Communication-in-use: customer-integrated marketing communication

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Communication-in-use: customer-integrated marketing communication
Article in European Journal of Marketing · April 2017
DOI: 10.1108/EJM-08-2015-0553
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Åke Finne
Hanken School of Economics
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European Journal of Marketing
Communication-in-use: customer-integrated marketing communication
Åke Finne, Christian Grönroos,
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To cite this document:
Åke Finne, Christian Grönroos, (2017) "Communication-in-use: customer-integrated marketing
communication", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 51 Issue: 3, pp.445-463, doi: 10.1108/
EJM-08-2015-0553
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(2016),"Exploring the integration of social media within integrated marketing communication
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Communication-in-use:
customer-integrated
marketing communication
Åke Finne and Christian Grönroos
Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management (CERS),
Department of Marketing, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland
Abstract
Purpose – This conceptual paper aims at developing a customer-centric marketing communications
approach that takes the starting point in the customer ecosystem.
Design/methodology/approach – After a critical analysis of existing marketing communications and
integrated marketing communication (IMC) approaches, a customer-driven view of marketing
communications is developed using recent developments in relationship communication, customer-dominant
logic and the notion of customer value formation as value-in-use.
Findings – A customer-integrated marketing communication (CIMC) approach centred on a
communication-in-use concept is conceptually developed and introduced. The analysis results in a CIMC
model, where a customer in his or her individual ecosystem, based on integration of a set of messages from
different sources, makes sense of the many messages he or she is exposed to.
Research limitations/implications – The paper presents a customer-driven perspective on marketing
communication and IMC. The analysis is conceptual and should trigger future empirical grounding. It
indicates the need for a change in mindset in research.
Practical implications – CIMC requires a turnaround in the mindset that steers how companies and their
marketers communicate with customers. The CIMC model provides guidelines for planning marketing
communication.
Originality/value – The customer-driven communication-in-use concept and the CIMC model challenge
traditional inside-out approaches to planning and implementing marketing communication.
Keywords Customer-dominant logic, Value-in-use, CIMC, Communication-in-use,
Customer-integrated marketing communication, Relationship communication
Paper type Conceptual paper
1. Introduction
The introduction of integrated marketing communication (IMC) with its concept of helping
senders to speak with one voice was a step forward in the development of marketing
communication. However, what remained unclear was whether the receiver, such as a
current or potential customer, recognized what was communicated as one voice, or
recognized it as different voices, or recognized it at all. For this reason, in an earlier article
(Finne and Grönroos, 2009), we suggested a relationship communication model, where the
focus on how the voice of a sender is perceived is shifted from the sender to the receiver. In the
present article, we take this a step further by introducing the communication-in-use concept,
which is based on the value that emerges for a customer of messages sent by a
communicator. We define communication-in-use as:
The authors would like to thank their colleague, Professor Tore Strandvik at the Hanken School of
Economics, Finland, for his most useful comments and suggestions.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0309-0566.htm
Marketing
communication
445
Received 18 August 2015
Revised 2 December 2015
Accepted 31 December 2015
European Journal of Marketing
Vol. 51 No. 3, 2017
pp. 445-463
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0309-0566
DOI 10.1108/EJM-08-2015-0553 Downloaded by Hanken School of Economics At 03:28 18 April 2017 (PT)

[...] the customer’s integration and sense making of all messages from any source, company-driven
or stemming from other sources, the customer perceives as communication, forming value-in-use for
him/her for a specific purpose.
Based on this, IMC is developed into outside-in-oriented customer-integrated marketing
communication (CIMC).
