From yesterday till today, we have come a long way…
A long way of innovation and evolution which would be credited to various eminent people belonging to our society. These people belong to the unsatisfied category, who have an unremitting will to change and to transform for the improvement of civilization and to make this world a better place to live in.
Media is not merely the outcome of technical development, but also ‘social institutionalization’. The technical invention simply played a role in improving on the old media. For example, Gutenberg improved writing, Wireless improved telegraphy, Graham Bell bridged communication distances and many more.
Social institutionalizing on the other hand basically changes the invented media by discovering new possibilities of communication. It essentially means to adopt and format the new media.
In the early days of folk media, we used various forms of communication like puppetry, theater and dance to propagate the message to the masses. But as a society we have advanced from folk media to print media to broadcast and now finally…. Internet, that has caused the world to shrink.
“In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream.” – Christopher Buckley
Depending upon the people we want to communicate to, we chose our media. As the society evolved, every individual had a specific media preference and there were people who had similar inclination towards a particular medium. These people formed homogenous groups as they had similar media taste and they could be reached through the same medium. This is what we call today as the Target Audience.
*Target Audience is the specific group of customers that a company aims to capture. They have been identified as people with needs or wants that can be met with the products or services from this company.
Today, as a marketer we have a variety of media available to reach our potential target audience; like press, television, radio, cinema, internet, mobile, Direct Contact Program, events etc.
The increasing complexity and importance
Due to these increasing options of media in the market and this rapid fragmentation, it is increasingly difficult to reach the potential target audience. The wide variety of media options available have indeed given a wide scope for us to improvise on our creativity and given us various options to reach our potential consumers. It indeed shows the dynamism in our society and our process of evolution.
On one side it indeed is a boon, but it also acted as a nuisance because this highly fragmented media made it difficult to make contact with our TG.
For example, if ‘I’, as a brand, plan to reach my target audience through one of the highly penetrated media – newspaper, and my potential target audience is a family.
In that case, when a newspaper comes to the house, the father in the family picks up the main newspaper, the mother picks up the health issue and the young ones on the family are interested in sub sections of Bangalore Times.
Therefore, in order to reach each one of them, I should now put my advertisement in each section of the newspaper. The fragmentation that has been created in the newspaper is definitely for the ease of the reader, but it makes things more complex for us as a marketer.
Similarly, if I want to reach a family through television and I need to decide the channel, the confusion is equally huge out there too. If it was the early era of Doordarshan, then the effectiveness of my media plan would have been incredible because the only two options that viewers had were DD1 and DD Metro. But now, due to the dawn of cable television in the industry, the viewers have a wide variety of options to entertain themselves. This indeed is a windfall for the viewers but a predicament for the marketers because it is getting gradually trickier to be able to reach the consumers and direct the message towards them.
Therefore, now, depending upon the potential TG we need to decide the most adequate media in order to achieve the desired reach and to increase the efficiency of the campaign.
Well, apart from the complexity of the issue of over-fragmentation of the media, media planning as a process has also gained drastic importance over a period of time. Afterall, this is where the big bucks go. Media has become overtly expensive as the time passed and hence, careful investment in the right media vehicle is required in order to ensure the effectiveness of the campaign and to optimally utilize the capital invested for the propagation of the message.
Marketers have now realized that it is not only important to devise a creative message and a creative advertisement to attract consumer attention, but also devise a creative media plan to be able to optimize the reach and to be able to communicate our message to the defined target audience. And social media is the new key in hand to conveniently and directly reach the prospective consumer and also generate feedback. We need to catch up with what’s happening in the ‘new media’ to analyze market trends and understand consumer preference. Marketers need to learn to reach consumers in those channels and measure results. It’s a big challenge, and it’s not getting any easier!
Author: Matta
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