Power Channels

... are where your customers and prospects are most likely to discover these wonderful products and services and in a manner that means they are disposed to purchase them.

Customers make this discovery in a whole range of places.  They see it in a shop, friends will recommend it, maybe they will see advertising, direct mail, internet or email.  The question for you is which will be the most productive and stimulate the most profitable growth.

Purchasing decisions are both emotional and rational. 

• Emotional requires building brand image by creating awareness, building trust and credibility and developing an affinity.  Then people want to buy from you.
• Rational is about stimulating usage and purchasing through practical methods of getting trial, encouraging previous customers to return and becoming chosen more often within a repertoire.

No one channel does all these things.  e.g. price offers are good for trial, but not so good for trust while advertising is good for awareness and building the emotional bond.  Usually recommendations from friends and family are very powerful, but hard to achieve with marketing communications. 

Power Channels brings clarity and some science to the art of marketing communications.  It helps you decide which channels will deliver the most impact for the least cost.   It is not a substitute for creativity and good ideas, but it will make sure that your great ideas are discovered and will have a big impact on your sales.

The 3 step process

The tools and techniques are precisely aimed at helping you discover how to get more from your marketing spend and about knowing which distribution channels are most important.

Step 1 - Create a list of channels – we have developed an interview and/or workshop approach that will ensure we come up with all the channels including the less obvious ones.

Step 2 - Research and analysis – we use a robust research technique called ICOM to discover which channels are best at doing each of the eight tasks identified in this diagram.

Step 3 - A workshop exercise to make sense of the insights and agree the Power Channels for the brands and marketing objectives you have today.

Outputs and deliverables.

You will know in which channels you should invest and be distributed to get the most growth.  This will make your marketing spend much more efficient.

You will have the support of the sales team and the business team provided you implement the option of a workshop session to translate the insights into practical decisions for growth.

Our report will act as a catalyst for changes to marketing communications and retail distribution strategy.  It has huge impact because the idea of Power Channels is something that is easy to understand and it is believed because all of the data is either quantitative or gathered from authoritative figures within the business.

Power Channels might even be accepted by your Financial Director as a useful tool.  It will help them to understand which parts of the marketing budget are working best and which need to be refined.

Because it is a Differentiate analysis we design the approach to answer important business questions about how to get growth and guarantee that you will have clarity about what to do next and the support of your colleagues to implement it.

Power Channels is the fourth step in the Growth Game.  If you want to see some examples of how this has worked for clients, then take a look at our case studies page.  Click here