How a Common Currency Helps

The common currency that many communications professionals seek is the effect on an audience. This is brand. It is a measure of attitudes, an understanding of reputation amongst key publics or market segments. But why are attitudes important? Because we know from consumer behaviour theory that attitude change must occurs before behaviour can change. And behaviour change is generally what marketers want. Whether its product trial, brand shift, increased usage or brand advocacy. It could even be social change, such as socially responsible drinking. Finally, by knowing where attitudes sit we know more about planning relevant communications. So the steps can be mapped as follows:

• Social (& other) communication activity occurs
• Attitudes are changed in some way
• Brand shifts
• Behaviour changes toward that desired
• Advocacy status shifts

The other important thing about a common currency is its a universal success measure. Universal across all your communications activity. So if you keep track of the activities you did and your brand health resulting then you can relate the two together. Its just cause and effect. More often its probably 'causes' plural, reflecting multiple activities and thats good because integrated communications is all about synergy. Where it gets tricky is separating the causes to help understand what to do more or less of. But its worth the effort because that understanding can save you big chunks of budget and/or precious time that would otherwise be wasted. Simply put understanding drives good planning and good planning creates new value.

So the question becomes "What was my return on each communications activity?". Over time this can be answered if you are systematic about your tracking. In fact, simply charting the communications activities against brand preference scores can be very revealing. Even better, if you can evaluate acitivites to convert them into outputs like reach and tone of media or blogs and number of people attending events. Building up that collection of metrics creates an asset to improve decisions and prove your results. Also, you then have the option of using more sophisticated statistics. These can show how strongly each activity drove brand or sales. And even what type of content to focus on. For more how-to info see this document.

Imagine how it would change your comms planning if you knew, for example, that the Trust brand attribute drives 22% of your brand preference result! Or that for every $1 you spend on PR you get back $5.50 in Sales but only $2.70 for advertising. There's a compelling value proposition.

Need Market Traction - Get it with Attitude!

Understanding attitudes is the next step. Traditionally this has been done by market research and in particular qualitative research. A semi-structured exploration of thoughts, feelings and ideas is an incredibly valuable reality check for marketers and communicators. It enables you to test and explore in an organic way with rich insights resulting. In the social media, many of these opportunities exist already in the conversation stream. Whilst you don’t get to select your respondents, the feedback could be nonetheless valuable. On the upside it is a ‘clean read’ by observation in a ‘natural’ environment. On the downside, strong opinions may crowd out others and Distance bias may also inflate persona’s. The bottom line is that understanding is created from a unbiased position and assembled in a systematic way. By either method, the resulting insights should contribute to a structured set of frameworks and guidelines.  


Armed with this valuable understanding, we then set out to change attitudes with appropriate communications. But how do we know that we have succeeded? And there is no common currency to measure communications anyway, is there? Yes, there is! The problem is many don’t get to see that currency measured properly or at all. So there is no accurate yardstick. No diagnostic if things don’t come out as expected. And thats the topic for next time!