There are staple questions in corporate communications, such as:
- What’s the broader business imperative?
- What’s the communications goal that will support the business imperative?
- What’s the audience (implicitly meaning, who should we be trying to ultimately reach, or influence in order to gain their support?)
All very well, but we too often fail to flesh out the audience questions; we should also be asking:
- An audience is never entirely uniform: what are the audience segments?
- What are the values, traits and habits of each audience segment?
- Can each audience segment be influenced at all?
- If so, based on their values, traits and habits, what is likely to influence each segment?
- How do they consume information?
- How will our opponents target the same audiences?
Steffen Moller 