Broadcast vs. Narrowcast
File this under Communications 101…
I am not a marketer, nor am I a communication expert. I am however, a business consultant, and advisor. I have also been fortunate to be in the position of leading teams, and providing professional guidance to many very smart and talented professionals. My leadership style, if you can call it that, is to roll up my sleeves and be in the trenches with my teams. I also often quip that all the answers are there, it’s just a question of how to organize the bits of information. So I’ve found myself in situations of finding the right technique to share messages (not always good) with different groups of people.
Broadcast & Narrowcast defined:
Often, we use the concept of broadcast and its implied corollary narrowcast when talking about the types of communication. Broadcasting, by definition, is sharing a message broadly with a very wide audience. Implied in broadcasting is that the message is fit for mass consumption. Narrowcasting, on the other hand, is about sharing a message with a narrower group. The extreme version of narrowcasting is 1–1 messaging where the message is tailored to the specific individual that you are reaching.
In a broadcast communication, one would likely use a least common denominator point to reach a broad group (“Clean Air is Good”). In…
