Media Strategy

We have covered the definition of strategy and how it differs from planning in the article Strategy vs Planning. In this article, we will go into the process of building a strategy and the tools that can help us along the way.

Strategy Building Process

The strategising phase is where we need to get creative and innovative in the way that we solve the business problem and set the scene for media planning. Strategy building can be rather vague and broad, so it helps to have a guiding process. There is no one right way to go about this, but here is a guide that we can use and modify to specific needs.

Step 1: Unpack the business problem

First, we want to get to the core of the business problem. In order to do so, a simple trick is to ask ‘why’ until we pretty much exhaust all answers. It might seem like a daunting task, but at this point we are collecting unanswered questions and hypothetical answers that we can do more research on to find concrete answers.

Quite often this leads to some answers about why our audience is not engaging with our brand in the way we want. There could be multiple reasons, and the most obvious solution may not always purely sit in marketing. This is a great insight for brands to make changes from within. That said, the role of marketing is to convince our audience to change their mindset, so all the data and information we collect is still absolutely essential to building an effective media strategy.

Step 2: Explore and collect Insights

At this stage, we want to collect as much meaningful information as we can to help us build a solid strategy that will solve our core business problem. It is crucial that the information we collect in this process are data-rich facts, as far as possible, to ensure that we build our strategy based on reliable and accurate information.

The key areas to explore are brand, competitor, consumer and culture.

Brand: Here, we will be looking at the brand and their products and services and questioning the rationale and effectiveness of these. Some questions to answer are,

What the brand’s mission is?

What the brand’s values are?

What the products or solutions the brand is providing?

Why they are providing these solutions?

How well received are these? And why?

Competitors: We also want to understand what the current state is in the product category. To do this, we will have to look at where our brand currently sits, and who the main competitors are and what they are doing. Some questions to answer are,

Where are we ranked in our category?

Who are our key competitors?

What are our key competitors doing differently?

Why are they doing it this way?

Consumers: We need to dig deep into consumers’ psyche to understand what makes them tick. That way we can reach the right audience with the most appropriate form of communication. Some questions to answer are,

Who is our audience?

What do they like?

What motivates them?

What is important to them?

Where do they spend most of their time?

How do they like to communicate and receive information?

When are they most receptive or active?

Culture: By understanding the culture where we are running marketing activity, we can leverage some of the latest trends, and avoid cultural faux pas. Some questions to answer are,

What are the latest trending topics?

What are some topics to avoid?

Once we have gathered all the necessary information, we can start synthesising these into key insights. We may have uncovered some insights in the earlier process, but what we would mostly have are observations or data based on fact.

Insights are different from observations. They are deeper interpretations of observations that seek to uncover the underlying motivations and desired outcome behind them. An easy way to extract insights is to ask ‘why’ until you have exhausted all answers.

Examples

Observation: Pet owners feed their pets at breakfast and dinner.

Insight: Pet owners feel guilty when eating in front of their pets, and feed them so they may enjoy their own meal guilt-free.

Observation: We see engagements with our ads dropping significantly after 2 months.

Insight: Ad fatigue is setting in as people have grown tired of seeing the same ad for 2 months and are no longer interested enough to engage with our ad.

Step 3: Find the Big Idea

Once we have the core business problem and key insights, we can begin the ideation process. Everything and anything goes in the ideation process. These could be mediums we can use, industries we can partner with, things we want to say in our creative, events our audience might enjoy, competitions, interactions and even other brands’ marketing ideas we can use for inspiration. The goal here is to brainstorm as many ideas as possible that will help us solve the business problem.

A great trick is to kick off the ideation process with the silliest ideas you can think of to get any kind of fear of judgement out of the way and to get our brains warmed up. The best part about this is that you might just find inspiration in the most absurd ideas.

Once we feel like we are running out of ideas, we can begin finding recurring patterns in all our ideas. By condensing these into a central theme, we can define our ‘Big Idea’. For example, working on a brand like Kathmandu we might find a recurring theme of ‘adventure in the city’ where our key audience are city dwellers with busy lives, or ‘mother nature’ if our key audience are mothers and their families.

