Need for speed vs. Discipline of structure

This article is part of a series where we share about organisations and their challenges when it comes to implementing strategic communications and marketing for their brand, services or products.

One of our clients from the technology space decided to launch their new digital offering during the pandemic in order to capitalise on a new audience segment. There was a general impression given the nature of the recovery stages that a digital service at an affordable price point would garner interest from customers.

However, the new digital service lacked structure in the form of audience and segment positioning, as well as messaging. It was built on the back of existing systems (perhaps coming from a perspective to streamline or recycle) and therefore was not able to differentiate apart from price, and medium of delivery.

The client was reasonably working on an urgent schedule given the investment in technology and resources. In their playbook, speed has to trump many other considerations.

Small brands and market chasers typically squeeze themselves into a bubble; and stop coming out for air. They stop observing the external environment and believe that the process of ‘building and shipping product’ will magically send customers their way.

In short, they create a self-fulfilling need for speed, and fail to see the forest for the trees. They end up launching a product and not building the framework for a brand.

Setting up a structure with strategic communications requires building a master plan that includes control of the messaging and narrative across various communications channels. It has to be executed against this master plan. There cannot be too many new insertions and additions to the plan just because a co-marketing opportunity or a new development suddenly happens.

It's not about working with a fixed structure either. Importantly, each addition or insertion has to serve and move the primary need of the brand or product forward to decision makers, stakeholder and influences. It has to be defensible without limiting the sales team from selling.

Brands can also consider limiting these additions by isolating them so the assumptions and variables being experimented on by the main campaign are not impacted. Any obligations made to external parties can continue to take place.

These steps – while easy to summarise – takes time. It requires time to test assumptions, wait for data to come in, and tweak and test again. At this point, being hasty means multiple data sources, variables or outcomes that do not help indicate a direction.

In this client’s case, the product champion started adding more variables through marketing tactics to the mix of launch and customer service-related operations. There was an impression that doing more will result in more output and possibly results. Unfortunately, we did not see that outcome. The initial set of tactics proved that specific actions led to outputs that could be optimised. However, from an overall campaign perspective, waiting for the output was deemed slow and therefore the overall campaign was lacking.

The counsel provided was (and is) to maintain perspective and add more tactics to the back of the plan i.e. to create a continuous series of campaigns while allowing the current one to run its course. This way, there is a steady stream of data to understand whether the messaging, USPs, channels (e.g. website, blog, social media, offline etc) are working. With the data, there is the ability to craft more experiments and once there is a hit on the right mix of tactics, the brand can use it to speed up for more momentum.

Read previous articles from this series:

1. Dealing with the temptation to skip strategic planning for communications

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We are Brand Utility is a business consultancy. We work with brands in the corporate, retail, travel and technology spaces.

We offer strategy and tactics to support growth outcomes - revenue, scale, regional expansion and market entry – for our clients.

Areas of support include:

· Strategic communications: Approach to market, brand concept and map, positioning, messaging, story and narrative, thought leadership

· Marketing: Campaign/programme planning, story-based marketing execution, digital marketing, community amplification, content planning and production, go-to-market execution

· Lead generation: Digital advertising, social media advertising, social commerce, e-commerce

· Integration of marketing with business operations: We plan and execute as a seconded marketing and/or PR lead for your brand

Discover more about our services at our website or book an exploratory consultation through this link.

Photo by Andrew Roberts on Unsplash