Market Core · Marketing Channels · Module
Channel selection
Which channels are used and why — matched to where the audience actually is and to what the message requires, rather than to what is available.
The idea
How it works
Most channel mixes are inherited. Someone set them up, they were adjusted at the margin, and the question of whether a channel should exist at all has not been reopened in years.
Two tests decide fit: is the audience there in the state of attention the message needs, and does the message survive the format. A long-form argument in a short-form channel fails on the second whatever the targeting.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Start from the audience, not the channel
Where they are, established from the audience work, is the only sensible starting point.
- 02
Check the message survives the format
Some things cannot be said in fifteen seconds. Choosing the channel first forces the message to shrink.
- 03
Reopen the inherited ones annually
For each existing channel, ask whether you would start it today. Some answers are no.
- 04
Leave room for one experiment
A mix with no experimental line converges on whatever worked three years ago.
One level in
The components of channel selection
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
For each existing channel, ask whether you would start it today. Some of the answers are no.
The other modules in marketing channels
Channel economics
What each channel truly costs and returns, including production, management time and the effect on other channels.
LearnThe mix
How channels combine and in what sequence — because channels interact, and a mix managed as a set of independent lines will misread all of them.
LearnTesting and incrementality
Whether a channel contributes demand that would not otherwise have arrived, established by withholding it rather than by observing it.
Learn