Count them.
Take your channel list for the last quarter. For each one, write down the results that were actually attributable to it, not reported, not assumed, not claimed in a deck. Attributable. In our experience the list rarely runs past seven items and is usually around five.
Then take your revenue, reach, and trust lines and ask which of them moved because of something on that list. The overlap is the brand ecosystem. Everything else is coordination overhead, some of which is necessary and most of which has outlived whatever it was set up to compensate for.
Why the number is small.
Brands are not short of channels. They are short of channels that are both consequential and connected, where the channel sends people somewhere the brand can hold them. Those are the only channels worth designing a system around, because they are the only ones where removing them changes the outcome.
Most of what fills a channel list fails one of those two tests. It is either consequential but disconnected, sending people nowhere in particular, or connected but immaterial, which is usually a sign the channel exists to make someone feel present rather than to move anything.
If removing a channel would not change where people end up, you do not have a channel. You have a habit.
The test we apply.
On every engagement we build a channel inventory before we look at a single page of the website. Each candidate channel has to survive four questions:
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The fourth question is the one that produces silence. In roughly two-thirds of the brands we work with, at least four of the active channels have no unambiguous owner, which is precisely why they take three meetings and a quarter to change.
The obvious objection.
Marketers push back on this, reasonably, by pointing out that audiences are everywhere and a brand has to meet them there. That is true and it is not the point. Being present is delegated to the ecosystem; the five channels are the ones that cannot be delegated because they set the frame everything else operates inside.
A second objection is that reducing a brand to five channels is reductive. Also true, and also the point. A system that captures everything captures nothing a team can hold in its head, which is the only place a system has any effect.
What to do on Monday.
You do not need an agency for the first step. Pull the last two quarters of channel reporting, extract every result actually attributable, and put a name against each channel. Circulate the list without comment.
Two things usually happen. Several channels turn out to have two owners who each believed the other was running them. And the list will be shorter than anyone expected, which is uncomfortable for about a week and clarifying thereafter.
Written by the strategy team at The MBC Group, Denver.