ABSTRACT
In this fi nal chapter I wish to present a model of marketing communication that, while being founded upon continual, mutual interactivity between actors traditionally termed “consumer” and “producer”, at the same time rejects the control paradigm that has informed all previous attempts to integrate interactivity into the marcoms system. The model is constructivist in that it assumes that all communication can be seen as building mental models of world, self, and others that are dynamic (in the sense that they are constantly revised) but also tend toward stability (in that our tendency is to seek further consistency between our re-presentations and our observations). The approach taken in this chapter is one which seeks to combine, from a constructivist perspective, a number of discourse streams from disparate fi elds. The characterization of some of the basic actors or agents in the model originates in earlier work attempting to expand the subtlety of the standard marketing communication schemes (Stern, 1994; Miles, 2007). In addition, the recursive model of communication proposed by Krippendorff (2009) is here adapted and extended to provide a framework for the self-referential aspect of marketing communication hitherto entirely ignored in the literature. In order to engage with a defi nition of interactivity that challenges assumptions of control, I have attempted to integrate a form of the “rhetoric of invitation” outlined by Foss and Griffi n (1995) as well as incorporating some of the implications of Benoit and Smythe’s (2003) ELM-inspired study of the rhetoric of message reception. Finally, in order to help bridge the recursive and the persuasive, I have turned to the rhetoric of self-persuasion as formulated by Jean Nienkamp (2001).
