Marketing Maestro – Mind what you say, and do

Every behaviour in which an organisation engages has a marketing effect. Plan for it or pay the price, says Brian H Meredith.

Vodafone blocked my mobile again today for a late monthly bill payment, despite the complete lack of a reminder or any warning.
Spark (nee Telecom) had yet another network crash last week – a trend which has become too common.
Despite Vector’s promise to the contrary, our last heavy wind and rain bout was yesterday and we had yet another power cut.
Data suggests that less than ten percent of traffic accidents have speed as a factor. Yet it seems the police continue to concentrate a very substantial percentage of their resources on speed. Worse, this results in little or no attention to a range of other serious driving issues which contribute to accidents far more than speed does.
Screw-ups have become a common experience with our bank and their readiness to acknowledge and apologise is almost non-existent.
Traffic light phasing in Auckland is something of a farce and, despite there being a very prolonged and vocal debate on the issue, no action has been taken to address it.
Auckland Council recently admitted that 1780 of its employees are earning over $100,000 per annum. Our somewhat odd Mayor simply responded by claiming that it was “an issue for the CEO”.
This week, Solid Energy has been caught out for having known that entry to the Pike River Mine had been deemed safe since October 2013. They had not shared this information and nor do they appear to have acted upon it. Yes, those who suffer most from that bad behaviour are the families of the miners who were lost in the tragedy. But will it also affect the relationship between Solid Energy and the markets in which it trades? Almost certainly.
I could go on identifying behaviours on the part of both private and public sector organisations that seriously damage their brands. But I won’t. There isn’t enough space here.
More importantly, I should like to draw your attention to a simple yet powerful reality – every behaviour in which an organisation engages (however major or minor) will have a marketing effect. It will be positive or negative; never neutral. Now, you can either leave that reality to chance or you can plan for it.
When your last Marketing Plan was prepared, did it have a “Customer Experience Management” section? And if it did, was it dominated by a software perspective or did it set out to identify and plan for the right/desired outcomes from every behaviour in order to build, nourish, nurture and protect relationships with your customers and potential customers.
If it was the former, it was a waste of time. If it was the latter, then you are well on your way to ensuring that your customer’s brand experience is everything that you want it to be.
Which means that you need to identify and articulate what you want that experience to be and then break it down into every behaviour in which your organisation engages. And then you must plan those behaviours, monitor those behaviours and measure the scope and outcomes of those behaviours.
Don’t get trapped into thinking that it’ll be your frontline staff who might have the most positive or negative marketing effect as a result of their behaviours. As is apparent in my examples above, it is equally often the CEO and senior management who don’t seem to think
that marketing has anything to do with them, and therefore give little or no consideration to this issue.
Vodafone has moved, in my opinion, from being an excellent service provider to being amongst the worst in the country. Spark has been a problem
for some time.
Our bank? Well, the less said,
the better.
The police relationship with the public will continue to be damaged if they continue traffic policing in the way that they are.
Auckland Transport just doesn’t seem to understand the concept of traffic movement and dynamics. Their reputation will continue to suffer.
Auckland Council has just become something of a bad dream for many ratepayers.
The reality of doing business in the 21st century is that businesses and organisations are no longer isolated from the mainstream community. Once upon a time our only exposure to a business was via its paid for, above the line, advertising activity (which it, of course, controlled) or the occasional media story – typically limited to major stories relating to major businesses.
Today there is a powerful reality that anything that you or your people say or do will be shared, in a heartbeat, through a miscellany of channels. If what you or they say or do is good, then the marketing effect will likely also be good.
But if it’s bad? Then get ready to pay
the price.