Experiences- the 7th Era of Marketing

by Robert Rose

  Are the business goals aligned with the level of effort needed to implement and integrate this initiative? What does this look like in the short term and over the long term?

  How will this story express itself through channels over time? How does this affect the purpose-driven content strategy?

  • The Third Month and Onward

  Create the implementation and integration plan and begin to manage the platform.

  Once budgets and the project are approved, work with the CCM team to assign resources for the “product development” of the initiative. How will the roll-out, plus the ongoing management, affect resources from marketing, subject matter experts, content sources, technology, etc.?

  Map the rollout and execute not based on major development milestones, but rather as a function of progress toward the different phases of the story as you have mapped it.

  Conduct frequent iterative reviews to establish whether “truths” have been reached and if changes are necessary in order to make future assumptions come true.

  “Be the change you want to see in the world.” | Mahatma Gandhi

  At its core, marketing is about communicating. It’s about getting people’s attention, saying something interesting that matters to them, and then motivating them to change their behavior, attitude, or take action.

  We focus a lot of our time and attention on outside audiences, which makes sense. We’re trying to get people to buy what we sell. We want them to get to know us, like us, talk about us, and think that what we sell benefits them. Our marketing performance is based on how much, and in what ways, we’re moving the needle with building, engaging, and retaining audiences.

  That’s an awful lot of heavy lifting, and to be truthful, marketing departments cannot do it all by themselves. There’s so much going on within our organizations that it’s hopeless to think that we can keep our finger on the pulse of everything. It’s what David Packard, one of the founders of Hewlett-Packard, understood when he said, “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”

  We spend so much time telling our story externally that it’s easy for us to forget about the most important audience we have—our fellow employees. However, if our primary goal is to own niches, online and off, we have to teach employees how to help tell our story.

  We know that customers have relationships with people, not brands. So marketers need to take a leadership role in helping employees understand what makes a company special, especially the employees who interact directly with customers. As we look to create seamless, meaningful experiences for customers, employees turn into more than brand ambassadors; they become promise-keepers. They’re the ones who bring to life the promises made by marketing and sales.

  One of our roles as content marketers needs to be getting our employees, the people who bring our brands to life, excited about the story we are telling. More than believing in it, we want them to join in creating the experiences that make the story real, so that marketers and employees all sing in harmony.

  Hail, Hail, What if the Gang’s Not All Here?

  To win customers (and a bigger share of the marketplace), companies must first win the hearts and minds of their employees. To be successful at this, marketers must understand the need to build a group that’s accountable for consistent publishing for internal audiences and that works shoulder to shoulder with what we do on the outside.

  Kathy Button Bell, vice president and chief marketing officer of Emerson, talks about marketing’s ability to create emotion within a company. She describes it as a function of bringing color, light, and movement. For her, how we adapt to telling brand stories to different audiences, through multiple channels, is connected to the story’s ability to create joy and something to which we should aspire. It used to be enough for us to make sure that employees knew what the logo looked like, but now we need to move into creating valuable experiences for our own people. Today, the need for someone to take responsibility for a consistent employee experience is more important than ever. And, marketing brings the power of that consistency.

  As we examine our internal roles, more and more we are becoming stewards of story and culture. The internal culture of a company determines so much when it comes to the destiny and position of marketing.

  But does focusing this much on the inside audience really make that much of a difference? Absolutely.

  Gallup’s 2013 State of the Global Workplace looked at high-performance, world-class organizations.70 In surveying more than 225,000 employees in 142 countries around the world, they found that only 13% of employees worldwide were engaged in their work. That’s an improvement of only 2% from their survey in 2008–2009. That leaves a staggering 87% either not engaged, or actively disengaged, which is a big deal when you start to translate that into financial performance. However, the survey found that high-performance companies earned nearly four times more than their industry competitors and experienced one-third less attrition.

  People spend a majority of their waking hours at their jobs, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a local landscaping company, a high-tech startup, or a financial institution. That’s why the depth of employee engagement reflects how people feel about their jobs and the quality of the work they produce.

  Gallup found that the majority of employees worldwide said they had an overall negative experience at work; just one in eight were fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, their jobs. And actively disengaged employees outnumbered engaged employees two-to-one.

