Are the Publics Really Targeted?

PR practitioners have various tools to segment and analyze the publics, such as Grunig’s situational theory, Bernstein’s wheel, Broom and Dozier’s 9 ways to segment stakeholders,etc. The goal is to get across messages that organizations want to send out via segmented media channels to targeted audiences.

Public relations professionals are often the ones to suggest segmented media channels to reach segmented stakeholders, where

media proliferation driven technology has fragmented the market greatly.

Below is the photo showing how consumers choice for media has mushroomed until 2006, which is already significant when explosion of new media such as streamed broadcasting, podcasts, user-generated media hasn't been take into account.

PR practitioners, like many advertisers, often base their media decisions (whether in part or comprehensively) on differentiation claims of the media. But are media as targeted as they claim?

In Nelson-Field and Riebe’s (2011) journal on the impact of media fragmentation on audience targeting, they found that media are not successful in delivering the audience they claim they do because ‘audiences are not as segmented, nor are they as niche, as media owners suggest’. Their research suggests that media fragmentation just delivers smaller audiences instead of highly differentiated ones.

This is obviously not encouraging news for the industry. But it could be an implication for corporate that at the end of the day, we could be less bothered and distracted to target so loosely called niche media but focus on more trustworthiness of media channels, which are an all-time crucial.

Reference:Nelson-Field,K. and Riebe,K.,2011,The impact of media fragmentation on audience targeting:A generalization approach,Journal of Marketing Communication.