4.13
Message–Market–Media
The rule that a campaign has three parts, chosen in this order: who you are talking to, what you say, and where you say it.
Dan Kennedy, the 3 Ms, in the No B.S. Direct Marketing series
What it does
Forces sequencing. Most failing campaigns have a message written before anyone decided who it was for, and a channel chosen before either, and the rule makes that ordering error visible in a sentence. As a first diagnostic on a campaign that is not working it is fast, and it usually finds something.
When it breaks
The strict ordering is wrong wherever the channel constrains the message, which is most paid media: a six-second pre-roll and a long-form email cannot carry the same argument, so media is an input to message rather than a consequence of it. And the rule names the three variables without saying how to choose any of them. It is a checklist presented as a strategy.
Case
No independent case was found. The 3 Ms are taught, restated and excerpted widely, including by Kennedy himself in Entrepreneur, but no published work tests whether campaigns built in this order outperform campaigns built in another.
↗In the wild
Unchecked · not part of the tier
What people have written about this tool in the last twelve months. A machine found these and nobody has read them. Everything above this line was checked by hand.
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