Brands are working with a short-term, fail-fast-and-move-on mindset tend to forget that long-term sustainable growth comes from structure and alignment with goals and master plans. Utilising a strategic communications framework and approach can help support brands by minimising risk and encouraging integration with the big picture.
Let’s get the elephant out of the room, shall we?
Brands often ask about the value that strategic communications and marketing can bring to the table. Both disciplines do not help bring in sales or close deals. Even worse, they spend hard-earned revenue on intangibles such as reputation. Their measurements are usually indirect, and broad. Instead, they focus on big targets such as policy, regulation, awareness. These metrics are hard to determine impact on sales figures, volume sell-in or out and market share.
This is really a short-sighted way of thinking.
Communications and marketing was never set up to replace or substitute relationship or account-based sales. Nurturing, developing and closing a lead continues to be a sales function. If the sales team is unable to close a deal due to the lead’s lack of context or understanding of the product, that is an opportunity for sales and marketing to work together. Instead, we see tension happen between the functions.
The gap here is not one where teams are not able to work together. Instead it is a narrow perspective by management, to not seek alignment of goals, and integrate business and functional objectives into an over-arching framework.
This is where strategic communications comes in.
Regardless of industry, size, funding/investment stage, or whether the brand is private or public, all organisations benefit from consistency and structure. In fact, we argue that strategic communications (as a discipline) is critical to business success. This will be more apparent as businesses restart their engines, adapt and recover (or live with) the pandemic.
So what is this strategic communications discipline about?
The master plan sets out the narrative, positioning, messages and channels that a brand has and outlines the sum of all actions (for example, content, formats, locations, etc) and the intentions that will be taken, in order to reach out to decisions makers, customers, stakeholders and influence, promote or defend the brand and outcomes.
It’s obvious that all of these actions and intentions must be aligned with the organisations goals and values.
Where we see failure with this framework is typically when functions, units or teams start to work in siloes or decides to pick and choose what is convenient to their agenda without care of the big picture. Naturally, this creates confusion for customers, and negatively impacts the brand’s reputation.
The impact is intangible, so how do we know that strategic communications is working?
A strategic communications team is typically cross-discipline and would work across areas such as branding, public relations, marketing and policy. The objective would be to find ways to help build, protect and enhance the value of the brand and its reputation.
Using a sales lens to measure strategic communications would be like going to a fast-food restaurant and asking for healthy meals. There will be choices on the menu but chances are the customer is not getting either fast-food or a healthy meal.
Instead of using the wrong measurement tool, return to first principles, what exactly is the business goal and how would achieving that goal holistically look like? Apart from revenue, sales direction, are there other metrics such as brand recognition, easier access to the correct customer, policy/regulation support for the industry or category, third-party validation through media articles, etc.
There are things to measure that are valid, realistic and can push the brand’s agenda forward. Brands and management owe it to their organisation to find the right mix of measurements and not use a square peg for a round hole.
Right, so when should I activate strategic communications?
In general, strategic communications should be activated when there is a new direction, position, product launch, movement into a new area or if there is need to secure employee support for an initiative. These generally correspond to milestones on a business roadmap and involve growth, expansion or market entry for brands.
For brand introductions and product launches, strategic communications becomes the ‘master plan’ aligning communications, marketing, product and sales teams in a territory/country. The integrated team would benefit from having an operations member that can project manage and has access to all aspects of the introduction or launch. The master plan will cover positioning, messaging, audience identification, specific tactics mapped to the different audiences, a timeline and anticipated outcomes.
For movement into new or adjacent areas, fresh positioning and messages (distinct from the master brand) will be needed to explain the rationale or the move to customers and the brand’s market. There will be activities such as roadshows, launches, sit-downs with early adopters and influencers. These activities will have impact on existing and newly-acquired customers. If the end goal involves setting up a subsidiary or an country office, the strategic communications master plan will also include a ‘handover’ to the new leadership and operations team.
Soliciting and gaining support from current employees for a business goal also comes under strategic communications. This can sometimes be referred to as internal or employee communications as well. An inter-function team is set-up with communications and HR members. They will serve as the culture and change champions and provide guideposts for fellow employees to navigate the changes to the organisation environment. The master plan would involve identifying a baseline of environmental factors and the ideal/future state. The gap between baseline and future states would be handled by a series and progression of steps involving messages, steps, information, activities and review.
We are Brand Utility is a business consultancy. We work with brands in the corporate, professional services, retail, travel and technology spaces.
Our principal consultant is a registered management consultant, certified and recognised by the Institute of Management Consultants Singapore.
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 and growth marketing: Digital advertising, social media advertising, social commerce, e-commerce
· Integration of marketing with business operations: We plan and execute as a 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 Clay Banks on Unsplash
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