Communication Strategy and Planning Models

Introduction

Communication strategy is the disciplined process of converting a brand diagnosis into a coherent set of choices about whom to influence, what change to seek, what to communicate, how to communicate it, and how communication should contribute to wider brand and business objectives. In account planning, strategy is not a collection of creative ideas. It is an argument that connects evidence about people, markets, competitors, and the brand to a focused communication task.

A useful communication strategy must answer five questions:

1. Audience: Which people or groups matter most?
2. Response: What should change in their knowledge, feelings, beliefs, behaviour, or relationship with the brand?
3. Proposition: What central promise or meaning should the brand communicate?
4. Support: Why should the audience believe the proposition?
5. Executional direction: What tone, style, and communication task will make the strategy effective?

These choices are interdependent. A proposition that is persuasive for existing customers may be irrelevant to non-users. A rational benefit may require demonstrations and evidence, whereas an identity-based proposition may require symbolism, cultural relevance, and consistent experience. Similarly, a campaign intended to build memory over time should not be evaluated only through immediate sales response.

This chapter develops the principal planning frameworks used to make these choices: the Get–Who–To–By model, response-hierarchy models, brand-building and activation logic, and communications architecture. It also examines their assumptions, limitations, integration, and application in a contemporary media environment.

Learning objectives

By the end of this chapter, students should be able to:

• distinguish communication strategy from executional planning;
• translate diagnosis into a precise audience and behavioural objective;
• apply the Get–Who–To–By framework;
• use response-hierarchy models critically rather than mechanically;
• differentiate long-term brand building from short-term activation;
• design a communications architecture across channels and customer stages;
• formulate propositions, reasons to believe, tone, and communication tasks;
• evaluate strategic coherence, ethics, measurement, and implementation risks.

1. From diagnosis to strategic choice

Diagnosis explains the situation; strategy chooses a direction. A diagnosis may reveal low awareness, weak distinctiveness, declining consideration, poor conversion, or a mismatch between brand meaning and customer experience. It may also reveal that the apparent communication problem is actually a product, pricing, distribution, or trust problem.

The planner should therefore distinguish three levels:

A communication objective should not claim control over outcomes that communication cannot reasonably produce. For example, “increase sales by 20%” may be a business objective, but a communication objective might be “increase qualified non-users’ recognition of the brand’s rapid-delivery benefit and prompt first purchase.” The latter identifies an audience, a change, and a plausible mechanism.

Strategic coherence

A strategy is coherent when its elements reinforce one another:

• the audience has a relevant unmet need;
• the desired response addresses the diagnosis;
• the proposition offers meaningful and distinctive value;
• reasons to believe are credible and available in the experience;
• tone fits the audience and brand character;
• channels can deliver the required response;
• measures correspond to the objective and time horizon.

Coherence is not the same as uniformity. Different executions may use different formats and tones while expressing the same strategic meaning. Consistency concerns the underlying idea, not visual or verbal repetition in every context.

2. The Get–Who–To–By framework

The Get–Who–To–By framework is a compact strategic brief structure. Its value lies in forcing the planner to make explicit choices rather than describing an audience or ambition in vague terms.

Get

“Get” identifies the priority audience. It may refer to a demographic group, a behavioural segment, a life-stage group, a need state, or a culturally defined community. Strong audience definitions combine identity with relevance. “Adults aged 18–34” is usually too broad; “urban first-time renters who feel financially exposed when unexpected repairs occur” is more strategically useful.

Audience selection should consider:

• commercial value and growth potential;
• category involvement and current behaviour;
• accessibility through media and experiences;
• unmet needs and barriers;
• influence on other decision makers;
• the brand’s permission to engage.

The audience may include a primary target, secondary influencers, and internal or institutional stakeholders. These should not be collapsed into one undifferentiated group.

Who

“Who” describes the audience as a person in a situation, not merely as a statistical segment. It captures the audience’s current worldview, tensions, habits, and language. The planner should ask:

• What are people trying to achieve?
• What frustrates or prevents them?
• What do they currently believe about the category and brand?
• Which alternatives do they use?
• What social or cultural meanings shape the decision?

In some versions of the framework, “Get” denotes the desired audience and “Who” denotes the audience’s human insight. In others, the terms are used differently. The essential principle is to separate selection from understanding: identifying whom to influence is not the same as explaining why they might respond.

To

“To” specifies the desired response. It should express a meaningful change, not merely exposure. Possible responses include:

• notice the brand in a crowded category;
• recognize a problem or opportunity;
• believe a specific benefit;
• feel confidence, reassurance, pride, or excitement;
• choose the brand at a decision moment;
• try, buy, subscribe, recommend, or return;
• participate in a community or relationship.

