All Channels
“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
When you hear that phrase issuing forth from your radio or TV, you can be sure of a couple of things. First, the President is about to speak. Second, on any channel you switch to, any station you can tune in, in any market, in any part of the nation — the President is about to speak. The same goes for any big national or international breaking news. Whatever channel you’re watching or listening to, the message will be the same.
What happens as a result? We all the get same information, at the same time. A few different flavors of it, perhaps, depending on the individual source, but the same essential statement comes over the airwaves. Good news or bad, welcome or not, we’re all clued into the same data in more or less the same way.
Imagine what would happen if, instead of everyone experiencing the same live press conference, different audiences got totally different pre-recorded statements, all emphasizing different points and delivered in different tones. In the end, no one would know the whole story. Chaos.
So why do we let it happen in our marketing?
You’ve seen this phenomenon yourself. A company’s website conveys a slightly different marketing message than its Facebook page, which conveys a different message than its official blog, which conveys a slightly different message than its Twitter campaign, et cetera. The disconnect can be as subtle as a web page that expresses one feeling visually and another feeling verbally. The resulting contradictory statements tend to cancel each other out, leaving the impression that nothing much has been expressed at all, or at least not in a way that made an impact.
Marketing is all about making an impact on the emotions and decision-making triggers of your audience. But emotional impact, like physical impact, depends on congruent, massive action. You can’t knock somebody out by punching them with five fingers, one at a time — you have to curl all five into a fist and throw them all at once. A marketing campaign must use the same unity of action across all its “fingers” — the many channels, spread across many media, that project a company’s brand. Not “brands.” Brand. Yes, little variations add freshness and help you get the most out of each channel’s individual strengths, but across all channels the core message must prevail.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
