Five layers that draw the ecosystem a brand lives in, so the plan starts from the system and not from a list of channels.
Broadcast assumes a message and finds a place to put it. Climate asks what conditions a person already lives in, and shapes those conditions so the right behaviour becomes easier.
The Ground Plan™ is structurally post-omnichannel. Its states and interventions do not depend on a channel, so the unit of analysis moves from channel to system.
The ground the brand stands on: the category, its rules, the stakeholders who shape it and the constraints nobody can change. Territory is drawn first because every later choice has to fit it.
Who shapes this category besides the buyer?
Which rules are fixed and which are habit?
Where does attention already gather?
Audiences described as structures of roles, states and relationships rather than flat segments. The same person can be a caregiver on Monday and a clinician on Tuesday, and the plan should know the difference.
Which states does a person move through?
Who influences whom?
What must each role believe before acting?
The data, identity, content and technology that let the plan operate. It is the load-bearing layer: invisible when sound, and the first thing to fail under pressure.
What can we recognise, and what can we not?
Which content is structured, and which is only published?
Where does the system lose the thread?
The routes between states, and the behavioural mechanisms that move people along them. Pathways connect the audience map to real triggers, sequences and next-best-actions.
What moves a person from one state to the next?
Which bias is helping, and which is in the way?
What happens when they stall?
What the brand does inside the climate the other four layers describe. Role comes last, and it is defined by function rather than by slogan.
What job does the brand do at each state?
Where should it stay quiet?
What would be missed if it left?
Eight layers describe how the plan runs day to day. It has been pressure-tested on a pharma enterprise brand and on a flower shop, opposite ends of scale and regulation.
Behavioural mechanisms, emotion and context decide what a person notices, trusts and does next.
Measured on the states and pathways in the plan.
What an agent can read, verify and repeat decides whether the brand is included at all.
— Structured-data completeness
— Claim verifiability
— Semantic consistency
— Source authority
The Ground Plan™ Intake is a structured set of questions that turns what your team already knows into a first plan. Four channel intakes and an omnichannel meta-intake use the same schema.