The Big Idea need not be lofty or creative. It just needs to effectively solve the business challenge by appealing and influencing your audience. For example, if we know the audience are huge bargain hunters and are extremely motivated by getting the best deal, perhaps the big idea can be as simple as ‘more for less’.

Step 4: Stress test the Big Idea

Finding the big idea may not be so straightforward. After identifying your big idea, we will need to run it through the wringer to ensure that it answers our business challenge effectively. We could find that the big idea appeals to too niche an audience, or that it doesn’t quite align with the business challenge.

To stress test our big idea, we can run it through a series of questions such as,

Does the idea appeal to the majority of our key audience?

Why will this idea appeal to and influence our key audience?

How will this idea solve our business problem?

Is this idea realistic and executable?

Is the idea scalable with media?

Step 5: Creative Tagline

Once we have settled on our big idea or theme, the creative agency starts putting together the message for the audience. There is often a catchphrase or tagline that flows through all creative messaging to leave a lasting impression and facilitate recall. Along with this, the creative agency develops a visual concept that resonates with the big idea. Some ideas from the previous step can serve as inspiration for creative.

Step 6: Media Mission

While step 5 is about what we want to say to our audience, this step is about how we want to deliver our message. This is where we build our mission statement that goes, “Everything we do in media must solve the business challenge by using the Big Idea”

For example, if our big idea for Kathmandu was ‘adventure in the city’ and the business goal was generating awareness for their urban wear, then the mission statement might be, “Everything we do in media must drive awareness for Kathmandu’s new urban wear by creating a sense of adventure in the city.”

This mission statement guides the way that we think about media and ensures synergy and a common goal across all our media activity.

At this point, we would have already uncovered some gems from our ideation phase, and these could flow into the Media Planning phases of building a Media Approach and Recommendation where they are further refined.

Some Tricks and Tools

The steps above will suffice in building a good strategy, but you can supercharge the process by using some tricks and tools to give you greater breadth and depth of ideas.

Primary Senses

As we all know, we navigate the physical world with our five primary senses (i.e. sight, sound, touch, smell, taste).The science behind how humans think and feel is based on how we interact with and ascribe meaning to the physical world. These thoughts and feelings combine to form memories, be it conscious or subconscious. One of the main goals of marketing is to ensure that your brand is remembered. The idea here is that if we can tap into people’s primary senses, we might be able to encode a memory of our brand.

This has been an age old tactic of branding and marketing. When we see a certain shade of blue, we think Tiffany, we could recognise an Abercrombie & Fitch store by its smell before even looking up at the signage, and let’s not even get into jingles. These are powerful tools and a task you can do is to set a scene for your big idea and think about the kind of senses you can conjure with your mind. This can help to build sensory marketing tactics into your campaign.

Emotion Setting

Contrary to what most of us believe, the majority of our decisions are driven by emotion, not just the mind. Even when logic is the primary tool for making a decision, like when getting the best deal on a new iPhone, there is an emotional goal which is to feel “victorious”. So we need to think about how we want our audience to feel from our marketing campaign. The goal here is to evoke specific emotions that will trigger them to move in the direction of our media and business objective. A great way to go about this is to ascribe emotions to all the ideas generated in the ideation phase. That way, the Big Idea can be identified with expected emotional responses.

Personification

Brand, marketing, strategy are all pretty abstract concepts. Humans have been communicating with other humans since life began. Wouldn’t it be easier if we thought of our marketing campaign as a person then? But who? Well, imagine we turn our brand into a famous figure, whether real or fictitious, that we know would resonate with our key audience. We can then put ourselves in this famous person’s shoes and think, “what would they do?”

For example, if a men’s watch brand is trying to drive sales by targeting 35-55 year olds, they might use James Bond as a persona. We then ask ourselves “what would James Bond do?” In doing so, we might think of ideas that are bold, stylish, flirtatious, suave, charmingly gimmicky with gadgets and surprises.

This is just an exercise to generate ideas. You could use almost any person or character to get the ball rolling. That said, you are likely to find the most potent ideas by picking someone who closely resonates with the brand, campaign and your audience.