The desired response should be singular enough to guide creative work, while acknowledging that several intermediate responses may support it.

By

“By” identifies the means or strategic route by which the response will be produced. It may include a proposition, proof, experience, social mechanism, distinctive asset, or behavioural prompt. For example: “By demonstrating that the service resolves common household emergencies within two hours, and making booking possible with one tap.”

A useful planning statement can therefore be written as:

Get first-time renters who feel vulnerable to unexpected repair costs; who want independence without financial anxiety; to see the service as a dependable form of control; by proving rapid, transparent assistance in realistic rental situations.

This statement is not finished advertising copy. It is a strategic hypothesis that creative and media teams can develop.

3. Proposition, reasons to believe, and support

The proposition

The proposition is the central value the brand offers the audience. It should answer the audience’s implicit question: “Why should this matter to me?” Effective propositions are:

• relevant to a genuine tension or need;
• distinctive relative to alternatives;
• credible in light of the brand’s capabilities;
• capable of motivating the desired response;
• concise enough to guide communication.

A proposition is not necessarily a slogan. “Feel more in control when things go wrong” may be a strategic proposition; “Control, when you need it” may be an executional expression.

Functional, emotional, and identity value

A proposition may operate at several levels:

Strong brand strategies often connect these levels. A functional benefit can become emotionally meaningful when it resolves a human tension. However, emotional language cannot compensate for an untrue or undelivered functional claim.

Reasons to believe

Reasons to believe are the evidence supporting the proposition. They can include:

• product features and performance data;
• demonstrations, trials, or guarantees;
• credentials, certifications, and transparent policies;
• testimonials and credible third-party endorsement;
• distinctive processes or assets;
• customer experience and service design;
• institutional reputation.

Evidence must be both available and relevant. A technically accurate fact that does not address the audience’s concern is weak support. A dramatic claim unsupported by operational reality creates reputational and regulatory risk.

4. Response-hierarchy models

Response models describe possible stages through which communication may influence behaviour. The classic hierarchy-of-effects tradition commonly distinguishes cognitive, affective, and behavioural responses: learn, feel, and do. Related models include AIDA—attention, interest, desire, action—and innovation-adoption sequences such as awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption.

These models are useful as planning heuristics because they prompt the planner to ask what must happen before action is plausible. They are not universal laws of human behaviour.

A practical response chain

A contemporary planning chain may be expressed as:

Exposure or encounter → attention → processing → meaning or belief → motivation → action → experience → memory and advocacy

The chain is not necessarily linear. People may buy from habit without extensive conscious processing; they may feel affinity before they can articulate a belief; or they may act because of convenience and rationalize later. Repeated brand exposure can also build memory without immediate action.

Choosing the required response

The appropriate response depends on category conditions:

The planner should diagnose the main bottleneck rather than attempt to maximize every response simultaneously. A campaign that tries to create awareness, educate, reposition, generate immediate leads, and build loyalty in one undifferentiated message will often lack strategic force.

5. Brand building and activation

Brand building and activation are complementary but distinct modes of communication.

Brand building seeks to strengthen memory structures, associations, distinctiveness, trust, and future preference. It usually operates over a longer time horizon and reaches people who may not be ready to buy today.

Activation seeks to stimulate a near-term behaviour among people with sufficient motivation or opportunity to act. It uses prompts, offers, demonstrations, reminders, direct response, retail visibility, or simplified conversion paths.

The distinction is strategic, not simply a division between television and digital media. A social video can build the brand or activate demand depending on its role, audience, creative design, and measurement.

Why both are required

If a brand invests only in activation, it may harvest existing demand while weakening future distinctiveness and becoming dependent on discounts. If it invests only in broad brand communication, it may fail to convert available demand or learn from behaviour. A balanced system connects long-term meaning with short-term availability.

A useful planning principle is:

• brand building increases the probability that the brand will be remembered and preferred in future choice situations;
• activation increases the probability that a current opportunity will become a measurable action.

The appropriate balance varies by category, competitive position, cash constraints, purchase frequency, and growth stage. It should not be reduced to a universal percentage allocation.

Measurement implications

Brand-building measures may include unaided awareness, prompted recognition, distinctive association, consideration, perceived relevance, and mental availability. Activation measures may include qualified traffic, response rate, conversion, cost per acquisition, basket size, or repeat action. Neither set should be interpreted in isolation.

