Communication Need:
Need States: Building Blocks for Product Strategies
All people have communication needs that are critical to understanding the new-media landscape and audience behavior in that landscape. Whether people are reaching for a telephone or a cell phone, reading a newspaper or magazine, turning on the television or radio, or browsing the Internet on the job, at home or on the road, they are acting on a need to get or impart information.
Understanding those needs, and how those needs impact media choices, is critical for the creation of a strategic framework for new-product development. Going forward, newspaper companies will compete by matching the right product to the right needs at the right time.
Based on work by the Reynolds Institute at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, commissioned as part of the NAA/ASNE Audience Development Initiative, this report will examine media-based communication “need states” and how they can impact strategy development.