A holistic communication strategy is something of a Holy Grail in marketing. It promises greater effectiveness of communication at a time
when budgets have never been tighter. It also promises more objectivity in media choice when the media landscape has never been more complicated.
But devising great, or even good, communication strategy is not easy. Over 80% of both clients and agencies agree that more learning is required to allow people to get better at it.
There are new skills to understand, new processes to consider, but also some new mindsets to adopt. Here are some quotes from our research amongst clients and agencies that characterise some of the difficulties. In order to understand how to overcome some of these difficulties let’s look back to see how communication strategy has emerged to be such a dominant part of the marketing agenda.
THE REVOLUTION
Historically, the way brands spoke to their consumers was through individually planned ‘units’ of conversation; some PR, some direct mail, some point of sale, some advertising.
These ‘units’ may have had individual strategies, but rarely did these strategies ‘touch’ each other. A PR strategy was written separately from a direct mail strategy,
usually by people in different client company departments or in separate external agencies. Different channels were used to do different jobs and, as long as all the jobs got done, then that was fine.
Advertising became the dominant form of brand communication as it was clear that
it worked hard. Therefore, choosing the advertising channel became something of a default choice. The sheer power of broadcast media, especially television, to reach mass audiences reinforced this habit.
Therefore a good advertising strategy was the centre-piece of the thinking. Its purpose was to enable the creative content of the advertising (and not the placement of the advertising in media).