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Customer service Engagement Marketing

Employee & Customer Trauma Cause Brand Damage

My recent posts dealt with the employee-customer happiness/satisfaction link and employees as personification of the brand.

Unfortunately, some managers may be blind to these self-reinforcing relationships, but not customers.

Customers are quick to pick up on signals of employee frustration & dissatisfaction, whether conveyed deliberately or not.  Consider a consumer’s experience in dealing with employees who:

  • lack sufficient product knowledge to help customers
  • are not clued in to the marketing messages being communicated to customers
  • genuinely want to help customers, but are hampered by a lack of internal support.

Any one of these situations that repeatedly occur reflect negatively on a company, its employees, and management.  Even worse, it puts an organization at risk to:

  • lose customers & income
  • lose employees (while incurring turnover expense)
  • negatively impact the company’s reputation (as a result of customer & employee churn), and
  • inflict serious brand damage.

Here’s a case where preventative medicine is preferable to acute care.  My prescription?  A healthy dose of internal marketing’s 3 Rs (Respect, Recognition & Reinforcement) applied regularly.

Categories
Customer service Engagement Marketing

Happy Employees & Customers

I came across a great post (one of many) in Olivier Blanchard’s The Brand Builder blog that reinforces the happy employee-happy customer link (it even sports a title similar to one of my earlier posts).

What I love about Olivier’s post is “The Wheel of Customer Service and Brand Identity Doom” that models what he describes as “a self-perpetuating vicious cycle of substandard customer-to-brand experiences.”

It’s a great visual and one that many managers need to be reminded of.  Sadly, there are also too many consumers and employees who would agree.

More to follow in my next post …

Categories
Customer service Engagement Marketing

Employees Personify the Brand

In his blog, From the Marketing Trenches, Jonathan Dampier reinforces the critical role employees play in presenting a company’s brand to the public.  And he laments the fact that there are organizations out there who still don’t get it.  (As consumers, we all have our horror stories about these companies.)

With the best intentions and creativity, a company can put out a spectacular marketing message; i.e., the brand promise.  But if the customer’s experience – as actually delivered by employees – is inconsistent or conflicts with the company’s marketing message, who are customers gonna believe:  the marketing or their own experience?

That’s why organizations need to be reminded that employees ARE the brand.  As Len Berry, marketing professor at Texas A&M, so aptly put it: “the brand walks around on two feet.”

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Engagement Marketing

Keeping Up with Employee Communication

My last post covered the results of a research study that found a distressing number of organizations failed to effectively communicate to employees the purpose of their jobs along with their corporate mission & strategy.

It’s not as if organizations don’t have enough communications tools to use.

Check out New Frontiers in Employee Communications: 2005 featured in Christopher Hannegan’s blog. Christopher heads Edelman’s Employee Engagement Practice.

Here are the key findings from Edelman’s survey on employee communication trends:

  • While in-person communication was found to be the most effective tool for general employee communications, it is not the tool most frequently used; i.e., cost-effectiveness does not equal communication effectiveness.
  • Communicators have a much greater awareness of new communication tools over the past year.  Despite high awareness of blogs and wikis, these tools aren’t being applied for internal or external communication.
  • Most standard communications policies do not yet include guidelines covering the new tools, notably employee blogs.  The absence of such guidelines puts companies and their blogging employees at risk (depending on blog content and tone).

Note: For more info on employee blogs, check out Edelman & Intelliseek’s white paper: Talking from the Inside Out: The Rise of Employee Bloggers.

Bottom Line

There’s no lack of available communication tools – both new and traditional – in organizations.  And there’s certainly no lack of content to be communicated.  The key is to focus on what employees need to know in order to do their jobs, apply the appropriate communications tools, AND find the right balance between too little and too much information.

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Engagement Marketing

Companies Fail to Engage, Connect with Employees

Here are some scary statistics from a recent survey by IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) and Right Management Associates:

  • nearly half (48%) of 472 organizations surveyed acknowledged that their management failed to effectively communicate to employees the purpose of their jobs and their business mission and strategy
  • only 37% of those surveyed said their employees are effectively aligned with their organization’s mission and vision.

Talk about a disconnect!

Internal Marketing Fundamental

Effective communication is one of the basic precepts of internal marketing – to engage employees, an organization needs to communicate (at a minimum):

  • what the organization stands for (i.e., its mission, vision & values)
  • what its goals & objectives are (strategy), and
  • what is expected of employees in helping achieve the mission & strategy (where they fit in “the big picture”).

How can employees effectively help their organizations move forward if they don’t know where it’s going or what is expected of them?!

Consider this

I’ll avoid going off the deep end here (no wringing of hands or gnashing of teeth).  And I won’t waste time pondering the many reasons why this happens in organizations.

My question, dear readers, is this: where would your organization find itself in this survey? And if you think you’d be in the company of the 48% above, what will you do to improve your situation?

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Engagement Marketing

Goodbye, Peter Drucker – You’ll be Missed

I had to comment on the recent passing of Peter F. Drucker, aka the “father of modern management.”  I’ve followed his teachings throughout my career, especially as my work in services marketing evolved to focus on internal marketing and nonprofit marketing.

Drucker was truly a visionary who advocated:

  • Employee value … “People are a resource and not just a cost.”
  • Customers as the focal point of business … “To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.”
  • Marketing as “the distinguishing … unique function of business” (see Customers above), and
  • the Importance of the Social Sector … “The nonprofit exists to bring about change in individuals and in society.”

Here’s my favorite quote from Peter Drucker, and it comes to mind every time I finish up an internal marketing session:

“If a client leaves this room feeling he has learned a lot he hadn’t known before, he is either a stupid client or I’ve done a poor job as a consultant.  He should leave saying, ‘I know all this — why haven’t I done anything about it?'”*

Thank you, Peter, for your incredible legacy.  You’ll be greatly missed.

*Note: No offense meant to those who attend my internal marketing programs; I truly value their interest & willingness to learn more about it.  Most feel internal marketing is intuitive and already buy-into the concept (hence my experience of “preaching to the choir”) … the challenge is getting more organizations to put it into practice.

Categories
Marketing

Advertising & Marketing History: A Blast from the Past

For a fascinating look at how advertising has shaped our society, check out this incredible resource: the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History (part of Duke University’s Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library).  You can find:

Center holdings include papers from Madison Avenue ad executives that document advertising campaigns with insight into the creative process, target audience, and media selection.

Take a journey back in time to view 19th & 20th century advertising … it’s bound to be a fun trip!

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Engagement Marketing

Employees: The Prize Inside

Echoing the importance of employee impact on the brand, NYU professor Douglas Rushkoff writes in this month’s Fast Company, ” … it’s employees who communicate a brand’s true values to customers.”

Beyond the basic concept of employees as brand ambassadors, Rushkoff emphasizes their role in product innovation.  Instead of outsourcing, he encourages companies to “treat employees as a community of people who actually like what they do and want to do it better.”  (Right on!)

A focus on employees and customers (i.e., internal marketing) is only part of his message to “Get Back in the Box.”  According to Rushkoff, too many organizations get caught up in looking for solutions outside-the-box, and they overlook the solutions that can come from within — from their employees and customers.

It’s a crackerjack message.

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Engagement Marketing

“Employees First”

Just finished reading Bob Lamons’ new book The Case for B2B Branding – Pulling Away from the Business-to-Business Market.  It’s a great overview of B2B branding, complete with many informative & insightful mini-cases.

And I was glad to see Bob recognize employees as the most important audience for a company’s branding message … even before customers.

Why employees first?  According to Bob, employees must truly believe in your branding strategy for it to have a chance at success.  How can they sell it (your brand concept) or deliver it to customers if they themselves don’t buy-in to it?

Every time someone (customer or prospect) comes into contact with one of your employees, the outcome of that contact represents “a chance to build or destroy your brand.”  Makes sense, therefore, that employees be the first audience when it comes to introducing a new brand strategy or a new product, service, or program.

Employees first — sounds logical enough.  Yet I know from experience that sound logic isn’t always applied in organizations.  I’ve witnessed situations were employees were an after-thought.  (“Our new ad campaign kicks-off tomorrow.  By the way, shouldn’t someone tell our employees?”)

A good branding strategy, like charity, starts at home.

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Marketing Marketing – Step 5

Now you’re ready to develop your resulting plan (building on the previous four steps).

Your ultimate plan will be reflective of your situation, corporate culture, and internal politics.  To give you an idea of what might be included in such a plan, here are some sample activities I’ve seen used to promote marketing:

  • Host a department “open house” so others within the organization can get acquainted with marketing & its resources.  (I did this in my earlier banking career, and it worked to the point that bank staff recognized the marketing department as more than “just the guys who blow up balloons at the branch openings.”)
  • Invite key people from other departments to your staff meetings to learn what marketing is doing and vice-versa.
  • Distribute an internal marketing newsletter or report to let other staff know what’s happening; e.g., share the latest on market & consumer trends, competitive analysis, product usage, customer satisfaction results, etc. (whatever is not proprietary or confidential).
  • Conduct mini-seminars or brown-bag lunches on marketing — feature subjects such as product development, pricing, understanding consumer behavior, etc.  (Better yet if you can afford it, spring for lunch or refreshments … an excellent incentive to encourage attendance!)
  • Participate in new-employee orientation.  (At the very least, make sure whoever is in charge of orientation covers the organization’s marketing/branding efforts.)

Following the five steps covered in this series can help you increase marketing’s awareness & visibility, increase your perceived value, and strengthen marketing’s relationships with others in your organization.

But what if, despite these efforts, your situation doesn’t improve?  The you can adapt this strategy to market yourself somewhere else!