Ernest has three engineering degrees. He has hired an interior decorator to update his home. He is tremendously frustrated when he asks what he thinks are simple questions about weight-bearing walls and insulation requirements that the designer is unable to understand. Yet Ernest has the same problems when the designer starts talking about mauve, cerise, and magenta. Why is the communication process not working in this instance?
a. The designer is not intelligent enough to understand engineering.
b. Noise is interfering with both encoding and decoding.
c. The wrong medium has been used.
d. The sender and receiver do not share overlapping frames of reference.
e. Personal selling should not be used to market this type of product.
ANSWER: d