Think about the last time you saw an advertisement that made you want to buy something. Maybe it was a billboard on your way to work, a social media post from your favorite brand, or a catchy jingle that stuck in your head. What you experienced wasn’t just a random message. It was the result of a carefully designed process where a company tried to reach you, make you understand their offering, and hopefully nudge you toward making a purchase. This journey from the marketer’s desk to your decision is what we call the marketing communication process, and understanding how it works can reveal why some messages resonate while others fall flat.
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The basic communication flow model
At its core, marketing communication mirrors how we naturally talk to one another. Imagine a telephone circuit connecting two people. One person has something to say (the source), they put their thoughts into words (encoding), speak them into the phone (the message travels through a medium), the other person hears the words (decoding), and understands what was said (the receiver). This simple back-and-forth is the foundation of all communication, including marketing.
In marketing terms, the process involves a sender, typically the company or brand manager, who creates a message about a product or service. This message gets encoded, meaning it’s transformed into advertisements, social media posts, or promotional campaigns. The message then travels through various channels like television, websites, or print media to reach the target audience. Once the audience receives the message, they decode it based on their own understanding, experiences, and perceptions.
But here’s where things get interesting. Communication isn’t complete until there’s feedback. Think of feedback as the loop that closes the circuit. When you click on an ad, redeem a coupon, or simply talk to a friend about a product you saw advertised, you’re providing feedback. This feedback tells the marketer whether their message was received and understood as intended. Without this loop, companies would be shouting into a void, never knowing if anyone is listening or caring.
Why feedback matters so much
Consider a scenario where a smartphone company launches a new product with the tagline “Stay Connected Forever.” The company intends this to mean their phone has exceptional battery life and network reliability. However, if customers interpret it as a promise of eternal device functionality and expect their phone to never break, there’s been a decoding error. Feedback mechanisms like customer reviews, sales data, and social media conversations help the company realize this misunderstanding and adjust their future messaging accordingly.
A comprehensive model by M.W. DeLozier
While the basic model gives us a good starting point, real-world marketing communication is far more complex. Marketing scholar M.W. DeLozier developed a more comprehensive framework that takes into account the strategic nature of marketing decisions. His model recognizes that communication doesn’t happen in isolation. It begins with identifying market opportunities and assessing what resources a company has at its disposal.
Picture a beverage company spotting a growing trend among health-conscious consumers who want low-sugar drinks. This market opportunity, combined with the company’s existing manufacturing capabilities and distribution networks (their resources), triggers a strategic response. The company decides to develop and promote a new line of naturally sweetened beverages. This decision then leads to creating what DeLozier called a “transmission module,” essentially the complete package of product features, pricing, packaging, and promotional messages that get sent out to the market through various channels.
What makes this model particularly valuable is how it views the product offering itself as part of the communication. Everything from the bottle design to the placement on store shelves to the price point communicates something to potential customers. A premium price and elegant packaging might communicate luxury and quality, while bold colors and energetic advertising might signal fun and youthfulness. The transmission isn’t just about what you say in ads but about what every aspect of your product and its presentation is telling customers.
Message reception and perception
Now comes the tricky part. Once all these stimuli reach the market, consumers don’t just passively absorb them. They actively filter and interpret messages based on their own communication skills, attitudes, prior experiences, and current needs. This reception and decoding process can vary significantly from person to person, making marketing both an art and a science.
Let’s say two people see the same luxury car advertisement. One person, who values environmental sustainability, might focus on the high fuel consumption and perceive the brand as wasteful and out of touch. Another person, who associates luxury cars with success and achievement, might decode the same ad as aspirational and desirable. Same message, completely different perceptions. This happens because each person’s “reception module” filters information through their unique lens of values, beliefs, and circumstances.
The perception feedback loop
Here’s where DeLozier’s model becomes especially insightful. The way messages are perceived gets fed back to the company, not just through direct actions like purchases, but through market research, social listening, focus groups, and customer service interactions. This feedback then influences how the company adjusts its communication strategy going forward. If that luxury car brand notices its messaging resonates poorly with younger, environmentally conscious buyers, it might pivot to highlight hybrid technology or sustainability initiatives in future campaigns.
This creates a full circle where communication isn’t a one-time broadcast but an ongoing conversation. Companies that excel at marketing communication are those that listen as much as they talk, constantly refining their approach based on how the market actually receives and interprets their messages rather than how they intended them to be received.
Potential snags in the process
If all of this sounds straightforward on paper, that’s because it is, at least in theory. But the reality of marketing communication is messier than any model can fully capture. While these frameworks help us understand the general flow of communication, there are countless hidden snags that can derail the process at every stage.
The first major snag is noise. Noise in communication refers to anything that interferes with the clear transmission and reception of a message. Physical noise might be literal background sounds when someone watches TV, or visual clutter on a website that makes an important message hard to notice. Psychological noise occurs when a receiver is stressed, distracted, or prejudiced against the sender or product category. Semantic noise happens when technical jargon or cultural references don’t translate well across different audience segments.
When encoding goes wrong
Another potential problem area is the encoding stage. Marketers might encode a message based on their own worldview, professional vocabulary, or cultural context without considering how diverse their audience really is. An advertising agency in a major city might create campaigns using urban slang and references that completely miss the mark with rural audiences. Or a global brand might use humor that works in one culture but offends in another.
The medium mismatch
Choosing the wrong medium for your message is another common pitfall. A complex B2B software solution probably can’t be adequately explained in a six-second video ad, no matter how clever. Similarly, a simple consumer product might not need a twenty-page white paper when a catchy social media post would do. The medium needs to match both the message complexity and where your target audience actually spends their time and attention.
Feedback failures
Finally, many companies struggle with establishing effective feedback mechanisms. They might send out messages but have no reliable way to gauge whether those messages are being received, understood, or acted upon. Or worse, they might have feedback channels in place but fail to actually use that information to improve their communication. A company might see declining engagement on social media but continue posting the same type of content because they haven’t created systems to act on what the feedback is telling them.
These models and frameworks are invaluable for understanding the fundamentals of how marketing communication should work. They provide a shared language for marketers to discuss strategy and a structure for planning campaigns. However, they’re simplifications of an incredibly complex reality where human psychology, cultural contexts, competitive pressures, and rapidly changing media landscapes all play a role. The best marketers use these models as guides while remaining flexible enough to adapt to the messy, unpredictable nature of real-world communication.
What do you think? Have you ever misunderstood a marketing message in a way the company clearly didn’t intend? What do you believe causes the biggest communication breakdowns between brands and consumers in today’s crowded media environment?
References
- https://www.easymanagementnotes.com/what-is-the-process-of-marketing-communication/
- https://openstax.org/books/principles-marketing/pages/13-2-the-communication-process
- https://www.open.edu/openlearn/money-business/marketing/marketing-communications-the-digital-age/content-section-2.1
- https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-esc-communicationforprofessionals/chapter/interference-in-communication-processes/
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