PERCEPTIONS AND BUSINESS COMMUNICATION.

1. Introduction
Business communication is a very key element to the success of business organization in the world today. It is the lifeblood of every organization. This is important for internal relaying of information for example work orders, internal memos, and internal reports among others. It is also important for passing of information to external stake holders like customers, shareholders, government agencies and the general public. Effective communication is thus an essential component of organizational success at the interpersonal, intergroup, intragroup, organizational, and external levels. According to
Vielba and Edelshain (1997), communication is very important; it is also one of the major challenges that businesses are facing.

Effective communication helps organization to improve performance through accurate execution of jobs, efficient use of resources, and meeting customer expectations. Effective communication also helps improve the brand image of the company.

Lack of effective communication leads to;

Misunderstandings Lack of information Decrease in employees performance Decrease in companys turnover, as a result

Ineffective or poor communication is frustrating for employees, and becomes a source of a conflict. Managers' inability to clearly express their thoughts, ideas and demands leads to employees' inability to perform work well, according to the companys demands. Such a situation may take place when an employee is not truly aware of what is requested of them. This decreases the satisfaction an employee gets from the job.

1.1.1 Benefits of Effective Communication in the Workplace

If a manager is able to communicate their ideas clearly, so that employees definitely know what is asked of them, the subordinates will, consequently, perform their jobs correspondingly. On contrast, an aggressive way of managing reports results in employees getting more and more frustrated, often guessing what their real faults were. A good style of management, as well as a positive approach to communication, ensures that an employee and a supervisor understand each other, and are more effective at the workplace. Effective communication in the workplace provides employees with a clear understanding of what is demanded from them, with knowledge of what to do and what to expect. For organizations, such a communication style creates effective performance of the staff, and, consequently, increases customer loyalty and profit.

1.1.2 Factors that influence Effective Communication

There are a wide number of sources of noise or interference that can enter into the communication process. This can occur when people now each other very well and should understand the sources of error. In a work setting, it is even more common since interactions involve people who not only don't have years of experience with each other, but communication is complicated by the complex and often conflictual [sic] relationships that exist at work. In a work setting, the following suggests a number of sources of noise: Language: The choice of words or language in which a sender encodes a message will influence the quality of communication. Because language is a symbolic representation of a phenomenon, room for interpretation and distortion of the meaning exists. It is important to note that no two people will attribute the exact same meaning to the same words. However, according to
Doole and Lowe (2008, p. 7-8) there are arguments that the usage of visible signs makes this problem less of a barrier

Defensiveness, distorted perceptions, guilt, project, transference, distortions from the past misreading of body language, tone and other non-verbal forms of communication noisy transmission (unreliable messages, inconsistency) receiver distortion: selective hearing, ignoring non-verbal cues power struggles

 self-fulfilling assumptions managers hesitation to be candid assumptionse.g., assuming others see situation same as you, has same feelings as you distrusted source, erroneous translation, value judgment, state of mind of two people Perception: People attend to stimuli in the environment in very different ways. We each have shortcuts that we use to organize data. Invariably, these shortcuts introduce some biases into communication. Some of these shortcuts include stereotyping, projection, and self-fulfilling prophecies. Stereotyping is one of the most common. This is when we assume that the other person has certain characteristics based on the group to which they belong without validating that they in fact have these characteristics. How we perceive communication is affected by the past experience with the individual. Perception is also affected by the organizational relationship two people have. For example, communication from a superior may be perceived differently than that from a subordinate or peer.

Perception is on of the key factors in the psychology of communication and it is the objective this paper to expound on the effects of perception on communication..

2 PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION

Perception is a process through which humans attend to, select, organize, interpret, and remember stimulating phenomena. Although all people are constantly involved in perception and aspects of the process are sometimes similar across individuals (especially among closely related members of families or cultural groups), each person perceives the world in unique ways that are open to a number of influences. It is difficult for us to know what and how each other perceives.

The perception can be either sensory or normative. Sensory perception refers to how we see concrete visible phenomenon. That is the physical reality. Normative perception refers to matters subject to interpretation or opinion.

Making our perceptions clear to others is an important part of effective communication and mutual understanding. The awareness that others don't always see the same world that we do is the other essential step to effective communication.