Short-term response can be represented descriptively as:

Here, “qualified responses” means responses meeting a defined quality criterion, and “conversion rate” is the proportion that completes the specified action. This identity is useful for diagnosis, but it does not establish causality. Conversion may be affected by price, distribution, seasonality, competitor activity, and prior brand equity. Experimental or quasi-experimental designs are needed for stronger causal inference.

6. Communications architecture

Communications architecture is the designed relationship among strategic idea, audience, touchpoints, content, timing, experience, and measurement. It prevents channel planning from becoming a list of disconnected media activities.

A practical architecture includes four layers:

1. Core brand meaning: the enduring idea or promise.
2. Audience and journey roles: what different audiences need at awareness, consideration, action, use, and advocacy stages.
3. Channel and experience roles: the contribution each touchpoint makes.
4. Governance and learning: rules for consistency, adaptation, testing, and evaluation.

The journey is not always sequential. Customers may enter through search, recommendation, retail, or a service encounter. Architecture should therefore be designed around decision contexts rather than a rigid funnel.

Channel roles and message adaptation

A channel should be assigned a role based on its strengths. Broad-reach channels can create memory and cultural presence; search can capture expressed intent; retail can influence choice at the point of sale; email can support retention; customer service can prove or undermine the promise.

Adaptation is legitimate when it preserves the strategic meaning while adjusting format, depth, and invitation to the context. A short video may dramatize the proposition, a product page may substantiate it, and a service interaction may deliver it. Incoherence occurs when each channel makes a different promise or targets an incompatible response.

7. Tone and communication task

Tone is the manner in which a message speaks: authoritative, warm, playful, urgent, reassuring, provocative, expert, or understated. Tone should emerge from the audience tension, brand character, category norms, and desired response.

Tone is not a substitute for strategy. “Make it fun” is not a communication task. A communication task states what communication must do, such as:

• dramatize a hidden inconvenience;
• make an unfamiliar benefit easy to understand;
• reframe a category as more accessible;
• reassure sceptical buyers through transparent proof;
• turn a functional feature into a personally meaningful benefit;
• prompt an immediate, low-friction action.

Tone should also be tested for inclusiveness and unintended meaning. Humour may increase attention but trivialize a serious issue. Urgency may prompt action but create anxiety. Prestige may signal quality but exclude audiences the brand seeks to grow.

8. An integrated planning process

A robust planning process can be organized into the following sequence:

Step 1: Re-state the diagnosis

Identify the business, marketing, and communication problem. State what evidence supports the diagnosis and what remains uncertain.

Step 2: Select the audience

Define the primary audience by need, behaviour, and situation. Explain why this audience has strategic priority.

Step 3: Define the desired response

Choose the most important mental, emotional, behavioural, or relational change. Specify the time horizon.

Step 4: Develop the proposition

Connect a meaningful audience tension to a distinctive brand value.

Step 5: Specify reasons to believe

List proof that can be demonstrated, experienced, verified, or credibly endorsed.

Step 6: Choose tone and task

State how communication should behave and what it must accomplish.

Step 7: Assign architecture and roles

Map touchpoints to audience contexts and distinguish brand-building from activation roles.

Step 8: Define measurement and learning

Select indicators for exposure, processing, response, action, experience, and longer-term brand effects. Establish baselines, targets, and test designs where possible.

Step 9: Check feasibility and governance

Confirm legal substantiation, operational delivery, data permissions, accessibility, cultural sensitivity, and organizational ownership.

9. Illustrative case: Northstar Home Assist

Background

Northstar Home Assist is a fictional subscription service providing emergency repair coordination for renters. It has strong service ratings among existing members but low awareness among younger renters. Competitors emphasize low monthly price, while Northstar’s research indicates that renters are less concerned with the absolute price than with uncertainty about what happens during an emergency.

Problem

The business wants growth, but a general awareness campaign would not explain why the service matters. The communication problem is that non-members do not connect emergency repair coordination with the emotional benefit of control and reassurance.

Analysis

The priority audience is first-time and early-stage renters who have limited experience managing repairs. Their tension is independence accompanied by uncertainty: they want to solve problems themselves but fear being overcharged, ignored, or unable to act quickly.

The desired response is not simply awareness. The audience should believe that Northstar provides dependable, transparent assistance and should consider joining before an emergency occurs.