  Performance problems don’t just affect disengaged employees. Gallup also pointed out that 41% of U.S. employees don’t know what their employer stands for or what makes their company different from others. While people are less scared about actually keeping their jobs these days, they aren’t confident about what work, exactly, they’re supposed to be doing.71

  As marketers, we need to increase our role and influence on increasing employee purpose and engagement, because increasing it is crucial to driving sustainable growth for our companies.

  So, what exactly do we have the ability—and right—to influence?

  EMPLOYEES, CUSTOMERS, AND REVENUE

  Research shows that there is a direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, and between customer satisfaction and improved financial performance by a company. Organizations with satisfied and engaged employees motivate customers to use their products more. And, increased customer usage leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction.

  Research also shows that an organization’s employees influence the behavior and attitudes of customers, even if the employees don’t have direct contact with customers. Employees who don’t have direct contact often think they don’t influence customers, but they do. Their hard work behind the scenes makes for positive customer influence. Ultimately, the most satisfied customers turn out to be less expensive to serve, to use the products more, and to be more profitable.

  Professional services firm Towers Watson, in its 2012 Global Workforce Study, talked about the difficulty of sustaining the kind of positive engagement that employees need in order to deliver consistent productivity.72 This comes from almost a decade of pressure to do more with less and to respond to the challenges of global competition, ever-evolving technology, and the ongoing need to strictly control costs.

  When workers aren’t fully engaged, it leads to greater performance risk for employers. It makes companies more vulnerable to lower productivity, higher inefficiency, weaker customer service, and greater rates of absenteeism and turnover. When Towers Watson looked at sustainable engagement for 50 global companies, and their one-year operating margins, they saw dramatic evidence of the impact of sustainable engagement on performance. The companies with high, sustainable engagement had operating margins almost three times greater than those of organizations with a largely disengaged workforce.

  In Gallup’s research, those companies with the highest levels of engagement experienced 147% higher earnings per shar
e, compared with their competition. And those with a low level of employee engagement experienced 2% lower earnings per share, compared with their competition. Active disengagement has an immense drain on economies throughout the world. In the U.S. alone, Gallup estimated that active disengagement costs companies $450-500 billion per year.

  Employees have to be engaged in order to understand and articulate their company’s uniqueness. Why should a customer do business with a company when employees can’t explain what makes them different and better? It doesn’t matter how much is invested in external marketing; if the customer experience with employees is negative, then it’s all gone to waste.

  Here’s how it pans out if employees really had a choice about keeping their jobs. Gallup asked U.S. workers, “If you won $10 million in the lottery, would you continue to work, or would you stop working? If ‘continue to work,’ would you continue to work in your current job, or would you take a different job?”

  Here’s how the responses came out:

  Actively disengaged Not engaged Engaged

  Continue in current job 20% 42% 63%

  Take a different job 41% 25% 12%

  Stop working 40% 33% 25%

  Despite all the statistics describing what happens when employees aren’t engaged and telling the same story about our business, why don’t we put the same level of care and effort into communicating with our entire company as we do with customers and prospects? If our team isn’t telling the same story and creating a seamless customer experience, all we’ve invested in branding, public relations, marketing, sales, and customer service is a joke. If we need a business case for investing in our story internally, think of it as insurance to protect all the other investments we’ve made.

  WHERE TO BEGIN

  Where do we start with getting everyone to sing the same song, much less in harmony? We’re going to walk through three big-picture steps to help give context for the breadth and depth of what needs to be done.

  Start with the leaders

  These are the senior people who can help drive the story from the top down, and they know how to get people involved with a program. Regular communication from the company’s leaders will begin to breed a culture of engagement. If it’s a big company, communication has to come from both the enterprise and local levels. Executives set the direction of the company based on the story, but transformation and bringing that story alive happens at the local level.

  How do we get executives to pay attention to the importance of this? We have to speak their language: financial performance.

  In their book, Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras pointed out that companies driven by purpose—and that have the values in place to support that purpose—outperform the general market 15 to one. And, they outperform comparison companies six to one.73 John Kotter and James Heskett, in Corporate Culture and Performance, also noted that companies that have cultures based on purpose and values outperform companies that don’t: their research showed that revenues grew four times faster, job creation was seven times greater, and stock prices grew 12 times faster.74

  Second, look for your connectors

  These are the people who really know the ins and outs of an organization—the ones who can make or break a project, not because they are in positions of power, but because they have influence. It’s what Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his book, The Tipping Point. Among the different types of personalities he describes are the “connectors.” They are the people who know everyone. They bring people together. And if they believe in the brand story, they can help others do the same.75

  Third, focus on the people who will be most affected by the story

  These are the people who really have to “live” the story because they’re the ones bringing it to life for customers. Think customer experience service professionals, the people in accounting—people who customers talk to but who we don’t traditionally think of as being the ones who make experiences come alive for customers.

