‘Channel planning’ represents a fresh perspective

The last few years have seen a progressive change in media planning. Instead of focusing only on the traditional media such as television, magazines, newspapers, radio and outdoor, a much wider range of channels of communication is being considered.

This shift in perspective has been prompted by the arrival of new digital media – the internet, digital television and radio channels, emails, text messaging and so on. The new media have elbowed traditional media into a fresh position in certain respects, forcing the old to adjust to the new. The old ways of thinking about media have been jolted, and in the process of embracing the new media, the new outlook has expanded to take in other long-established methods of communication which were traditionally outside the media planners’ sphere. The landscape has come to look different.

Thus the planning scene now includes brand experiences in a great variety of places: at the point of sale (such as promotions or product-tasting in supermarkets, or advertising in showrooms), at the point of consumption (e.g. branding on the cups in which your cappuccino is served, or advertising on beer mats), sponsorship (sports events, television programmes, magazine supplements, garden shows) and even informal exposures such as word-of-mouth among friends or advice given by sales people. All of these are contact points between people and brands which the marketer can influence, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly.

The new perspective has brought about a change in vocabulary. While the term ‘media’ is elastic enough to embrace such things as sponsorship, point of sale promotion and text messaging, the term ‘channel’ is favoured because it is a different word and thus symbolises the shift in emphasis. As far as the dictionary is concerned, ‘media’ is exactly the same thing as ‘channels of communication’, but in current usage ‘media planning’ and ‘channel planning’ carry different symbolic overtones.

There are other shifts in outlook associated with channel planning. The discipline talks of ‘media neutral’ assessment of all the channels, giving the non-conventional media an even chance against the traditional ones. What is being planned is ‘communication’ rather than ‘advertising’, since communication is a wider term which includes promotions, sponsorship and so on, whereas advertising is interpreted as being narrower.

The talk is also of a ‘consumer-centric’ attitude, to emphasise that the starting point is the consumer and how she or he experiences all the communication channels. Of course, the old media planning that was done for decades (as when I was an agency media group head) was also supposed to be consumer-centric, but the term today is used to stress the fact of additional channels being brought into deliberate consideration.

Thus the core image is of people shopping while surrounded by a vast array of brand experiences swimming in their heads. These include the prompts physically in front of them – the branded products themselves, the shelf-talkers, in-store promotions, and so forth – but also much more than this. They include emails, text messages, telemarketing, direct mail, books, directories, conversations with friends, previous experience of the brands, etc - as well as the advertising seen on television, internet, cinema and posters, in newspapers and magazines, and heard on radio. All these exposures leave some trace in consumers’ minds, which may play a part in influencing brand choice at the point of purchase. And marketers’ promotional activities can be planned so as to affect (directly or indirectly) any of these contact points between people and brands.

To do this, the pathways to purchase are being researched with growing intensity. What are the functional and emotional triggers which prompt a decision to buy? What is the process of investigating, evaluating and locating products? How does the decision-maker’s mindset change during the process? And which channels of communication impinge at each stage? The answers are likely to be different for different categories of product.

So today one talks of consumer-centric media-neutral planning of the channels of communication. For once, a change in vocabulary really is associated with a change in thinking. As Sheila Byfield of Mindshare has expressed it [84], “we need to think of communication opportunities as every point where people can potentially meet brands”.

In the new situation it is also the case that intrusiveness is not as desirable or effective as it was once considered. Instead of advertisements bludgeoning their way into consumers’ minds, consumers are more likely to choose their media experiences selectively, because of the growth in the media options available to them. Engagement and involvement are key. The Chartered Institute of Marketing wrote in 2004 [85] “We need to enter the age of consent across the media spectrum. This will involve a shift from a model of intrusion to one of communication and building relationships through collaboration… The key to this is consent – doing things on customers’ terms, when they want it, where they want it and how they want it.”

The effect of the channel planning perspective can be seen in the number of channels used by the winning campaigns in the IPA’s biennial Advertising Effectiveness Awards. In 1998 the winning campaigns used an average of 3.9 channels. In 2000 this rose to 4.0, and in 2002 to 4.3. In the 2004 Awards it accelerated to an average of 6.7 channels [86]. There is a clear movement towards using more channels of communication.