A Critique of the Communicative Assumptions Within Consumer Behavior Research

Successful communication, that is the reception of meaning by consumers as intended by marketers, underlies marketers’ very existence as well as researchers’ justification for empirical and theoretical analyses. In spite of its importance the assumed location of meaning in the communicative act varies tremendously among three major epistemological approaches (cognitive, structuralist, post-structuralist) in Consumer Behavior Research. The approaches are critiqued, and it is suggested that meaning emerges from a complex transaction between the socio-cultural competence of the reader and the kind of competence that a given text postulates in order to be read according to the author’s intentions.