A media plan tells you where your brand will show up. BrandMapp and BrandMASS together will help you work out what it should say when it gets there, and to whom.
Every media plan has its non-negotiables: an objective, a budget, a target market and a mix of channels, which are all essential. But somewhere between the brief and the booking, one question deserves a little more airtime: what do we actually know about the consumers we’re paying to reach?
Two audiences, one lens
For more than a decade, BrandMapp has been our view of South Africa’s established consumer class in households earning R15,000 a month and up. BrandMASS is our new dataset on the digitally connected consumers just below that line, an emerging audience of roughly 13 million adults.
Both datasets ask the same questions, which means you can explore each audience on its own, or put them side by side and compare how they live, what they value, how they feel about brands and the media they use.
Same brand, same message?
Picture a brand with one national campaign: same product, same creative, same message, running across every channel in the plan. It’s reaching consumers on both sides of the R15,000 line. The question is a simple one: should it be saying exactly the same thing to both?
Do both audiences value the same things? Are they motivated by the same triggers when they buy? Do they trust the same voices, turn to the same media and feel the same way about your category? If the answers differ, perhaps the message should too.
Sometimes one message will work beautifully for everyone. Sometimes it won’t. Knowing which before the budget leaves the building is important, and it’s exactly the kind of question BrandMapp and BrandMASS together are built to help answer.
Start with the decision
Let’s play it out… a (hypothetical) retailer wants to grow with connected consumers in lower-income households. Job one: get to know that audience using the relevant measures in BrandMASS, and see how it compares with the BrandMapp consumers. Job two: work out which channels offer a credible way to reach them and which ones they respond to.
The role of the consumer insight is to tell you who and why. Channel and audience measurement tells you where and how many. A good plan needs both, and neither should be doing the other’s homework.
The same goes for creative. Insight can point a message in the right direction, but it still pays to check the execution lands: is it understood, is it believable and is it right for the consumers seeing it?
Where location comes in
For planners working with location-based media, there’s an extra dimension. Both BrandMapp and BrandMASS data are collected down to suburb level, and our new online GIS mapping tool lets you explore consumer profiles by area. It’s a way to connect where a brand can show up with a richer understanding of the communities around it.
The brief that wins the room
So what does good look like? A brief with a specific audience, a solid reason to talk to them and a clear role for every channel in the mix. The consumer analysis should leave fingerprints all over it: a question answered, an assumption revisited, a message sharpened… and a happy client.
Media is bought by the channel, but it lands with consumers. Knowing who they are, on both sides of the R15,000 line, could start your next planning conversation somewhere far more interesting.
Got an audience question keeping you up at night? Chat to Julie-Anne Bell at julie-anne@whyfive.co.za or visit whyfive.co.za.