The Message versus the Media

So what do you do?

With so much change in the world of communications technology, there’s some comfort to be got from the fact that many of the old key messages of branding still apply, with the big one being: track.

You’ve got to track all of your various media operations, with the obvious ones being:

• Number of visits to your website
• Number of views on YouTube videos
• Number of ‘likes/dislikes’ on Facebook postings

In the 1950s, the main branding budgets went on radio and newspaper adverts; but, in a campaign, it was really hard work to figure out what activities worked and what didn’t. Back then brand building was a strange cocktail of focus groups, statistical estimating and guesswork.

Now it’s all so much easier. With all of the three examples mentioned, you can get real-time data and, often, from large population groups.

The final step is to analyse numbers. Generally, there are three categories you need with building a brand:

1. Input measures – what you put in is usually in two categories: money and time.
2. Activity measures – this is the first measure of the results of inputs and include tangible results of efforts such as TV ads made, TV ads aired, number of column-inches in a newspaper, number of words in a magazine article or number of hits on YouTube.
3. Output measures – or the actual result. In the case of a business, that would be sales profits.

Needless to say, very few organisations look deeply at all three, and a depressingly large number look at just the first two. To do all three perfectly across a range of media is near enough an impossible job, but just a rudimentary analysis could be highly valuable (see Box).

This gets easier to manage if you can blend the ‘spent’ items into one number with a ‘$ per hour’ rate. Even if it’s an approximate number, a ‘$ per customer got’ for all your various media activities can be a massive upgrade to managing your brand-building.

Dr Ian Halsall
Author & Researcher