Fighting the Civil War against the Brand Guerillas:
A.K.A. Communication with the internal audience (people want to hear vs you want them to hear):
1. What people want to hear:
a. Apart from falling under the same product category, do all the Business Units (BUs) have anything else in common, ie;
i. Markets / Target Audience / Use of product - All the products seem to be a stand-alone, they DO NOT complement one another
ii. Top Management Business Direction - How can we work together to bring them under the same umbrella as one whole suite of solution?
iii. Top Management Business Direction - Diverse Target Audience / Market / Product Group = Divided Brand Management views = Company losing its identity.
b. More info about the other business units
i. Overall business developments – get the bigger picture of the world around
ii. Latest developments – which are the new products relevant to me?
1. Which relevant products can complement my products?
2. How will their development affect me?
c. How much business is the company doing, each BU specifically.
i. Sales Figures / Current market situations
ii. Markets might be different, but the problems faced might be similar
iii. Review meetings might have shared these common issues between the BU Heads.
d. How healthy is their market in the current situation?
i. What are the upcoming trends? / Market statistics / analysis
ii. Any area of growth to develop / possible area of threat?
1. Predict / foretell future (Info to be shared by the individual BU PIC
e. How can the data in the newsletter become a sales / enhancement tool for them?
i. Sales figures? / Success stories?
ii. Embedded videos – Technology?
iii. Can these tools be passed to dealers as sales tools directly?
1. Minimal / no adaptation is needed
2. Straightforward – brochures (chop dealer’s info and use)
iv. How do we know that our marketing efforts have paid off?
1. Surveys / Feedback / Success Stories
2. Sales figures / Dealership requests / Distributorship requests
3. Sales Companies
a. Web Enquiries
b. Sales activities
i. Advertising / online / print
ii. Materials requests
1. Source files / brochures
4. Web traffic / enquiries
a. SEM / SEO
b. Contact Us
2. What you want them to hear:
a. Value in brand management
i. How does the company stand to benefit in having a consistent image and identity
1. Consistent image = trust and image building = better business
2. Strong brand image = trust from dealers / customers (2 ways)
b. Importance of Marketing Communications in augmenting sales activities (but not over-preaching)
i. Marcom ensures consistency in the brand management aspect
ii. Marcom is seen as the brand specialist
1. They know what you can do / cannot do.
2. They provide valuable advices on how you can enhance your overall image / sales promotions / events.
a. Even suggests sales tools which are possible for use
3. They augment sales activities with website / online and print advertisement
iii. They help to highlight the important aspects in a product, ensuring 100% accuracy and hit in marketing a product.
c. Ownership of brand management is shared; they have to understand, they can bypass Marcom at any point in time. But the right choice would have to be to consult Marcom on all branding issues first.
i. Though bypassing will not have any immediate effects / penalties per se. But results are imminent and extremely damaging.
ii. Losing brand identity = losing image consistency = losing trust of customers = lost of market shares = lost of revenues = closing down of company.
3. Dealer’s brand guide:
a. Why should they care about your consistent image?
b. How to motivate them to adhere to the brand guide?
i. How will company’s Brand consistency benefit the partners?
1. Company doing well = Partners will do well.
2. Partners are also brand ambassadors of the Company’s Brand.
a. Think along this line.
c. Put yourself in the dealer’s shoes, why should you care about the “upstream” when what is more important to you is actually the sales figures?
i. Partners depend on Company;
1. Sales support tools – what can we provide them with?
2. Products
ii. Company depend on Partners;
1. Brand management
2. Product sales
posted by yang @ 5:47 PM
0 Comments
