Mike Stopforth is our speaker this month at CreativeMornings Johannesburg.

There is no shortage of jargon in marketing, advertising and branding. In fact, business communication is peppered with terms that have such divergent definitions that they’ve become all but meaningless. In any given client meeting, or on any given brief, words and phrases like “digital”, “web”, “online”, “mobile”, “interactive”, “social media”, “socialCRM”, “digital PR”, “new media” and others get thrown around liberally even when the likelihood is great that the sender and recipient define those terms differently.

Every time a new technology or platform gets introduced into the communication mix we get lured into believing we need a new strategy or approach. We start believing we need to rethink the principles of communication. I think this is a big mistake. This is why…

Marketing, branding and advertising is all, fundamentally, communication. Whether it’s internally or externally focused, business communication and therefore all marketing, branding and advertising can be simplified to a set of 4 building blocks:

Content, delivered through a Channel, to some semblance of Community, with a Commercial objective.

Content, Channel, Community, Commerce.

Read the full post on Mike’s website here