Personal And Impersonal Communication

Personal and impersonal communication has a vital role to play throughout the buying process, from the initial creation awareness of a new product’s existence right through to the reduction of uncertainty concerning the rightness of the decision once a purchase has been made. Basically, communication fall into two categories, personal and impersonal, the use and importance of each of which vary according to the stage in the buying process, which has been reached.

As the term implies, personal communications involve direct person-to-person contact and may be buyer or seller-initiated, formal or informal in nature. Sending a salesman to call on a potential customer is an example of a formal, seller-initiated personal communication; asking a

It has been found that personal influence is most effective in high-risk purchase situations, as, for example, in cases where the buyer is expending relatively large amounts of money, purchases infrequently and is unfamiliar with the product(s) under consideration; while mass or impersonal communication is most effective in the case of familiar, frequently purchased items of low unit value.

However, while the emphasis may be on one or the other form of communication, it is usual to find both forms employed together. Even where this is not the part of the seller’s deliberate communication strategy, impersonal channels are almost invariably affected by the mediation of personal sources.

Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that the influence of word-of-mouth communication is equally as important in industrial markets as in consumer markets. Opinion leadership also operates in industrial markets and seems to be

This is so because promotion can be combined with price, distribution, merchandising, communication, direct marketing, sales force, product and packaging polices to increase the end value of a product. However, this affects one of the essential roles of promotion. It can become temporarily grafted on to defined polices. The flexibility with which promotional techniques can be used allows for the readjustment and improvement of these policies. We can easily find these aspects in the list of promotional objectives: obtaining of classification, bringing forward orders, emphasizing an image factor, encouraging sales people and so on. We can, therefore, from this point on, distinguish two approaches to the use of promotion within the company.

➢ First, the company defines a promotional strategy by clearly fixing its objectives and the means allocated to this promotion, by defining promotional operations for a given period, the coordination between them and so on.

➢ Second, promotion plays a supplementary role and is used, as the situation requires, often in reaction to a problem: low demand, competitor action, and sales problems and communications failure. In this case, promotion has the advantage of having immediate results and is generally effective with regard the assigned objective. However, this practice can be dangerous: it runs the