  Make your story understandable and captivating for people.

  Bring the brand story into everyday language using everyday words. Communicate the “why” of the story to employees. Use words, phrases, and anecdotes they can relate to. For example, why does the strategic direction being taken matter to them? How does their role fit into the bigger picture? What contribution can they make on an individual basis? Skip the corporate speak and explain it in the same way you would if you were talking to a real person.

  Find ways to tell the story in the places where people are. Think about the influences of local cultures and economics as well as factors such as an employee’s type of job and education level. They all play a role in how employees share the story.

  As the story is rolled out, get people excited about it and keep them excited after they first hear about it. They can be the eyes and ears on the ground for what’s working and where the effort is running into challenges with people who don’t believe it or support the story. Look for excuses to tell your story again and again and tie it into things your company does. Are you launching a new product? Explain how that came about in the context of the bigger brand story. Win a hard-to-snag client? Why was their belief in your brand purpose the reason that your sales team sealed the deal?

  Internal communications have to be just as much fun—and human (if not more so)—as external stories. Get rid of the urge to “business speak” this to death. Skip talking about how this will optimize performance, maximize productivity, or other “ize” buzzwords that make this sound like corporate ramblings. Instead, create online and real-time conversations with people on a human and emotional level.

  When reviewing brand efforts for 2014, Antonio Lucio, global chief marketing and communications officer for Visa, and his team scrutinized the communications they had created for employees with the same rigor they did for B2C and B2B audiences. “We looked to see if we’re delivering a comprehensive and integrated brand message,” he said. “We want to know that we’re making our employees true spokespeople for our brand.”76

  Let’s look at four specific areas that have a big impact on how engrained the brand story is within an organization: human resources, sales, research and development (or the people who decide what to sell and how to evolve it over time), and the overall employee population.

  1. Human Resources

  One of the expanding opportunities for telling brand stories can be found in human resources. Many companies fall short on doing a good job of communicating with current employees, much less extending the brand story to those they hope to recruit. But, hiring the right people is essential to building a workforce that’s truly engaged in what your company does.

  If we thought of supporting human resources as a way to recruit people to deliver our brand story, marketers would be more proactive in working with them. That’s because these recruits are the filters through which we’ll build our own teams. Research from The FORUM, the research arm of the Business Marketing Association, shows that within the next five years, Millennials will outnumber Baby Boomers in the workplace by two to one. That’s a huge cultural shift in a short amount of time. It means that we need to be ready to help human resources communicate with four generations of workers: Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, and Millennials.

  In order to have the right people tell the right story, we have to hire the right people. That means telling our story consistently through all channels, not just to reach customers but to reach prospective employees, too. We need to consider the human resources angle when we work on top-of-funnel awareness. The stories that matter to customers also matter to the rock stars we want to recruit. These involve ideas such as culture, leadership, challenge, and growth.

  In competitive industries and job markets, recruiting top-tier talent is crucial. But despite its importance, it can be easily overlooked because of pinched resources and day-to-day job demands.

  A report from the Altimeter Group surveyed human resources and marketing executives from bot
h B2B and B2C companies. Among the results:

  • Only 41% of respondents said their company has a holistic and strategic approach to employee engagement and advocacy.

  • HR leads the employee engagement efforts in 41% of the companies and only 11% are led by marketing.

  • On the flip side, marketing is involved in 47% of the actual employee engagement initiatives and human resources only 39%.77

  Fortunately, we can partner with human resources not only to tell our brand story through them, but also to discover stories about why people come to work for us, what matters to them, and how their own stories mesh with the brand story. This gives us insight into how our content marketing makes a difference in recruiting the right people and the importance of our work within our organizations. However, marketers need to take a greater leadership role because of all of the best practices we bring to the table: how to drive and measure engagement, how to create delightful experiences, how to nurture audiences, and how to tell a story that keeps people interested and engaged over a long period of time. HR professionals, on the other hand, realize that they lack these skills: only 42% of chief human resource officers believe they’re effective at fostering employee engagement and a mere 20% think they have what it takes to effectively address collaboration and information-sharing challenges.78