Success means turning your marketing positioning into a whole corporate mindset, says Ray Grech.
Amazingly, in many instances certain important functions of business enterprises are not considered critical to positively influence a company’s image. These areas either fall behind in the strategic priority list, giving way to ‘easier’ image building initiatives, or fall in the trap of departmental ownership that overrules the company’s wide need to give them due importance.
If you have an ingrained corporate culture that shies away from risk taking – where your people think twice to try new initiatives and ideas for fear of failing – it’s time to look at the people who tried something that with all the good intentions in the world, still did not work.
“It’s the marketing team’s job – we play no role in that,” is a commonly heard phrase. The truth is that there are many touch points within organisations that are continuously creating or maintaining relationships with clients and consumers, and many fall outside the immediate span of responsibility of marketing departments.
You overcome this by growing a marketing mindset across the company. I have chosen two areas, although there are more, which I feel need particular focus if the long-term sustenance of your business is to be stronger.
Customer service re-visited
A regular victim of this phenomenon is the customer service function. While this function – in name and in well-crafted organisation charts – falls under marketing jurisdiction, it ends up being the day-to-day chore of operational departments that are already overloaded with the firefighting-, deadline-riddled realities of the servicing sections.
Good or bad customer service is pivotal to positive or negative word of mouth, resulting in increased brand goodwill or customer incredulity. But now it’s a whole new ball game on an enormously expanded scenario as we enter the digital age with all its trappings of social media, video sharing, mobile uploads and so on. It’s an elevated new dimension and your marketing campaigns have been taken over by your target audiences for them to control as they please. So any company/brand customer service relationship has become a micro-exercise in marketing communications that has visible and tangible results. Happy or unhappy customers who increasingly share their experience of your product or service, is a growing trend.
And it’s not just about applying technology to the task because what may seem like a good cost-efficient solution could be a veritable nightmare for your customers. We have all been there – imagine you’re calling your supplier because your newly purchased item or service is under-performing. The answering machine is blaring promotional messages at you, encouraging you to buy more products from the company. Not exactly good timing. Thank heavens it’s a machine and you can’t hear what they really feel at that point about your prized brands and services.
You need to review the process you have in place to receive queries, particularly complaints from customers, but do so from the perspective of your customer.
This month, Tesco, UK’s biggest retailer, announced that they will be recruiting and training 20,000 people over the next two years. Analysts say this was motivated by a concern over slower growth and some decreases in certain categories, as some cost efficient initiatives are diminishing customer satisfaction and they need to get back in touch more effectively with their customers. This is the kind of forward thinking that personifies those organisations that are not afraid to review their strategic priorities and have the longevity of their customers’ satisfaction at the core of their business vision.
What you do and how you do it has never been more critical to customer retention and attracting new ones. So give more time and focus to customer service across your business, and make sure everybody owns it. It could be your best marketing communications campaign yet.
Innovation by all
A leading international business in designer household goods has a display in its main offices which applauds its major product launch failures. Its message to both employees and visitors is that the company rewards an innovative, risk taking culture that continuously strives to think out of the box.
If you have an ingrained corporate culture that shies away from risk taking – where your people think twice to try new initiatives and ideas for fear of failing – it’s time to look at the people who tried something that with all the good intentions in the world, still did not work. Identify these people and publicly, maybe in meetings, commend them for trying new ideas as it’s what the company needs more of.
A mindset that fosters innovative thinking, particularly when it comes to problem solving, is not easy to establish. Even our own modern educational system sometimes takes you in the wrong direction. Multiple choice school examination questions, for example, lead you to think that life is going to be full of challenges to which you will be offered a set number of answers to choose from. We know that real life is different and there can be numerous solutions to issues that face us. And the answer is not always staring us in the face. Hence the need for quantity when it comes to ideas. Toyota has hundreds of thousands of ideas generated in various forms across the global organisation every year and executes most of them, in full or in part, at some point or other.
This means that you need to create a significant number of innovative solutions or ideas to ensure that your initiative has a higher level of success. The only way this can happen is if you rope in as much of your organisation’s functions as possible in a regular and structured manner.
The marketing team can be the driving force behind this effort, but the impetus must come from the top if valid contributions are expected from across all company sectors. Once you do this and you have chosen your preferred innovation concepts, do not discard the remaining ideas. Some of them may hold ground for other future instances. Create an ideas folder and revisit them with your team occasionally. Time will most definitely produce market changes, social behaviour trends and new organisational circumstances that will change the perspective with which you will view these ideas in the future.
Innovation also brings value to the critical element of differentiation. Identifying and working for what singles out your brand from others needs to be a total business team commitment. This is vital if that differentiation is to filter down effectively to the customer front line with the effort of all behind it.. Ask your team if there is at least one product or service can only be delivered by your company, identify that point, then work hard to project it out there in the market. If you can’t find one, stimulate your people’s innovative drive to create one. It could be anything, as long as it adds some value, tangible or otherwise.
When Nike created the ‘Just do it’ slogan, they could have raved about the performance element of their apparel. Instead, Nike projected a differentiated positioning based on an intangible attitude. From then on they owned that attitude, applying it not just in their advertising campaigns but also displaying it in their whole DNA of the organisation at all levels, setting them apart in the sportswear segment. They took their marketing positioning and made it part of their corporate mindset.
Ray Grech is a Chartered Marketer (Chartered Institute of Marketing, U.K.), works as a Strategic Marketing Consultant for leading companies in Malta and is Chairman of IAA (Malta Chapter).