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Kiran Wood,
Senior Brand Planner, Lowe Brand
The promise
offered by media-neutrality can only be truly realised by putting consumers
at the centre of the strategic planning process. A consumer-centric approach
is nothing new in itself. Many have talked a good talk on the subject,
and many have gone on to execute it to good effect - but nearly always
within the confines of their own specialisms. As specialists, if we're
worth our salt, we put the consumer at the heart of our brand strategy,
or advertising strategy, or CRM strategy, or design strategy...etc. But
as a marketing industry we're not set up, culturally or operationally,
to put the consumer at the centre of our communications strategy - and
that's what media-neutrality requires.
So how
do we begin putting the consumer at the heart of our communications strategy?
Media-neutrality is a mindset and a culture rather than just a process.
And it's a mindset that really needs to start with the client. Most marketing
departments are still structured in a way that doesn't align with the
world they are trying to address. In the real world, consumers don't exist
in media specific silos - every target market consumes a combination of
media dependent on access and the relevance of what's being said. Neither
do consumers organise themselves neatly into sales channels. I consume
quite a lot of a certain fizzy drink?I buy it from my local shop, the
supermarket, I'll occasionally order it in pub, buy it from a vending
machine, but I also get it a load of it from the fridge that's kindly
kept well-stocked by my employer. Despite this I'm being targeted independently
by several teams within the client organisation. In fact it's highly likely
that I'm considered to be more than one person. Add to that my media consumption
habits and I doubt they understand my behaviour in relation to their brand
very well at all.
If we're
talking 'perfect world', clients serious about wanting more effective
marketing through media-neutrality, would be seeking to organise their
marketing departments around their consumers. Of course, it would be naļve
not to consider the efficiency versus effectiveness argument here. It's
more efficient to have your Direct Marketing manager managing all your
DM because they're experienced. But it's less effective because it doesn't
promote a neutral outlook - naturally they and their agency will want
the opportunity to produce good work, especially on the big, exciting
projects. So naturally, they will put their efforts into securing a chunk
of the budget. All this without really considering, or being measured
on their ability to consider, whether the objectives would be better served
by a mix of media which may involve them to a lesser extent, or perhaps
not at all. The solution might be for clients to push the DM agency to
deliver more of the efficiency they need, and free up your some more of
their own people's time to deliver the objectivity.
A wholesale
restructure of the marketing department around consumer segments, or levels
of consumer commitment, may seem a bit radical right now. But adopting
the right mindset can result in smaller yet very significant steps towards
a media-neutral approach. A major retailer, renowned for its marketing,
is taking such action. Although organised around disciplines of advertising,
sales promotion and direct marketing, it has a real desire to develop
a challenging and holistic approach to communications channel planning
from the inside out. Their objective is to foster a culture and develop
a process which breaks down silos, allows individuals to develop a greater
understanding of total communications disciplines and promotes joint ownership
of marketing goals.
Sitting
right at the heart of this is the consumer. But this requires more than
generating a picture of who they are and which media they consume.
Firstly,
we need to develop a dynamic understanding of where they experience the
brand - through marketing communications channels, as well as merchandise,
staff, positive and negative press, word of mouth?because everything communicates.
(One client was worried that showing their tv ad in the wrong kind of
programmes would damage their brand. Of course they were right to address
this, but it was only part of the picture - an audit of how consumers
experienced the brand showed that they were frequently exposed to an array
of merchandise costing the client £millions which, little by little, was
undermining the brand's credibility.)
The next
step is to determine how these experiences affect their behaviour and
decision-making in this particular market. Doing all this well gives us
a real understanding of what communications messages are required. It
tells us when they're required. And it tells us which media they can best
be accessed through?all the way along the consumers' decision making journey.
Or in other words, it gives us a truly media-neutral communications strategy.
So where
should clients look for support in this quest for media-neutrality? By
its very nature, it requires objectivity and knowledge. A new wave of
integrated agencies may be able to provide this in the future, but at
the moment they tend to be based on strength in a core discipline coupled
with the ability to deliver others. My advice would be for clients to
find a key strategic partner whose bread and butter isn't intrinsically
linked to execution in any particular discipline, and who also have the
ability to work constructively with the client's existing specialist agencies.
This might be one of the emerging media independents or a marketing consultancy.
Whatever, clients should put as much effort into finding the right one
for them as they would into finding the right advertising agency.
Finally,
as with any approach or discipline, effective and insightful evaluation
is key to progress. Media-neutral planning requires a much more holistic
research approach, particularly to communications tracking. Essentially,
we need a model that will enable us to track the consumers total brand
experience. To establish such a model, research experts need to develop
a much deeper understanding of communications vehicles beyond traditional
advertising and develop meaningful benchmarks over time. I have been in
a research presentation where awareness of internet activity had been
measured in the same way as that of traditional advertising. Measuring
awareness of a highly targeted activity on the same basis as broadcast
communications is not only meaningless but also misleading. What we must
be able to understand is the combined influence of layers of communication,
rather than simply comparing them against each other. It's this learning
and insight that will allow us to refine, improve and maintain the relevance
of our media mix, as well as our messages, as we move forward.
No-one
said it was easy, but then changing the way we've always done things rarely
is.
(c) Account
Planning Group 1995-2002
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