Today we ask Jason Baer, Social Media Consultant and author of AdAge Power 150 blog, Convince and Convert, 5 questions about social media, his career and life away from work. Jason provides training for our employees and insight on social media strategy for some Flint Group clients. He’s a multifaceted man who also writes a restaurant review blog with his wife entitled, Hottie and The Fatso.
Posts Tagged ‘Communications Strategy’
You’re selling what? To whom?
Who can forget the hilarious “cat herding” television spot that aired during the 2000 Super Bowl? More importantly, who can remember the advertiser that spent big bucks on it?
For those of you who miraculously came up with the name “EDS” before watching the spot… any idea what they do?
Cat herding is actually a pretty clever analogy with the service they were selling, but the message was lost. It didn’t help that the first mention of EDS arrived 57 seconds into a 60-second spot. Also, I was too busy laughing to pay attention.
It doesn’t matter how pretty or funny your ads are if they don’t achieve your communications objectives. Yes, advertising needs to grab attention and create buzz about your company or product, but ask yourself:
- Does this ad speak to my target audience?
- Does this influence their opinion or motivate them to action?
I know the cat herding spot captured the attention of millions. Actually, it still tops my list of favorite/funniest/most memorable Super Bowl commercials of all time… but what did it accomplish for EDS? Did it connect them with their target audience? Did it achieve their objectives?
By the way, EDS was acquired by HP last year, and eventually became HP Enterprise Services.
The New Brandscape
When I was in grad school, I wrote my thesis on branding in mergers and acquisitions. I thought I was pretty cutting-edge back then. Companies simply weren’t thinking too deeply about branding and as more and more companies were merging. They weren’t taking the brands into consideration and often ended up with a number of disparate brands or trying to force brands together – confusing everyone in their path.
Since then, I’ve paid close attention to branding. Not just the evolution of company brands, but how customers are reacting, shaping and demanding what a brand is. How do you manage that?
We used to equate branding with trust. Who are you? What do you do? And Why should I care? Answer those questions and then deliver on your answers. But it’s really more complicated than that. In this digital age, audiences are savvier and more demanding: “tell me what I want to know, when I want to know it… and say it how I understand it.”
So much for consistency of message. So much for simply repeating what you as a company want the public to know and think.
Let’s boil this down a little further. I was recently reading an article from Adam Morgan of Admap about brands and “three dimensions of trust.” The author broke it down as follows:
Competence: What is the company’s core expertise.
Intent: What motivates the company? Where does this company stand? An, honest job for an honest price, for example, could be your company’s intent.
Character: Who am I working with? Will they make things right if I am unhappy with the deliverable?
I like the idea of considering trust as three-dimensional. We should always circle back to these dimensions of trust when defining our brand. In doing so, a business stands a much better chance of developing communications and materials that get through the sea of clutter and confusion.
Branding is about to get a resurgence of sorts, because it’s not as simple as it once was. There are so many media channels and so many ways to reach out to people. We deal with complicated audience profiling and clusters, constant dialogue and feedback… I learned branding as simplification for ease of customer choice. I like that. I get that. But maybe now, branding should be simplification and trust for ease of customer choice through communications efforts, multi-media and digital dialogue.
If you embark on a brand strategy for your company, be sure and take the time to define what the three dimensions of trust mean to your company. It’s an important and worthwhile exercise. Then start to consider how that manifests itself in your day-to-day operations, including internal and external communications.
A Communications Lesson from Mr. Rogers
“People do not want to hear about simple things, they want to hear about great things–simply told.”
- Mr. Rogers
One of my most admired philosophers was Mr. Rogers (I must admit the name attracted me). He came across as a simple man, but his life lessons were full of great insight. The quote above is one of my favorites. It certainly defines the job of communications professionals and the role performed daily by many of my colleagues in the Flint Group.
It is important to start with comprehensive, accurate information and an in-depth understanding of your audience in order to properly develop your story. Of course integrity in the message is paramount, but the bigger the message, told in an easy to understand manner, the more impact it will bring to your brand.
Sounds simple right? Then why do so many companies fail?
(Photo from Wikipedia)
A Marketing Communications Plan or No Plan…That is the Question
For years and years we have been encouraging our clients to work off of an annual Marketing Communications plan. This is not an easy task by any stretch, but man, it can save a lot of everything…time, money, energy and sometimes even the business.
We’re no strangers to the idea of planning. I think intrinsically everyone believes they should do it. It’s very logical – no different than setting out on a road trip. You have to know where you are going, how you are going to get there, and how much money you have to spend. BUT, now there are more and more detours and unexpected forks in the road. A good plan is fluid, flexible and is evaluated continuously in order to morph with the changing needs of your market, audience and industry.
Marketing Communications planning scares people because they think it’s expensive and isn’t seemingly tactical, like producing a television spot. But think about it. You wouldn’t build a house without a plan. If you did, who knows what you would end up with…17 bathrooms, not enough windows, a garage that’s too small. Planning is smart and a wise investment! And how do you know you ended up with what you expected when you didn’t really have any expectations in the first place?
Adding new, measurable tools to your communications plan means more opportunities to analyze and quickly change direction when a more lucrative path presents itself. But you have to pay attention. Someone needs to be considering how the market is reacting to your communications strategies and advising what to do next. It’s the beauty and the challenge of having SO much information at your fingertips.
In our marketing communications planning process, we encourage many of our clients to add measurable digital marketing elements to their campaigns. The biggest misstep I see is that often the campaign activity is not evaluated frequently enough, resulting in missed opportunities to better respond to the audience. Make sure that your marketing communications plan includes someone consistently reviewing campaign results and evaluating that information against your objectives. Because, in today’s world, many of your digital marketing activities can be changed literally overnight to produce stronger results.
Here’s what I recommend. Plan annually, evaluate frequently, expect to adapt as you go along and measure everything you can. Annual marketing communications plans should flow from one year into the next, updating objectives from what you’ve learned.
