Theories of Marketing Communications

Channel Comparison

It is highly important for marketing and communication specialists to be able to ascertain which media channels are the most effective for communicating with potential customers. To that end, Peter Danaher and John Rossiter's journal article, Comparing perceptions of marketing communication channels, should be read with extreme interest, as the author's undertook a fairly lengthy, well researched study project to compare a range of attributes for both traditional media as well as for emergent, technology-based media, which are vying for modern consumers' attention (Danaher & Rossiter, 2009). Additionally, the study determined whether traditional or emergent media was more effective in engaging customers, and whether or not senders of advertising information had accurate perceptions about the receivers' thoughts on the communication channels used to convey their advertising messages. A number of valuable findings were uncovered during the research, which revealed that despite the near ubiquity of emails and text messaging (Barwise and Strong, 2002), traditional media channels such as conventional mail, radio, television and newspapers were the preferred method of communication among the population sample.

While the methodology employed in this study was highly stratified and fairly conscientious in its planning and its execution, there were still a number of limitations, assumptions, and gaps in the procedures which may have colored the results one way or another.

The most salient of these shortcomings, of course, was in the random way in which both businesses and customers selected their preference for advertising methods. Despite there being 11 communication channels involved in a survey, participants were only able to respond to three due to limitations in the length of time during which the survey was conducted.

The options selected during this initial qualitative survey were then used to compile a list of 14 attributes to describe the 11 channels. The limited amount of choices of communication channels therefore circumscribed the list and amount of attributes, as well.

Due to a lack of funding, the authors were not able to present commercials through each media channel, which would have demonstrated a highly efficacious means of monitoring the rate of preference for the media channels. Subsequently, they had to use experimentally generated scenarios, which are a well-established methodology (Smith et al., 1999), yet still more contrived than the deliverance of commercials.

The sample population was restricted to participants who were fairly internet savvy as well as proficient in cell phone use, which may not be indicative of the general population at large.