Strategic Planning Issue Number 2: The Brand Audit

By Rebecca McPheters
Media Industry Newsletter
July 13, 2009

The annual planning process is an opportunity to undertake a multi-faceted audit of the individual media brand, thereby sharpening the focus on its benefits, differentiation, and opportunities. By better understanding the value being brought to market, better decisions can also be made about how to deploy resources most effectively – the topic of next month’s Strategic Planning Issue #3. The brand audit provides a basis for identifying areas of needed change and has three components:

Brand Identity
The value of most media brands lies in their ability to provide:

• Consumers with content and experiences that they find engaging
• Advertisers with a way to effectively deliver their marketing messages to audiences that they value

Publishers undermine their own credibility when they persist in selling based on attributes that are not reasonably associated with their brands. As part of the brand audit process, publishers can revisit the basis upon which they are selling their brand to both consumers and advertisers. This requires a dispassionate assessment of whether their primary brand attributes are:

• Valued, credible and compelling
• Clearly and consistently articulated
• Adequately differentiated from those of its competitors

To avoid knee-jerk -- and possibly incorrect -- answers to each of these, another way of approaching the issue is to ask “can it be documented?” If the answer is no, then significant change is needed.

Brand Leverage
In leveraging the brand, the focus should be on expanding the brand in ways that either increase revenue or protect revenue that would otherwise be lost. Publishers and advertisers alike tend to lose sight of the relative inability of newer platforms to generate critical masses of consumers and effectively deliver commercial messages. While there are many reasons to deliver branded content across multiple platforms, by overselling the value and synergies associated with newer channels publishers have contributed to advertisers’ diminished perceptions of magazine strength. Many of the “synergies” pursued by advertisers and touted by publishers have failed to materialize due to the limited overlap among audiences.

While expanding a brand’s footprint is now most often associated with delivery of content across new media platforms, some of the most interesting and profitable applications of brand leverage have been in areas less dependent on technology. Prime examples include the sale or licensing of consumer products and services that are clearly related to brand strengths, as well as the leveraging of publishers’ detailed knowledge of specific consumer segments into the development of highly targeted and contextually appropriate marketing strategies for advertisers.

Brand Performance
Finally, when both the economy and the publishing industry are faring poorly, the issue of how to best evaluate magazine performance becomes ever more critical. Publishers have a tendency to very narrowly define their competitive set, but their ability to respond to the ever-increasing rate of change in the marketplace may be dependent upon their ability to redefine their competition to include a broader array of media competing for the time, attention, and spending of both consumers and advertisers.

We suggest that performance be evaluated in the context of all media within the relevant genre. For example with food magazines, performance would be evaluated in the context of not only other food magazines, but the Food Network and food websites. The metrics for this assessment would include:

• Competitive positioning
• Audience size, quality, and frequency
• Potential for ad exposure and effectiveness
• Pricing
• Consumer and advertising spending

The strategic planning process creates an important opportunity to reflect, redirect, and refine. Those publishers who think rigorously about their brands and their opportunities relative to those of an appropriate set of competitors are certain to outperform those who don’t, regardless of market environment.

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Rebecca McPheters, the former New York Times Magazine Group group executive and Simmons president, now heads McPheters & Company. The company specializes in strategic planning and research for brands and for companies in media-related fields, including media owners, advertisers, and ad agencies. She can be reached at RMCPHETERS@MCPHETERS.COM.