By Messan Mawugbe (PhD)
Brand communication managers across business spectrum are faced with a swarm of fleeting communication content from heterogenous news sources of information, misinformation, fake and non-fake values. These palate of content does pose a threat to brand communication efforts as it turns to dilute planned-communication objectives, expectations, impacts and strategy and subsequently straining brand-communication budgets. To offsets these storms of fleeting news impacts on brands’ competitiveness, strategic communication departments has employed media monitoring efforts. To a larger extent, an effective media monitoring efforts depends on the strategic designing and the deployment of psychographic instruments in a pre and post brand communication or media narrative analysis.
What then is psychographic instruments? An answer is in a remark by Alexander Nix, the CEO of the Cambridge Analytica that; “If you know the personality of the people you are targeting, you can nuance your messaging to resonate more effectively with those key audience groups”- This remark is an awakening call to brand communication managers across the globe. In an era of fake news and big data, brand communication executives need to adjust to the fleeting news and the consumer-info-sway mechanisms attempting to sway consumers from their respective brands. Practically, psychographics media narrative is the assessment of personality, attitudes, values, interests, habit, hobbies, lifestyles and opinions embedded in a brand’s news narrative. Also, Psychographics approaches allow for detail analysis and profiling of both the consumer and the news narrative in the context of time, space, place and subsequently the prediction communication impacts.
Media Narrative Psychographics – Its Impact
Many communication executives remain ineffective with their brand’s media news-positioning as the below study charts revealed. For instance, as a brand communication manager; are you in a position of predicting the news-like portrait of journalists and media houses relating to your brand and do you have a consistent profile matrix of such information? Do you have your psychographic media segmentation data pin on the wall? Certainly, many brand communication managers are likely to stretch for an answer. All is not lost, brand communicators should adopt a new approach other than the traditional news content analysis, but in addition, should embrace the new news content-psychographics method of establishing the personality of the journalists and influencers, brand-narrative- context, the aggregation of the brand’s news sentiments, competitor brand narrative benchmarking, the allocation of news spaces and place, reach and time to the brand, brands and industry analysts’ commentary, voice actualities of direct quotes and paraphrasing, the aesthetical attributes of your brand’s news across the spectrum of the traditional and digital media spaces. Not withstanding the importance of psychographic media narrative analysis, the study report (Fig A and B) on the Ghanaian Banking sector measuring Banking CEOs and Banking corporate visibility revealed many corporate communication executives are paying less attention to their brand’s media presence, reach and CEO’s coverage as depicted in the TOP 10 Banking Media Narrative Ratings below.
FIG A:
FIG B:
Looking Forward
Brand managers are encouraged to embrace communication News content psychographics since it allows brand communication team leads to consistently track, aggregate and analyze every single content related to their brands and subsequently evolve focus oriented messages to ward off any intended brand manipulation in competitive business spaces. Psychographic news content analysis, provides an effective media and content landscapes segmentation and communication impact profiling and success mappings. Brand communication managers of political and nonpolitical brands, who fail in their efforts to sustain consistent brand-psychographic media segmentation, are likely to fail in today’s environment of big data.