Indeed, there has been a call for a more customer-oriented view of IMC (Schultz and
Barnes, 1999; Schultz, 2003, 2006; Kitchen et al., 2004a, 2004b; Shimp, 2007; Finne and
Grönroos, 2009). Schultz (1996) was among the first to argue in favour of this. Subsequent
attempts to implement such a view included Finne and Grönroos’ (2009) relationship
communication model. This model addresses the changing view of customer activity in the
contemporary world, which is considered one reason for this call for a change in emphasis
(Finne and Strandvik, 2012). Lately, changes in the range of channels, use of media and
technical development have been rapid, with customers using several devices online
regularly. The customer has access to multiple forms of media and can interact with several
of these simultaneously, choosing or rejecting sources, receiving and sending messages and
being simultaneously active in some media and passive in others. In addition, the customer
is influenced by several forms of social media and, as demonstrated by relationship
communication, by a host of other sources (Duncan and Moriarty, 1997) and factors, such as
situational ones that are internal and external to the customer (Mick and Buhl, 1992) and
temporal ones that relate to past, ongoing and/or envisioned future relationships
(Edvardsson and Strandvik, 2000). This change in customer practices has become more
pronounced in recent years. Parallel to this change in customers’ communication activity and
behaviour, companies have access to a growing amount of data (big data) through technical
devices and online gadgets or collected through other means, which can be used for more
customer-focused planning of marketing communication. In combination with another trend
in marketing, neuromarketing (Braeutigam, 2005; Lee et al., 2007; Hammou et al., 2013), this
change may challenge future marketing research and practice. However, in spite of these
developments of customer activity, the media structure and marketers’ access to more
customer-specific data, the development of theoretical concepts and models of marketing
communication have not kept pace.
On the other hand, new thoughts regarding the customer’s role in marketing and
marketing communication today can be found in the literature on customer-dominant logic
(CDL) (Heinonen et al., 2010; Heinonen and Strandvik, 2015; Rindell et al., 2010). Because this
logic is based on a customer focus grounded in the customer’s own ecosystem, customer
value is a central concept in CDL. Following Grönroos (2008, p. 303), we define customer
value in the following manner:
Value for customers means that after they have been assisted by a self-service process (cooking a
meal or withdrawing cash from an ATM [and also being exposed to an ad; authors’ comment]) or a
full-service process (eating out at a restaurant or withdrawing cash over the counter in a bank [and
also being involved in sales negotiations; authors’ comment]), they are or feel better off than before.
Lately, customer value has extensively been emphasized by several researchers as
value-in-use. This value concept (Edvardsson et al., 2011; Grönroos, 2006, 2011; Vargo and
Lusch, 2008) differs from the traditional transactional value-in-exchange concept, as it
focuses not on money paid for a product or service but also on perceived customer value
emerging from the use of a product or a service. In this discussion, customer activity is well
addressed, but this stream of literature does not discuss marketing communication in any
greater depth. Thus, in this paper, we argue that the focus on the customer ecosystem of CDL
and the notion of value-in-use will contribute to a more customer-centric and outside-in view
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of marketing communication. A similar attempt to combine value-in-use with an existing
marketing concept can be found in branding literature, where Rindell (Rindell, 2013; Rindell
and Iglesias, 2014) discusses image-in-use as a branding concept with a strong customer
focus. For the development of a customer-centric approach to marketing communication, we
consider these insights useful.
One problem has been that definitions of marketing communications are rather limited in
scope – e.g. defining who is doing what and through which channels, and listing instruments
of communication. The focus has been merely on getting messages out and, when doing so,
making effective decisions. Such definitions lead to a focus on marketing communications
management from a company perspective rather than focusing on the customer’s value
process triggered by communication, whoever the sender might be. For example, De
Pelsmacker et al. (2013, pp. 3-4) define marketing communications in the following manner:
All the instruments [e.g. advertising SP, sponsorship PR, direct marketing, e-communications] by
means of which the company communicates with its target groups and stakeholders to provide its
products or the company as a whole.
This definition represents a traditional inside-out company-oriented view (i.e. what the
company does to influence a customer). Even though researchers or practicing organizations
sometimes may take the outside-in view into account as well, at the end of the day, it
probably remains a marginal attempt.
It is understandable that IMC at the time was developed in this way. IMC was a
development of earlier marketing communications approaches from a managerial
perspective based on the fact that customers were increasingly exposed to multichannel
messages. However, the managerial approach and the problem at the time to gather specific
data about customers disguised the outside-in idea of IMC. Changing realities have now
turned these definitions into relics from times when customer-specific data were difficult to
gather and customer-focused communications solutions were equally difficult to implement.
