Context planing article - Essay Example

Context Planning: The Door to Media’s Future Context Planning: The Door to Media’s Future Today popular brands strive to keep consistent customer relationships more than ever before. The growing intensity of brand completion has already challenged the creativity of media agencies to a great extent. The result was that any platform that offers public visibility became a medium for communication. Hatcher (2005) in his article Context Planning: The Door to media’s future fondly calls this new version of media as ‘contacts’.

According to the author, media is assigned with a new task of conducting incessant research on ‘how customers interact with brands’. The new developments require collaborative efforts of both media professionals and media agencies in order to ensure effective communication. Hatcher points out a few instances where media agencies deployed their context planners effectively to unravel customer insights and ‘generated non-traditional media solutions’. According to Klues (2004), context planners “provide the essential link between the consumer’s experience with the advertisers’ brand and the various ways the consumer chooses to receive commercial messages about them” (as cited in Hatcher, 2005).

Admittedly, the sustainability of media agencies depends on their creativity in context planning. Although change is visible in every sphere of social life and business activities more than ever before, media agencies are to struggle a lot to keep pace with the new developments happening in every industry. The most important thing about context planning is that business has become something more than a buying and selling process. It involves collective stakeholder participation that ensures convenient service, sustainable profit, effective communication, and many other aspects.

Today, media agencies work as a third party to link in this process to ensure this solidity. The emergence of countless organisations in the same industry increases market tension and thereby the responsibility of media agencies or context planning professionals to ensure consumer contact. Obviously, context planning thus has become popular and integral part of modern business. The old method of business will no longer work in the present scenario. As a response to the necessity of context planning, media agencies like Starcom Media Vest, Universal McCann successfully implemented the context planning (Hatcher).

Today customer relationship marketing is entitled with media agencies to some extents. Organisations today explore the most cost effective and potential way to connect with the consumers. In this situation, as Hatcher points out, context planners help them identify the ‘optimal environment’ for communication. On the flip side, the least important factor of this idea is that globally marketable goods have become the focus today rather than standard products sold internationally. According to Holt et al (2004, as cited in Parsons & Maclaran, 2009, Ch 12), consumers regard global brands as having higher quality and appealing to a larger cosmopolitan section.

Also, there is a shift in consumer preference for brands that have a global presence and are vouched for by the maximum number of people. Hence, to some levels Hatcher’s arguments go beyond reality. Media agency is not the sole instrument to gather customer insights. Instead, as Keller (2003, p. 599) points out, various marketing activities need to be integrated to create the appropriate brand knowledge structures. Also, competitive strategy is important today to gather information on competitors (Hooley, Piercy & Nicoulaud, 2008, p. 140). Every customer develops a mental impression about a brand influenced by a number of factors.

Hence, the role of context planning is vital, but not everything in business promotion. ReferencesHatcher, K. (2005). Context Planning: Door to media’s future. Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications. 37-43. Hooley, G., Piercy, N.F & Nicoulaud, B. (2008). Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning. Pearson Education India. Keller, K. L. (2003). “Brand Synthesis: The Multidimensionality of Brand Knowledge”. Journal of Consumer Research. 29 (4). [online] available at: http://www.

qip-journal.eu/index.php/QIP/article/view/150/207 [accessed 10 Jan 2014]. Parsons, E & Maclaran, P. (2009). Contemporary Issues in Marketing and Consumer Behaviour. UK: Routledge.