“It’s the Employees, Stupid!”

Here’s a depressing statistic: according to an online study of client-side marketers, only 20% of 198 respondents made sure that employees outside of the marketing department were kept informed of the company’s marketing strategy “all or most of the time.” A whopping 56% of the respondents kept employees informed “sometimes.”

Keeping employees in the loop

I found these stats in Don Schultz’s Marketing News column. As Don so aptly put it: “The marketing executives polled have the responsibility for planning and developing the marketing strategy but not the execution. That’s what the employees do. If only one in five even know what the strategy is, how can any organization hope to create a seamless, transparent, integrated brand experience for its customers?”

So Don created a slogan, “It’s the Employees, Stupid,” to help remind execs about the people who are ultimately responsible for delivering the brand experience to customers. He explained, “ … if the employees don’t know what the marketing strategy is, they will have a much harder time delivering on it, no matter what the [marketing] executives decide it is.”

Sometimes it’s not the employees who are clueless.

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