Once there is a concise message, when you’re comfortable that you know what it is that does (and doesn’t) need to be communicated about your organization, product, service or idea, the next step is clearly defining the community to which the message should be delivered:
concise message + clearly defined community + most appropriate platform + timely delivery → media mindshare
Most people would assume this is the easy part — surely, everybody knows from the outset the composition of their target community, market, industry or profession, don’t they? Actually, the answer is “No, they often do not.”
This part of the process can be the trickiest, because unexamined assumptions about the parameters of the target community can mean that valuable time and resources are spent on developing an entire communications campaign only to have the messaging “fall on deaf ears.”
The entire communications strategy can easily fail if you communicate your message to a community that will not respond to that message for any number of reasons — they may be in the right industry, but the wrong segment of that industry’s value chain; they may be sympathetic to your message, but not inclined to act upon it in a way that meets the objectives of the communications campaign; or, they may just not care about your your organization, product, service or idea, no matter how strongly you may feel that they should or how convinced you are that they eventually will.
“Never ‘assume’,” we were frequently admonished by primary school teachers, “because it often makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’.” 
You cannot afford to base an entire communications campaign upon assumptions about the nature of your target community that are not rigorously examined at the outset and then tested against the message you want to convey.
At the very least, a rigorous examination of those assumptions may help you to further refine your messaging so as to align it more closely with your target community — it could also save your organization a load of time and money, avoiding a failed communications campaign and necessitating a return by the entire team to Ye Olde Drawing Board.
It may also help you to arrive at a more fundamentally sound understanding of your market and its various segments, what actions you can reasonably expect will be taken upon seeing or hearing your messaging and how best to deliver that messaging to your target.
Elements of ‘media mindshare’:
● Why some strategies work … and others don’t!
● Concise message …
● Clearly defined community …
