The role of media brands in media planning

Abstract

Brand management is well established in the media industry. However, little research exists on the role of a media company’s brand in the media planning process. Exploring the brand’s relevance from a theoretical perspective, we argue that it is linked to other qualitative criteria. The results of our exploratory study show that for media planners in Austria and Switzerland, the media brand is most important when advertising for specialty goods, in the premium market segment and in magazines and newspapers. We conclude by presenting implications for media companies’ brand management to fully exploit their brands’ potential.

Keywords:

• branding
• brand management
• media brands
• media planning
• advertising

Notes

1. The remaining respondents were working in advertising, on the client side or in other fields. Research indicates that they tend to process criteria differently when compared with media planning professionals (King, Reid, & Macias, 2004). As the number of completed questionnaires in those groups was very small and the paper focuses on media planners, we excluded them from our analysis.

2. Concerning years of experience, 2.00% of the respondents had up to one year of experience, 23.20% had up to 2–5 years, 26.30% had up to 6–9 years, 25.30% had up to 10–15 years and 23.20% had more than 15 years.

3. Fifteen per cent of the respondents were responsible for 100,000–2,000,000 CHF/EUR, 37.40% for 2,000,001–10,000,000 CHF/EUR, 30.30% for more than 10,000,000 CHF/EUR and 17.20% did not answer.

4. Respondents rated different quantitative and qualitative criteria in previous questions and knew what those terms refered to.

5. t-Tests for differences between countries did not show any systematic differences or patterns, which confirms the similar market conditions we assumed.

6. Results for RQ3 are not ranked depending on importance but remain in order of the media planning process.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christoph Sommer

Christoph Sommer is a Research and Teaching Associate at the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich where he focuses on marketing in the media industry. He has been a visiting scholar at the Media Management and Transformation Center at Jönköping International Business School and at the NYU Stern School of Business. He studied at the University of Vienna and at the Fudan University Shanghai.

Linda Marty

Linda Marty is a Brand Manager at Branders Group AG in Zurich. She studied at the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich.