It’s both a blessing and a curse: everyone in an organization has an impact on marketing. Especially when you consider how many brand contact points (aka “moments of truth” when customers interact with a company) are outside marketing’s control. For example, the customer who calls with a billing question and gets transferred to the wrong department or is treated rudely.
The Challenge of Marketing’s Expanded Reach
Because marketing ultimately serves as the customer’s advocate, it has to find ways to ensure everyone in the organization is customer-focused.
I find most marketers are good at this. However, where they sometimes fall short is a lack of sensitivity to employees who consider their brand-ambassador role as “other duties as assigned” (i.e., low on their list of priorities). In this case, marketers may fail to recognize that marketing is perceived as creating extra work for employees.
Head for the hills, here comes Marketing!
Here’s an example from my early bank career. Whenever the bank would launch a new deposit promotion (offering gifts to customers for opening a new account or adding to an existing one), most of the branch people were less than receptive.
Who could blame them? They had to meet daily operational standards for processing transactions, cross-selling goals for growth, customer-friendly guidelines for serving customers, etc., AND THEN they had to display, process, distribute & control inventory of whatever promotional items the Marketing Department sent their way: blankets, watches, umbrellas, toasters, etc. (At one bank, we even gave away a new car! But that’s another story.)
Eventually, we learned how to deal with this so employees didn’t bar the doors & windows when they saw Marketing coming. And I’ll tell you how in my next post.