Marketing Communications

Archive for the ‘Marketing Communications’ Category

What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

In ThomasNet’s Industry Market Trends, the lead article discusses workplace communication. Really good communication is critical to employees’ success, to say nothing of the organization.

Amen.

That said, though, good communication ain’t all that easy. Many people think MORE communication is better communication. It isn’t. The best communication is between two parties, both of whom put themselves in the other’s shoes.

If I am a CEO, and I want to share my vision for the company, I want to share it in a way that everyone in the company understands. (And by the way, if you’re a CEO and you don’t want to share your vision, you should probably rethink that.)

The first thing to do is think about who your audience is. How will each segment of your audience receive the message? Under what circumstances will they be most receptive? Most people want to get important info like the CEO’s corporate vision in person. Face-to-face. With plenty of opportunity for questions and answers.

That’s not always practical. Your salespeople might be best reached on their Blackberries while workers in the plant may have to get a written message. And this is only the delivery method.

What about the message itself? It’s impossible to communicate well if you haven’t thoroughly thought through what you’re trying to say. Articulate your message as simply as possible. Leave it overnight and look at it in the morning. Imagine yourself as an employee who is not privy to what the CEO thinks. Look at the message through that employee’s eyes. Does it make sense? Can you cut things out for clarity’s sake? You will seldom need to add.

Now, why are you doing this? What result do you expect? Do you want people to understand where you want to go? Then what is the individual’s role in getting there? How does the vision relate to each person in your company? You may have to craft several messages, targeted to different employee groups. Everyone will want to know how your message relates to them in particular.

And finally, create an opportunity for feedback. Not the kind where e-mails evaporate into black holes, but the kind where you acknowledge the comment, and follow up with meaningful action, if appropriate. And then, make sure you report on that action.

See? It’s a lotta work. No wonder so many people have a failure to communicate.

Tags: employee communication, Marketing Communications
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ROI Is King

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

At least that’s what “roi” means in French, “king.” What does “ROI” mean to marketers?

I just saw the term used loosely again, in a feature article of B2B magazine. A sophisticated marketer referred to his program to measure marketing effectiveness as his ROI program—you know, click-throughs, webinar sign-ups, landing page hits. Aaaugh!

Why do marketers insist on using this term incorrectly? It has a very specific meaning. Basically, ROI is the profits generated over and above the initial investment and expressed as a percentage of the investment. It’s a financial gain—not an increase in awareness, not market share, not the number of leads you get or click-throughs to your web site.

As marketers, we should be aware of the importance of language. We should understand that precise wording makes meaning clear. We should know that it’s critical to be accurate with words if we want to communicate with the best possible results.

Yet, we continue to misuse this term, Return on Investment. Worse than sloppy language, its misuse demonstrates—no, trumpets!—our ignorance. We must use the term carefully, because we need to interact with people in our finance department if we want to calculate ROI according to best practices in our own company. We need guidance from finance to determine what constitutes gross margin, how to define what our investment is, and so much more.

How can we ever hope to work with our finance department if we persist in using finance terminology incorrectly? It’s a problem I’ve been kvetching about so long that I wrote a book, www.marketingroitruth.com. Okay, I’ll get down off my soapbox. For now.

Tags: accountability, Marketing Communications, marketing ROI, metrics, ROI
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A Mess of Stress

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Quick, think of the most stressful job you could have. Firefighter. Surgeon. Police Officer. Yup. Check, check and check.

But according to ThomasNet News’ Industry Market Trends, two of the top 10 most stressful jobs are, get this:

Public relations officer and

Advertising account executive.

No wonder I’m a mess. I’ve been doing both those jobs for most of my career. And yes, they can be stressful, but typically I haven’t had to face life and death decisions on a daily basis like, say, a surgeon does.

But I do recall one spectacularly stressful morning when I walked into my office and the phone was ringing. I hadn’t had my cup of tea yet when I answered and heard, “Hello, this is John Q. Reporter from CBS. You’re live and on the air. There are 28 people dead at your Good Hope facility. What do you have to say about this?”

Well, my immediate desire was to say, “No speak English.” But instead I had to say that I knew nothing about it. It was a little after 8 a.m. and none of my colleagues was in the office yet. I told the reporter I’d get back to him, asked him his deadline, and promised to call by then, whether I had all the info he needed or not.

Then I had to try and figure out what happened, which was a bit tricky because I worked for a Fortune 500 company with multiple subsidiaries, about three of which could have been involved in this tragedy. As it happened, the 28 people who died were on a ship that crashed into a dock at our Good Hope facility. And while we owned ships and barges, this particular ship was not ours.

Once I had the facts straightened out, I was able to prepare a statement for the press. But then I had to get the approval of someone—anyone—above me in the chain of command. And there was only one guy available who said, call the PR consultants in NYC and do whatever they tell you.

And here’s where the stress came in. The yahoo at the PR firm (well, I won’t name it, but it was famous at the time) said, “Tell the press that the damage to our dock is minimal.”

What about the loss of human life? Not our concern. Tell reporters our assets remain intact. Or some such rot. Really.

So I ignored our PR pros who were paid a kingly retainer fee, and by doing so I ignored the exec who was several notches above me in the pecking order. Instead, I went with common sense. Which was to deliver a statement to the press: While the ship does not belong to our company, we deeply regret the loss of human life near our facility.

And our company’s name never appeared anywhere in the press. Which is sometimes the greatest achievement you can have as a PR person—NOT getting mentioned.