Strategic choices

• Get: Early-stage renters in privately managed homes, especially those without trusted repair contacts.
• Who: People seeking independence but anxious about unfamiliar household problems and hidden costs.
• To: See Northstar as a practical form of control and feel confident joining before a crisis.
• By: Showing realistic repair situations, explaining the response process and pricing clearly, and demonstrating that help can be requested rapidly.
• Proposition: Northstar turns household emergencies into manageable situations.
• Reasons to believe: A documented response process, transparent membership terms, verified repair partners, service ratings, and a clear guarantee.
• Tone: Calm, capable, and lightly reassuring rather than alarmist.
• Communication task: Make an invisible future risk feel understandable and manageable without exaggerating fear.

Architecture

Brand-building content uses memorable scenarios and a consistent visual device showing a problem becoming manageable. Search and comparison content supplies proof for people researching options. Landing pages reduce uncertainty through plain-language terms. Onboarding confirms the promise by explaining how to request help. Referral communication encourages satisfied members to recommend the service.

Outcome and learning

In an actual implementation, outcomes should be assessed at several levels: recognition of the distinctive device, association with dependable control, qualified visits, membership conversion, cancellation, and service satisfaction. A rise in clicks without improved understanding would suggest an attention problem has been solved but the communication strategy has not yet created sufficient belief.

The case demonstrates that a proposition, proof, tone, and architecture must work together. A dramatic emergency advertisement without transparent terms might create attention but weaken trust. A detailed price message might create comprehension but fail to make the service emotionally relevant.

10. Critical limitations and contemporary issues

Models are abstractions

Get–Who–To–By and response hierarchies simplify complex social behaviour. They are valuable for disciplined thinking, but they should not be treated as predictive laws. Planning should allow for habit, emotion, social influence, cultural context, and non-linear customer journeys.

Attribution and causality

Digital platforms can report precise interactions while obscuring incremental effects. Last-click attribution may credit the final touchpoint even when earlier brand activity created the conditions for conversion. Stronger evaluation combines behavioural data with brand tracking, controlled tests, matched-market designs, and qualitative interpretation.

Privacy and responsible personalization

Audience targeting must respect consent, purpose limitation, data minimization, security, and applicable privacy law. Personalization becomes ethically problematic when it exploits vulnerability, infers sensitive characteristics without permission, or makes consequential decisions opaquely. Strategic relevance does not justify surveillance.

Inclusion and representation

Audience definitions can reproduce stereotypes if they reduce people to simplistic demographic assumptions. Planners should use inclusive research, test cultural interpretations, provide accessibility in content and interfaces, and examine whether targeting excludes people from essential information or opportunities.

AI and automated optimization

AI can support audience analysis, message variation, predictive modelling, and media optimization. It does not remove the need for human judgment. Models may encode biased data, optimize proxies rather than meaningful outcomes, or generate claims that cannot be substantiated. Human governance should require documented data provenance, review of generated content, claim verification, privacy controls, and monitoring for disparate effects.

Best-practice checklist

Before approving a communication strategy, ask:

• Is the audience specific enough to guide choices?
• Is the desired response observable or assessable?
• Does the proposition resolve a meaningful tension?
• Is it distinctive and credible?
• Are reasons to believe demonstrable in the real experience?
• Is the communication task different from a vague creative instruction?
• Are brand-building and activation roles both considered?
• Does each touchpoint have a defined role?
• Are measures aligned with the time horizon?
• Have ethical, legal, privacy, accessibility, and operational risks been addressed?

Chapter Summary

Communication strategy converts diagnosis into a focused set of choices about audience, desired response, proposition, evidence, tone, and task. The Get–Who–To–By framework provides a concise method for expressing these choices. Response-hierarchy models help planners identify the mental, emotional, and behavioural changes required, although they should be used as heuristics rather than linear laws.

Brand building strengthens memory, meaning, distinctiveness, and future preference; activation stimulates near-term action. Effective programmes integrate both and evaluate them with measures appropriate to their different time horizons. Communications architecture assigns strategic roles to channels and experiences while preserving a coherent brand meaning. Finally, ethical governance, privacy, inclusion, operational delivery, and critical evaluation are essential because communication cannot create sustainable value when the brand fails to deliver its promise.

Key Terms

Account planning: A strategic discipline that connects research, consumer understanding, brand diagnosis, and communication decisions.

Activation: Communication intended to stimulate a relatively immediate behaviour.

Audience: The people or groups selected for influence or engagement.

Brand building: Long-term activity that strengthens memory, meaning, distinctiveness, and preference.

Communication architecture: The structured relationship among brand meaning, audiences, touchpoints, content, timing, and measurement.

Communication task: The specific job communication must perform.

Distinctive asset: A recognizable brand element that supports identification and memory.

Get–Who–To–By: A strategic framework specifying the priority audience, audience understanding, desired response, and means of producing it.

