Part four

The builds

Every build is a different mix of the same seven stages.

Part three said what has to be true at each stage. But nobody builds a stage. A team builds things: a website, content, advertising, a pitch, email, events and a dozen more.

Those builds are usually run as separate crafts, each with its own team, agency, budget and dashboard. Each is judged on its own numbers: reach, traffic, rank, opens. None of those numbers says whether a buyer chose you.

Six categories, fourteen builds

There are more ways to reach a buyer than any team can run, so it helps to sort them by one question: who is speaking, and how did they reach the buyer? Six answers cover almost everything.

Owned: your voice, on ground you own. The website, content and social.
Paid: your voice, in space you buy. Advertising.
Earned: someone else's voice, freely given. Search and AI answers, and PR and reviews.
Partnered: someone else's voice or audience, by agreement. Partners and channels, and creators.
Direct: a person, live. Outbound and account-based selling, the pitch, and events.
Relationship: your system, talking to someone you already know. Email, automation, and customers: onboarding, loyalty, community and referral.

This extends the PESO model (paid, earned, shared, owned) that Gini Dietrich built for communications. For most firms, a person in a room and the system that remembers a customer decide as many moments as any channel, so each gets a category of its own.

That makes fourteen builds. A channel earns its own build only if it has its own shape, its own craft, and moments it leads better than anything else. Sponsorship, affiliates, awards, account management and the rest do their work through a build that already exists, so they get a short note, not a chapter. Offer, price, product and distribution aren't builds at all: they're foundations, set before any build starts.

Ten builds get a chapter here. Outbound, events, partners and customers get shorter sections at the end of Part four.

Lay the ten chapter builds against the seven stages and the picture changes.

Read across a row and you see what a build is for. Read down a column and you see something more useful: who is responsible for a stage. Believed is carried by seven builds. Known rests mostly on advertising and social. Kept rests on email and automation, and on a website most teams never think of as a retention tool.

So no build owns a stage, and no stage belongs to one team. When Believed fails, it may be the website's proof, the PR team's reviews or the pitch's case study. A team organised by craft can't see that. A team organised by stage, or by moment, can.

That's the change Part four asks for. Keep the crafts, because each needs skill. But give each stage an owner who looks across the builds, and judge every build by the stages it's meant to move, using the Selectability Score (Part five).

Brief it twice

Most marketing leaks at the brief. The IPA's BetterBriefs survey asked more than 1,700 marketers and agency staff about briefs. Eight in ten marketers said they wrote good ones, and one in ten agency staff agreed (IPA).

So use two briefs. The campaign brief carries one short idea, the moments and stages it must move, and a separate box of rules. The asset brief carries five lines for each thing you make: moment, stage, reason, proof and next step. The same five lines brief a person or an AI.

If you can only do two

A small business can't run fourteen builds. My working rule: start with the website and search and AI answers. They share the same questions and the same pages, and together they cover Found, Answered, Believed, Preferred and Bought. Add PR and reviews third, because it's the cheapest route to being believed by others. The rest can wait until those three work.

For agencies, the grid is also a menu. An agency selling one craft sells one row. The work that wins now runs down a column: an audit of one stage across every build, a source map, a body of proof.

How each chapter works

Each build chapter gives the argument: what the build is for, its anatomy by stage, the mistake most teams make and how to know it's working. The full how-to, with the briefs, templates and checklists, lives in the free Selectability Playbooks at rocmode.com/playbooks.