And yes, it was stressful, but still nothing like being a cop on the beat.

Tags: crisis communications, PR, reputation, reputation management
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BP: Bummer Petroleum Part 2

Monday, May 17th, 2010

In my last blog I said that no amount of PR would help BP if, indeed, they were not safe and environmentally sound. Their brand is certainly damaged, particularly because they built it to be green. BUT crisis communications are still essential, regardless of what the brand stands for. And man, is this a crisis.

Here’s the problem, from a communications point of view. The first rule in a crisis is to tell the truth. And if the truth isn’t good, tell it anyway, express sincere remorse and then explain how you’ll fix it. Well, the leak continues, and as long as it does, BP is in the spotlight.

So it’s not a finite event. You can’t just say ‘mea culpa’ and move on. You can’t promise it will never happen again when you don’t even know how to stop it from happening now.

To BP’s credit, they are admitting to mistakes. They are taking some responsibility. They are offering to pay all legitimate claims. (Although you immediately wonder what BP’s definition of “legitimate” is.) But in a catastrophe of this magnitude the normal rules of crisis communication, even when applied properly, may not be enough.

Perhaps that’s why I saw this headline in PR trade press a couple days ago:

BP Launches Lobby and PR Blitz

These efforts are mostly to respond to Congressional hearings as well as reporters.

The article mentioned that the company has also hired another PR firm, Brunswick Group, specializing in “critical communication challenges.” (So says their web site.) But to bring in new people at this stage of the game? A couple weeks after the initial incident? What about BP’s existing firm? What about the existing crisis communication plans that every company should have in place?

We can only hope BP knows how to stop leaks better than they know how to handle crisis communications.

Tags: B2B advertising, B2B branding, crisis communications, Marketing Communications, reputation management, trust
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Sea Change Is Official

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

A couple decades ago, I was in London on business and while there, met a Reed Elsevier rep for lunch. Among other things, Reed Elsevier is a global publisher of B2B magazines, directories and online information. The company is listed on several of the world’s major stock exchanges. It’s big.

I forget which publication rep I had lunch with—Consulting-Specifying Engineer, Control Engineering, Logistics Management, Modern Materials Handling, Purchasing, Supply Chain Management Review or the most ubiquitous, Plant Engineering. I have purchased space in all these publications for clients.

Well, in a recent announcement by Reed Elsevier, all the above magazines (and more) are to be closed. Kaput. Shut down. Others were divested.

But the titles above—the ones so familiar to me, my clients and their customers—are “to be closed.”

Wow.

It almost feels like a sock to the gut. Which is just about what I got when I had lunch all those years ago. The magazine rep took me to a charming pub outside London that was one of the oldest in the area. Apparently the mayonnaise in the crabmeat salad I ate was also some of the oldest in the area, because I was knocked out by food poisoning for the rest of my trip.

I don’t feel quite that bad now, but there is a bad taste in my mouth when I think of all these publications going down the tubes. The sea change (a phrase Shakespeare is credited with originating in The Tempest) is here. It’s official.

Tags: B2B advertising, Marketing Communications, Print Media, Trade Publications
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Be Desirable

Monday, March 29th, 2010

The Business Marketing Institute (BMI), which is all about measurement and building sales leads, publishes something called Tuesday Marketing Notes that I find in my e-mail in-box every week. It’s usually pretty good info, so if you don’t subscribe now, give it a shot.

This week, they’re telling me that it’s not enough to have great content in your marketing communications. You have to be recognized as unique, different and desirable. Sounds like eHarmony.com.

BMI is right, of course. They ask readers to look at three tag lines, all of which basically say save money and improve performance. Then they say that the content isn’t differentiated enough. The trouble is, when you’re buying any B2B service or product, isn’t that just about always what you want—money and performance?

Well, maybe not. Maybe potential customers want to deal with really pleasant people, or maybe they want to be dazzled with bells and whistles, or maybe they want you to paint your widget magenta.

The old adage is true—you’ve gotta know your customers inside and out. Then you’ve gotta make sure that what you have to offer is what they want. And then you’ve gotta tell them what you have in a way that makes you recognized as unique, different and desirable.

If you can do all that, you’re probably not paid enough.

Tags: marketing, Marketing Communications, sales leads
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A Contrarian Proposal for Print Media

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Last week I bemoaned the fact that trade publications, and, indeed, all print periodicals, are endangered. As vehicles for B2B advertising, this is not the end of the world because we have direct mail, trade shows, the Internet—and more, if we use our creativity.

But I still weep for the death of print pubs. They’re resources that have been declining in quality for decades now. I think many of them—especially newspapers—are tightening their belts, laying off reporters and cutting costs on quality to save their skins.

Let me propose that they should do just the opposite.

Embrace the Internet with new business models. Make people pay for quality, up-to-the-minute content. Hire tippy top-notch reporters, editors and researchers. Get real, on-the-scene stories that are not outsourced to India where it’s cheaper to interview (even long distance) by phone. Pay for actual face-to-face reporting. And then charge for it.

How much would people pay for excellence on the Internet? Information that they know is reliable, credible, correct. Articles that are thorough, documented, well written. I’m sure it depends on the audience, the type of publication and a whole host of other things. And maybe it wouldn’t work.

But what’s happening now—publications are withering away—isn’t working either. Maybe it’s worth a shot. What do you think?

Tags: B2B advertising, internet, marketing, Print Media, Trade Publications
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