Consumer communication goals - without them you’re just making noise

published 2003

Traditionally, those in Marcom positions have measured the success of a PR campaign or function merely by the number of media impressions gained or by ‘share of media voice’ within an industry or product category.

That’s still a basic form of measurement underpinning many PR campaigns or longer term programs. But modern measurement techniques and tools allow us to be more sophisticated and accurate in measuring the effectiveness of PR.

To continue to treat PR as something that simply generates a lot of media noise is doing modern PR a great disservice.  This attitude is normally apparent in companies that have poorly stated goals for their communication activities.  Indeed they may only have one goal - to generate more coverage than last year.  This may be a goal for the department or individual in charge of PR, but it is not a communication goal.

At the end of the day, most effective marketing communication should be done to change behavioural patterns.  We want our audience or market to switch from product A to product B, to trial a totally new product or think differently about a corporation.  We want them to stop doing what they are currently doing and act differently.

Consider this; before we alter our behaviour or ‘do something’, we have to want to do it.  And we can only want to do something if we know it can be done.  To know it can be done requires us being aware that it’s possible.

So, to change behaviour, we have to initially gain awareness within our market, we have to gain comprehension or understanding of what we are saying and we have to make people want to alter their current behaviour.

Therefore, in planning communication activities such as PR, four goals need to be established:

Awareness

What you want the audience to know or become aware of that they weren’t before. 

Comprehension

What you want your audience to understand based on their new awareness.

Attitude or desire

What you want your audience to feel based on those understandings.

Behaviour

What you ultimately want them to do based on those feelings.

Each goal has to individually stated.  And, as taking consumers through the stages of the communication process is sequential, there needs to be a timeframe to achieve each goal.

Now comes the hard part.  To make your campaign truly meaningful and accountable, these goals should be as measurable as possible.

Taking awareness as an example.  It’s easy to state the goal as “I want to increase awareness of our product in our target market”.  Harder, but more strategic and measurable is to say “I want to increase awareness of our product by 25% in the most affluent 60% of our market by the time we start our Christmas sales advertising”. 

This then is an example of an awareness goal.  A similar process applies to developing and stating comprehension, attitudinal and behavioural goals.