How We Work
Communications Planning System
Our agency follows a disciplined approach to marketing communications – one that recognizes and builds on the current relationship between a company’s reputation and its customers’ perceptions. This discipline consists of two parts: a comprehensive planning system and stimulus-response based creative development.
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Question 1: Information Gathering | Where do you stand?
Where does your company/product stand now, in the market
and in peoples minds? In many ways this is the most important question of the five;
it certainly requires the most work to answer.
We need to assemble and arrange – usually in a thick Fact Book – as much real-world business data as possible. We are looking for product purchase and usage habits, market growth rates, pricing, target groups’ attitudes and feelings, your competitive position and much more.
Answers to this question provide much of the information
required to tell us where the product or service stands now
in people’s minds. It goes a long way to answering the first
stimulus-response question “What do people think of my
product right now?”
Question 2: Current Position | How did you get there?
What factors have contributed to your company/product
strengths and weaknesses? Throughout the process of assembling and arranging
the information in the previous section, key strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) will surface.
These are isolated and identified in this section. What we’re
searching for are powerful leverage points for developing
effective marketing communications strategies.
Question 3: Objectives | Where could you be?
What, realistically, could be the position of your company/product in the future? This stage requires the first important application of
imagination. In relation to its current position, where
could your company, product or service be? This must be a
hardnosed assessment of what is realistic and profitable this
year and in the years ahead.
Question 4: Strategies | How will you get there?
What changes to what elements in the marketing mix could
achieve your objectives? Now we start planning – setting out what must be done
to reach your objectives. Marketing strategies might
include product or service improvements, pricing changes,
strengthened distribution networks, etc. Communication
strategies will clearly define target groups to be reached, and
how their awareness, attitudes and behaviour will be altered.
The Communication Plan flows from these strategies and
specifies which vehicles will be used, in what time frame, at
what cost. It’s your assurance that your marketing effort and
communications effort are working together.
Question 5: Results | Are you getting there?
Is the marketing communications plan achieving its objective
and is the total effect working? Is the Communications Plan achieving its objectives and is
the total effort working? This planning format recognizes
that there must be a continuous process of learning and
responding to changing market conditions. As soon as we
ask “Are we getting there?” we are in effect asking “So now
where do you stand?”