The 3 Practical Constituents

I don't mean this to be a lecture, but in order to make any sense in my future posts I'm afraid I have to lay down some of the basics. This is how I see TV Branding: the cumulative efforts of three strategical activities in television, with the common goal of building equity to the TV brand. These activities are aggregation [acquisition or production of TV content], placement [a term that encompasses linear and non-linear scheduling], and promotion [I almost changed it to dialogue, or communication, but later I decided to leave it alone].
I call these activities the three practical constituents of the TV Brand, because they are the practical roles in a television business that contribute the most to the process of building brand equity to a channel or a programme. I came to this conclusion by establishing the direct relations between the components of the marketing mix and the elements in Eastman and Ferguson's Model of Programming. Of course, except for Pricing and Evaluation, because from my point of view, they are included in all the marketing mix components and in all the elements of programming, namely.
So basically,  the relation between the marketing mix and the elements of programming, and their equivalent activities looks like this:

To reinforce this idea, I've also matched the three practical constituents to Aaker's asset categories responsible for adding value to the brand equity.


There might be other situations where one of the three practical constituents can relate to a specific asset. But those are the ones I could figure out. If you have any other suggestions, please let me know.

Throughout the interviews I did with some industry professionals, I could notice two things:

1. The lack of consensus regarding the terms to describe aggregation, placement and promotion. In addition, some companies overlap these functions within departments, making hard to see the line dividing the tasks.
2. Directly or indirectly, most interviewees confirmed the fact that these activities are the most important ones in the process of adding value to TV brands.

The next post will show the TV III attributes related to each one of the practical constituents, starting with aggregation. By the way, TV III = digital era. I'll explain that too in the next post.