CODAR: the open planning tool that makes integration possible

CODAR is a unique open planning tool that achieves the big ambition of unified communication planning and evaluation.

It has a simple but powerful technique, which defines and evaluates all communication activities, from top to bottom, across all contact points, within all disciplines, and related to all and any business objectives, using a single intelligent framework derived from the way communication affects people.

CODAR benefits include:

1. It is simple. Yet rigorous: you get to profound insights about communication objectives and how they will contribute to more sales and to brand and customer equity. For example, it provides a considerably more effective and rigorous basis for discussion and debate about what the communication objectives should be and how they will contribute to brand and customer equity. And later you can develop channel optimisation tools to support planning.
2. It covers every aspect of the customer or other stakeholders' interactions with the brand, across all media/Touchpoints in any kind of communication by any skill group.
3. It improves the precision of the brief while enhancing the creative space and opportunity. The result should be more 'creatively effective' and more efficient solutions.
4. This also means that it can be used for internal briefing for internal communication centres, such as call centres, service personnel and sales people.
5. It is adaptable to all kinds of working situation and levels of application. For example it enhances a conversation in the corridor, a workshop, electronic briefing, econometric database(s), optimisation tools and knowledge management system(s). Use it therefore as hi-tech or lo-tech as you require. And it is typically easy to connect it to existing tools, acting as an upgrade path.
6. It provides a clear brief for research and is easy to translate into a research instrument for planning and evaluation. It even works as a research library organisation tool.
7. It provides a corporate-wide performance database for econometric analysis that provides genuine common currency accountability, learning and insight.

CODAR draws on decades of marketing communication practice and psychological theory in defining five dynamic and inter-dependent planning dimensions to plan and evaluate any communication. These are:

1. Idea forming, referring to the communicator’s objective of influencing the ideas, associations and thinking of the communication recipient, for example about the brand or a particular project or product. This is therefore primarily a cognitive planning dimension.
2. Relationship building, referring to the objective of causing the communication recipient to feel him or herself connected through some form of relationship with the brand or its representatives. Examples might be the feeling of affinity with the values of the brand or culture, trust or appreciation, the sense of being personally recognised and appreciated, gaining accessibility to the communicator or brand, feeling a sense of belonging to some privileged or special group, involving the brand and its products more in everyday life, and others. This is therefore primarily an affective planning dimension.
3. Behaviour activation, referring to the objective of causing an intentional or actual behaviour change by the communication recipient, for example sales activation, sales enquiry or commitment to behaviour change. This is therefore a conative-planning dimension.
4. Help or service support, referring to the objective of providing required help or support to the communication recipient, for example in the form of information about a product or policy or help in a process. Here the objective is to reduce anxiety and generate the feeling of being cared for.
5. Product, service or environment experience, referring to the objective of giving the communication recipient an experience, whether actual, such as in a product trial, or imaginal, such as through a virtual, visual or verbal representation of the subject or product. Here the proposition is that it is difficult to agree to a roposition unless it and its consequences can be imagined.
   

Each of these objectives or dimensions is present to some extent in every act of business-oriented communication. However, the relative priority and specific objectives of each element will vary from communication to communication. It is the process of selecting the relative priorities (represented on a radar chart) and specific content of these objectives and subsequent evaluation of performance against them that constitutes the core of the process and tool.

Because the same framework is used from master level (e.g. global brand positioning) to fine detail (e.g. a banner ad), it has fractal properties. ractal is a term coined by the Nobel Prize winning scientist Mandelbrot to refer to structures that replicate to increasing levels of detail, the whole reappearing in the parts, a phenomenon common in nature and key to Chaos Theory).

The scores assigned to each communication at the planning and evaluation stage represent the communication’s CODAR signature and each communication can then be compared with any other as to the balance of objectives. Along with these scores, communicators provide precise descriptions of the objectives, define successful performance in relevant units, and specify the planned contribution related to budget of the activity. It is therefore possible to define a planned score or performance level (‘plan score’) and subsequently calculate the actual score or performance level (‘actual score’) for each and any communication of any type.

CODAR is also more than a smart prioritisation tool: it is a complete system for planning, managing and optimising communication. More...

The AA's previous communication, based on the endline The 4 th Emergency Service, proved dysfunctional, ignoring over half the brand's revenue lines, including insurance. A brand relaunch based on a more coherent proposition (the AA rescues you from uncertainty) summed up in the icon Just AAsk had these CODAR objectives.

Each element in the subsequent communication plan contributed to these objectives. CODAR uses the same tool 'from top to bottom' and across all media and disciplines.