The aspects that influence the way we perceive different situations include our experiences.

For businesses communicating to customers as in advertising they need to understand the perceptions of their customers so that they can leverage on this in their messages. Puntoni et al (2009) reports that when it comes to the emotional perception of marketing communication, consumers tend to be more emotional towards advertisements in their

native language. Kenyan firms may therefore carry out advertising campaigns in vernacular FM radio stations so as to appeal to the audience native to these languages

2.1 IMPORTANCE OF PERCEPTION IN CUSTOMER COMMUNICATION AND SERVICE

In the world of business, particularly marketing and advertising, perception is reality. Marketers spend great sums of money to alter the consumers perception of their product. Their goal is for the consumer to believe their advertising to be real and ultimately entice him or her to purchase their product, perceiving that it is right for him or her. Research has shown this to be effective. Samuel McClure (2004) and his colleagues have shown that preference of coke to pepsi and vice versa is affected by perception. That the reason why a consumer would prefer one over the other is because he or she has been exposed to visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into his or her nervous system influencing perception."

In the active area of delivering superior customer service, perception of an issue by the customer is often a very different matter than the actual circumstances might describe. The professional customer service specialist must actively listen in order to intelligently discern what the customer is actually saying, regardless of the facts of the matter are. Often, a tense situation can be diffused by simply being sensitive to the customers' viewpoint and perception of the issues, and then suggesting solutions based upon those perceptions. Insensitivity and indifference will fan the flame of customer anger and possibly lead to a lost customer. For example, an important factor in terms of attracting tourists is service

quality. Service quality is the perception of service which is evaluated by customers in comparison with their expectations. The better service quality, the higher the destination attractiveness perceived by tourists (Gretzel et al., 2000). Similarly, the price is important for tourists decision-making. The tourists perception of traveling price in relation to the perceived quality and value of products is what is important. For marketers it is then critical that they influence the perceptions of their customers positively viz a viz their products. This strategy of influencing the consumers perception ultimately leads to brand loyalty. Brand loyalty has the mystery power of attaining consumers over and over again. At the beginning, consumers might buy a specific brand because of objective reasons. However, after a long time of being advertised and exposed on the market, the brand might become part of the memory and also part of the consumers life. Consumers might associate the brand with many different and important occasions throughout time (Fisher, 1985). Therefore, brand loyalty makes consumers deeply committed to a specific brand. This is something marketers are constantly searching for by running a vast amount of different marketing campaigns in a bid to influence perceptions. The link between between customers perceptions, actions, preferences and behavior has also been demonstrated by Dick and Basu (1994) in the brand loyalty model shown in figure below.

The model explains the different factors influencing and leading to brand loyalty. Both behavioral and attitudinal aspects are influential causes throughout the entire model, ending up at the stage representing customer brand loyalty. Perceived brand performance fit considers the attitude a customer has towards a brand and the ability to perform according to customers expectations. Social and emotional identification with the brand points out the image a brand mediates and the customers ability to relate to it. Habit and long history with the brand is related to the behavioral aspect, where customers exercise a recurring behavior towards the same brand.

The three previously mentioned aspects lead to a further attitudinal behavior, where likeability is the contributing factor. If it is positive it will develop even further, into a repeat purchase behavior, strengthened by the actual likability and thereby transform into customer brand loyalty.

2.2 IMPORTANCE OF PERCEPTION IN CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS

As part of their strategy to attract and retain excellent personnel firms brand themselves in a bid to influence the perception of potential and existing employees. The company communicates a certain industry image that would attract the targeted work force. It then continuously monitors the target populations perceptions and adjusts the communication to achieve even more favorable perception. Fierce competition for talents and asymmetric distribution of information are the two main reasons that make employer branding necessary for knowledge intensive companies. A corporate reputation can be utilised by a firm to improve its competitive situation and to preserve a market position when under pressure (Mahon & Wartick, 2003). Having a positive reputation has been linked to several beneficial outcomes such as; greater intention to buy a product, higher perceived product quality, attracting investors to a larger extent, and enhanced organisation identification among employees (Caruana, 1997). Premium prices for products, lower costs of capital, and labour are some of the more concrete positive effects that can evolve from having a good reputation (Fombrun, 1996)..

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2. REFERENCES
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