Our approach is also managerial and intended for management use, and not primarily a
consumer behaviour view. However, we aim to develop it such that the outside-in aspect is
not distorted. It differs from earlier IMC in that we believe that only the customer can define
the instruments that influence him or her in the communication process – i.e. define the real
instruments in use in his or her case. Thus, we consider marketing communications from the
customer’s perspective in terms of the following aspects:
Marketing communication is a process where a customer perceives an offering, product, service,
company or person. It can be deliberated or embedded in context, visible or merely in the head of the
customer. It can include experience, processes, activities triggering value-in-use for the customer,
and can consist of several simultaneous senders. On the other hand, a sender has not to be involved
at all, and parts of the perception may be sourced in the past, present or future, and the process is
constructed on the customer’s logic.
Therefore, we propose a perspective that deepens the understanding of the customer process
and the customer’s logic, which is intended to support a company’s marketing
communication management (Finne and Strandvik, 2012).
The purpose of the article is to develop a customer-centric marketing communications
approach, based on customers’ real use of communication messages in their own ecosystem
for various information-gathering and decision-making reasons (communication-in-use). To
this end, it imports insights into marketing communication from CDL, particularly from its
view of the customer ecosystem, and the contemporary notion of value-in-use, to develop a
customer-driven view of communication. Rather than undertake an in-depth elaboration of
marketing communication or IMC literature, this paper focuses on the customer and
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value-in-use. The article will introduce a conceptual construct (communication-in-use) and
the CIMC model inspired by integrated communication from a CDL perspective.
The remainder of this article is structured in the following manner. A short overview of
marketing communication is followed by insights from the above-mentioned discussion on
value and value-in-use and CDL, concluding with a conceptual discussion of
communication-in-use and the development of the CIMC model.
2. Structuring previous marketing communication research
The use of sources in the communication process can be mapped by use of a two-dimensional
figure (Figure 1). The traditional perspective on communication normally focuses on one
message at a time, with a clearly defined sender (company) sending the message and a
receiver (customer) receiving it (for such a communication model, see Schramm, 1971); in
these terms, the message does something for the customer. Most textbooks on marketing
communications (Duncan, 2005; Pickton and Broderick, 2005; Shimp, 2007; Fill, 2013; De
Pelsmacker et al., 2013) still build on that concept, dealing with marketing mix and media
strategies in which roles and instruments are clearly defined. In this view of the
communication process, the company is the subject (active sender) and the customer is an
object (passive receiver) (Finne and Grönroos, 2009). Noise, miscommunication (Mortensen,
1997) or distortion (Russo et al., 1996, 1998) can occur and interfere in the process, but the
communication process is still company-driven, from sender to receiver. Figure 1 (lower left)
describes this as a company-driven process built on a single source. The process is linear,
beginning with one message at a time that is to be transported to a potential customer. One
typical example of this situation would be the planning and execution of a marketing
communication campaign.
Moving from single-source communication to communication using several sources
(Figure 1; upper left) leads to what can be labelled traditional IMC, which has its roots in
internal planning methodology. In IMC, the central idea is that communication does not
occur in a vacuum but in a broader context, including both traditional media and other means
of communication, as well as product and service encounters, some of which may be more
difficult to control from a company perspective (Duncan and Moriarty, 1997; Lindberg-Repo
and Grönroos, 1999).Single sourceSeveral sourcesCompany-drivenprocessCustomer-drivenprocessCompany-drivenprocessCustomer-drivenprocessSeveral sourcesSingle sourceIntegratedMarkengCommunicaon:consistency/1 + 1 = 3 (effect)Tradionalmarkengcommunicaon:Sender-receivermodelsMeaning-based models:Customer-definedsources(e.g. relaonshipcommunicaon model)C2Ccommunicaon:Word-of-mouth,online acviesFigure 1.
Categorizing
marketing
communication based
on sources and process
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