Mental availability: The probability that a brand comes to mind in relevant buying situations.

Proposition: The central value or promise offered by a brand to its audience.

Reason to believe: Evidence that supports the credibility of a proposition.

Response hierarchy: A model describing possible cognitive, affective, and behavioural stages associated with communication effects.

Salience: The prominence or accessibility of a brand or association in a relevant context.

Strategic coherence: The degree to which audience, objective, proposition, proof, tone, channels, and measurement reinforce one another.

Target audience: The priority group selected for communication influence.

Tone: The manner, attitude, or emotional character of communication.

Touchpoint: Any interaction through which a person encounters, evaluates, experiences, or discusses a brand.

Value proposition: A statement of the value a brand promises to deliver to a particular audience.

Review Questions

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the difference between a business problem, a marketing problem, and a communication problem?
2. What does the “By” component of Get–Who–To–By specify?
3. Define a reason to believe and give two examples.
4. How does brand building differ from activation?
5. Why should response-hierarchy models not be treated as universal laws?

Long Answer Questions

1. Explain how a planner can translate a diagnosis of weak consideration into a complete communication strategy.
2. Compare functional, emotional, and identity-based propositions, using an example to show how they can be connected.
3. Discuss the role of communications architecture in coordinating multiple channels and customer experiences.
4. Critically evaluate the advantages and limitations of the Get–Who–To–By framework.
5. Explain why measurement for brand building should differ from measurement for activation.

Analytical / Application Questions

1. A financial-services brand has high awareness but low trust among first-time investors. Construct a Get–Who–To–By statement, proposition, two reasons to believe, tone, and communication task.
2. Design a communications architecture for a new subscription service, assigning roles to brand-building, consideration, conversion, onboarding, and retention touchpoints.
3. A campaign generates many clicks but no improvement in consideration or conversion. Diagnose at least three possible strategic explanations and recommend tests to distinguish among them.

Multiple Choice Questions with Answers

Question 1

Which component of Get–Who–To–By identifies the desired change in the audience’s knowledge, feeling, belief, or behaviour?

A. Get

B. Who

C. To

D. By

Correct Answer: C. To

Question 2

What is the primary function of a reason to believe?

A. To define the media budget

B. To support the credibility of the proposition

C. To identify the broadest possible audience

D. To replace the communication objective

Correct Answer: B. To support the credibility of the proposition

Question 3

Which statement best describes brand building?

A. It only uses television advertising

B. It seeks to strengthen future memory, meaning, and preference

C. It is limited to discount promotions

D. It measures only immediate conversion

Correct Answer: B. It seeks to strengthen future memory, meaning, and preference

Question 4

A campaign explains a complex service and provides evidence that reduces perceived risk. Which response is it primarily designed to influence?

A. Understanding and belief

B. Production efficiency

C. Distribution margin

D. Internal staffing

Correct Answer: A. Understanding and belief

Question 5

Why is a response hierarchy best treated as a heuristic?

A. All audiences always follow the same sequence

B. Communication never affects behaviour

C. People may respond through non-linear, habitual, or emotional processes

D. It applies only to business-to-business brands

Correct Answer: C. People may respond through non-linear, habitual, or emotional processes

Question 6

Which is the strongest example of a communication task?

A. Make it exciting

B. Use social media

C. Make an unfamiliar benefit understandable and credible

D. Reach everyone aged 18–65

Correct Answer: C. Make an unfamiliar benefit understandable and credible

Question 7

If qualified responses equal 2,000 and the conversion rate is 6%, how many conversions are expected using the chapter’s identity?

A. 12

B. 120

C. 333

D. 1,200

Correct Answer: B. 120

Question 8

What is the main purpose of communications architecture?

A. To make every channel use identical content

B. To assign coordinated roles to brand meaning, touchpoints, audiences, and measurement

C. To eliminate the need for customer experience

D. To ensure that activation replaces brand building

Correct Answer: B. To assign coordinated roles to brand meaning, touchpoints, audiences, and measurement

Question 9

Which practice presents the greatest ethical concern in AI-supported targeting?

A. Testing alternative headlines for clarity

B. Using consented aggregate performance data

C. Inferring sensitive characteristics without permission for consequential targeting

D. Reviewing generated content for factual accuracy

Correct Answer: C. Inferring sensitive characteristics without permission for consequential targeting

Question 10

A brand has high awareness but weak distinctive associations. Which strategic priority is most appropriate?

A. Build distinctive meaning and associations

B. Stop all brand communication

C. Target only existing customers with discounts

D. Measure only impressions

Correct Answer: A. Build distinctive meaning and associations