Customer-driven media
How to use customer personas to design your media plan
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Consumers want entertainment. This trend is pushing brand executives to dust off their content studios, acquire movie-making chops, maniacally collaborate, and start putting showbiz talent teams together.
But the exact entertainment strategies are still work in progress.
Entertainment means not only traditional long-form TV and movie content and amusement parks, but also short-form social content, snippets of dance routines and cultural commentary, paparazzi shots, events, capsule launches, and merch and retail experiences. Pharrell understands this entertainment portfolio well. At LV, there’s always something happening in between runway shows - which themselves are spectacles - either a new store opening (the LA one gathered an impressive crowd of celebrity guests) or a capsule, like the recently released one with Tyler, The Creator, or a celebration event for a capsule. The outcome is a lot of cultural interest, owned and shared content, and the global attention management that no other brand can emulate.
Entertainment is, in this moment, an approach and an attitude, rather than a specific set of tactics. It focuses not just on the big event/launch/release/show itself, but on the time in-between. In fashion is still relatively rare to have always-on media outside of the seasonal fashion calendar, and media plans revolve around big buys mixed with performance marketing.
The shift is a matter of survival. Media is going through the great repricing, where market corrects the costs of traditional advertising, like print and TV, as well as of paid digital media. From consumers’ point of view, media is valuable if and when they respond to their social needs, identity markers like status signaling and belonging, motivations, tastes, and interests. But since there are 912 million ad-blocking users worldwide in Q2 2023, advertising’s current role in consumers’ lives (other than annoyance) are minimal.
The task here is strategic, not tactical. Starting point is specific customer profiles, their entertainment and information needs, influences, current barriers to purchase, and motivations. From this starting point, media planning teams have to focus on the key touchpoints in their customers’ journey and shape their strategy around both unmet needs and unrecognized barriers to purchase.
In the entertainment-driven brand world, media focus is on the entire customer experience that a brand delivers, rather than a media channel mix. Media plan is then driven by the architecture of the customer journey through the brand experience (online and offline, functional and social). This architecture connects individual interactions in a way that creates value (information, entertainment, socializing, etc) to the end customer. The way individual interactions are connected becomes a brand relationship - the way a brand is experienced for a specific consumer group, and thus key for brand’s performance and growth.
Brand desirability varies among different customer groups (e.g. the same brand has a different temperature for Selective Buyers then for Connoisseurs then for Scrollers). Consequently, different stages of the customer journey have different relevance for a brand relationship with this customer group.
Imagine three customer personas: one younger, more trend-driven, more price-sensitive; another functionality and comfort driven, less price-sensitive; and yet another status-signaling driven, not price sensitive at all, interested in quality and superior fit. In addition to influencing the product pyramid and brand actions, these three customer groups influence media planning as well. Persona-driven media planning prevents customer deadlock and moves budgets from retargeting and promotions towards strategic brand communication.
In the first scenario, this media plan targets customers that are most likely to belong to the first persona described above: someone who is not brand-loyal, who is looking for seasonal items and who is gravitating towards the lowest price. These customers are least valuable for the brand as they usually do not convert into repeat customers.
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