The evolution of the Message

The ‘message’ is traditionally the cornerstone of any branding or marketing strategy. The concept used to be simple enough – produce a message at point ‘A’ (the brand) and it is received at point ‘B (the consumer)’. The extent to which your message is understood and received denoted the level of successs of your campaign. Mass media communication messed with that a bit and  introduced a lot more ‘Bs’. Then social media came along and completely turned it on its head.

To demonstrate what this means for the evolution of the message, and the challenge for today’s marketers, I’m going to reference Shannon’s communication model. Shannon developed a model in 1948, from a mathematical perspective, that demonstrated the communication of a message from one end to the other. It was widely accepted as one of the founding models of communication.

The model, below, shows the journey of the message as it goes from the information source (the producer of the message) and ends with the recipient. There’s a fuller explanation of each of the stages here.

Here’s what I think social media did to the model. Firstly, it introduced extra channels ( the center box – the medium over which the signal/message is sent).

Messages are now sent over a variety of traditional and digital media and it has to be adapted to suit each one. Okay, so this may present an additional challenge to marketers, in that the production of the message has to be more carefully considered for the medium – how are you going to adapt your message to make it shareable on Digg, for example? The only problem is, that the channel is the medium over which the signal ( the messsage) is communicated. Signals are the source of noise, interruption of the original message. The more signals, the more noise and your message can get distorted.

So far, this is fairly standard in the advancement of communication and the same adaptations can be applied to the impact mass media had on communication. But social media has also changed it further. The destination (the consumer) has also moved to become the channel, as consumers are now empowered to become distributers of the message themselves.

‘Retweeting’ is a great example of this, and helps to explain how the message can be distorted. When Twitter users retweet a message, this is typically appended with a personal commentary. If I see this first, this affects my understanding of the message, before the original brand has had a chance to tell me their version directly.

In a further complication of the model, the destination has also become the information source.

For a working example of this – see the skittles campaign where they turned their homepage into first their Twitter stream, then their Facebook wall.  What the consumer said became a real part of their branding, if only for a day or two. Oxfam did something similiar with their digital billboard campaign, where users were able to submit their own versions of the ‘Be Humankind’ slogan, with the best being displayed on boards across London. The consumer was able to set the message at the point of production.

And of course, social media has necessitated the need for tailored messages, as you are now talking to an active, individual consumer as opposed to a passive mass. So take the rather messy diagram I just created and multiply it by.. a lot to get an accurate view of the communication model today.

Social media has meant that marketers now have to work that much harder to create some kind of meaning, some kind of brand messsage. You have to filter out a lot of the noise and ensure your message reaches the intended audience largely unharmed, with something vaguely coherent at the end of it. Fundamentally, there is no linear model for the communication of messages that can be accurately applied. It is some kind of 3D mess that is constanty changing and adapting and needs to allow for the constant interjection of any person at any point. I’m not able to draw this.