Introduction We’ve all seen the media frenzy over the banking fiasco, the so named “credit crunch” and mass layoffs as companies panic. In talking with clients and customers it’s becoming quite clear that there is a need for business as usual. Products still need to be made, distributed and sold and services commissioned.

The car industry has seen a massive down turn in sales but just watch any commercial TV station, have the ads disappeared, no, has your favourite newspaper or magazine disappeared from the shelves, the answer is probably no.

In our experience there is lots of business out there and buyers want to deal with positive and enthusiastic people. Cutting back on marketing budgets is not good for your business and the wider economy. Keeping your organisation in the public eye is paramount. Adopting hermit strategies and falling back on old campaigns and images only dates your identity and makes you less visible. Just take a look near Christmas time, at a certain men’s aftershave featuring a man and the ocean. It’s been recycled for the last ten years as I can remember.

Ask you self this question; “Who would you rather do business with, a positive, enthusiastic company that seeks the opportunities or one with its head buried in the sand crying credit crunch?”

Recycling is the buzz word of this decade but not when it comes to marketing and PR, your brand image or customer communications, these need to stay fresh and up to date. The same applies internally with your employees, keeping them motivated with a positive outlook reflects in how they deal with customers. People buy from people and they come back to happy helpful people.

So before you all reach for the sick bucket or discard this as pure puff, remember it’s about a steady hand on the tiller but on the optimistic side of the fence.

The Detail behind It So lets take a few of the points raised in the introduction and look at these in more detail.

Media Frenzy We see this so often over something that could be described as trivial. Just look at the pandemic swine flu story, breaking it back to the real world, a girl went on holiday and came back with a bit of a runny nose!

Within just a few hours of media interest in a story you can be the biggest thing from Boston to Budapest, all caught high def, colour corrected, computer enhanced. But what many articles lack, is depth and realism, it’s easy to whip up a panic or over reaction to an event, it’s harder to take a balanced view and report the facts, why, because that takes time, creativity, but is less interesting and doesn’t sell newspapers or generate viewer ratings and we site page views.

The media can be your friend or you foe - it all depends on if it’s a slow news day and what side of bed they got out of!

Take the banking fiasco as already mentioned, if this had been reported more neutrally then less banks, local authorities, businesses and home owners would have suffered. Fewer jobs would have been lost as less panic and knee jerk reactions created as companies laid off thousands of staff amid a banking freeze on loans and credit. All of which were perfectly acceptable the day before!

In terms of a company’s marketing communications then the media has a lot to answer for, it can make or break an economy, drive a share price higher or lower. As they say in the City “buy on fact sell on rumour!”

Layoffs and Panic Leading to Motivated Staff?

Well that would be great wouldn’t it? Well taking into account what has been said so far, lets take a look at two set ups, the panic company and the realistic company.

The Panic Company

Watches the news and lays off all un-required staff - well un-required in their opinion, so they remove the temps, operations and marketing all seen as an unnecessary balance sheet item. Sounds good to a Financial Director. Wrong. Now you have no market presence, no new campaigns and no new customers and because you sacked operations, no one to do the work!

The Realistic Company

This company looks at its sales, balance sheet and order book. Gathers its staff and makes a statement - no layoffs if we can maintain our present position. What the directors say no growth, what about my bonus! Well they are just that, bonuses not guarantees. This is where maintaining a market presence and sales in a recession should be considered as growth! Alien concept - no it shouldn’t be because your company is not going backwards like everyone else’s. With them cutting back and you maintaining presence and sales you gain market share - just by doing the same thing you did last week with the same team of people.

This company then communicates with its employees and motivates them to look for opportunities, the ways to maintain sales, retain customers and to seek the sales and to deliver the service. Other companies will not, because they are panicking, laying off staff and failing to deliver on service. Their staff will be distracted, worrying about redundancy and are unfocused on the job, that or they just will not care.

Strategy

Hermit strategies leading to budget cut backs again are based on panic reactions to a change in market conditions. Companies need to start being led by marketing and market conditions, not by accountants that only have historic information to base decisions upon. Sets of management accounts fail to deliver market opportunities and don’t motivate staff to go that bit further to look after an existing customer.

Now is the time to make use of the panic and cut backs your competitors are making and to raise your presence in the market place. Crawling under a rock and hoping it’ll get better just means people won’t remember you. Your competitors are concentrating on something else, now is the time to make a move. There is also another key opportunity, a market full of skilled people looking for work - you could gain some key assets, a time to change out some dull pennies and gain a shiny new 5p!

Marketing

So how does a company become less visible in a market place? As a marketing communications consultant, this can happen in two ways, less Marketing and PR and less customer communication.

Employees still read newspapers and magazines; it’s one of the last cut backs they make, their favourite read. This is where a well thought out PR strategy can work and it’s cheaper than display advertising and if you can do it in house - it’s essentially free.

The public still visit websites - so keep them up to date with fresh content and images. Find information that your customers would need or be interested in.

Direct Mail has for a long time featured less, due to the low response rates. How does 98% wastage sound when you try and justify the cost? Well targeted small campaigns can give 12 - 20% response in my experience. Some of this has transferred online but as the public have got fed up with Junk Mail, so too have they started to shy away from an over full Inbox. Opt-in newsletters are one way to build both customer and prospective customer awareness of your organisation.

There are of course other tactics like sponsorship but measuring the response and attributing it to direct sales becomes more difficult. Exhibitions and trade shows used to do well, but with more sellers selling to you and less footfall from the buyers, picking the right event is paramount .

Internal Communications

Internal communications is in some firms far from the agenda of the board room table; in others it is fully integrated into the organisation and embellished with the drive and determination of top management so that it succeeds. Good internal communications strategy and implementation motivates work forces and generates clear, useful communication to drive the company forward and ensures all employees take ownership of the positive side of honest communication of both opportunities for improvement and praise of fellow workers. Employees need to know what direction an organisation is heading in, where their individual and team roles fit in and what they have to do in order to achieve the goals set. People will put every effort into advancing the business if they can communicate their ideas.

So what do Internal Communications strategies look to deliver, well with many organisations it is the desire to further the quality standards needed in the business environment and to transpose that need internally towards its employees. With others, it is driven by the speed at which the business environment is changing and hence the need for the organisation to change. In this case good internal communication is delivered through a company vision and a change in focus toward face to face or more personal communication.

In order to achieve this, a firm must understand several aspects to the organisation. It is necessary to understand the environment of the employees and what likely influences there are. These factors that influence employees include line management, immediate workers and any subordinates. As well as their own set of values, but also, those of their colleagues that surround them in the working environment. The crucial points of influence are, and always have been, our own co-workers. Peers influence more than managers influence subordinates. Added to this are the issues of culture and the sub culture of the company. Politics play a part as does the management style. In all a complex set of variables are at play.

The communication environment is conceptualised via the modification of the concept of communication taken from the Chartered Institute of Marketing. The author has embellished this concept to include the environment of the employee.

If the company understands the environment of the employee then it can use the best methods to get information to each person.

The second aspect the organisation needs to understand are the perceptions of the employees concerning the information they receive. If the organisation understands this aspect as well, then it will know what information is best received. Hence an appreciation of these two aspects will indicate whether or not an Internal Communications strategy is working. Management is then in a position to either continue or change its strategy.

The importance of this article is to bring to the fore the need for organisation to appreciate these two key aspects of the organisation and then to plan an Internal Communications strategy that works.

Author : Peter G Davey MA DipM

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