Experiences- the 7th Era of Marketing

by Robert Rose

  Before BlackBerry could instill confidence in customers, they had to instill confidence in employees. That started by reiterating that BlackBerry was no longer for sale and had enough cash to survive beyond the next several quarters of expected losses.

  Mark Wilson, senior vice president of marketing, said that instilling the brand story—making BlackBerry synonymous with work—took center stage. He wanted anyone looking for greater productivity, efficiency, security, and privacy to choose BlackBerry.102 And it required employees to understand and believe it before they could get customers to do the same.

  Wilson pointed out: “Our vision is simple and clear and people understand where they fit in. You either make the company money or you save money. If you don’t do one of these, then you will change. That sends a clear message for employees when it’s delivered.”

  In an article he published on LinkedIn, Chen discussed why employees were key to executing a turnaround in the right way. Here’s how BlackBerry did just that:

  • Create a problem-solving culture. When things go bad, everyone knows what went wrong, but few understand the way out. Focusing on the problems creates a negative environment and brings people down. BlackBerry continually reminded employees about finding solutions, not problems.

  • Maintain the sense of urgency. Once you begin to make progress, it’s easy to let up and catch your breath. BlackBerry made cutting costs and growing revenue clear to every employee at every turn.

  • Take care of your company like it’s your home. It’s just as important to sweat the small stuff with a business you care about as it is with a family. Small things at scale add up to big impacts. For example, one manager had eight telephone accounts for employees who had already left but the company was still paying for them. Would you keep eight phones lines at your home if you only used one?

  • Know thyself. The ancient Greeks had it right; truly know—and live—your focus. This helps employees make the small, daily decisions that keep you on course to your long-term goal.

  • Empower employees to take risks. Many people know what’s right; they’re just afraid to say something. Let opportunities be a part of your culture.

  • Everyone has a role. If you empower employees and it’s okay to take risks, they’ll speak up when they need to and solve problems earlier on. Everyone, at every level, can make a difference. Siloed organizations make it hard to share ideas. A turnaround culture lets everyone pitch in to get things done.103

  It’s one thing to say these six steps are how you change—and save—a company; it’s another to actually execute on it. As a high-profile vendor with a huge social and blog audience (nearly 50 million social followers at the end of 2014 and 1 million blog readers a month), BlackBerry had a platform from which to tell their turnaround story. Brand journalism has become a key tactic. This has given them the ability to tell the story, externally, of how their device makes life easier for their enterprise customers. It’s also central to tell the story of how the company delivers on the priorities set out by Chen—cutting costs and making money. As a proponent and practitioner of frugal marketing, Wilson knows that brand journalism doesn’t require a lot of money but it does require proper execution and smart, consistent delivery.

  “Many companies built their intranets in the late 1990s and haven’t invested to keep them current as an internal publishing tool. Our intranet is absolutely a critical part of telling our story to employees; it’s something that we take very seriously because it’s THE communication channel for us to connect with our internal audience,” Wilson pointed out. “It’s not marketing hype; they’re interesting stories written from a journalism perspective.”

  BlackBerry has one person who sources content from many places, writes, publishes, and operationalizes the process. The content is then tracked in terms of views, comments, and likes to see which stories are trending and what ideas reasonably engage the attention of employees. BlackBerry also uses tried-and-true email, town halls, and in-person meetings with employees and their supervisors that cascade from Chen’s team to talk about what’s going on in the company.

  BlackBerry relies on its intranet, BlackBerry Square, as the core of its hub for making its brand story real and consistent for employees. Credit: BlackBerry

  “Content marketing is as critical to employees as it is to customers,” Wilson said. “Just as you’re trying to drive engagement with your target external audience, you have to do the same thing with employees. They’re part of the conversation at all times, particularly in a turnaround. BlackBerry Square is our publication hub, and it looks, feels, and acts like a news site.”

  “If people don’t consistently hear a focus on the strategy of the company, they focus on activities instead of outcomes.” | Mark Wilson, SVP Marketing, BlackBerry

  Employees interact and contribute to conversations through BlackBerry Square, even by simply “liking” an article. Wilson also measures engagement through the employee’s journey, similar to how the brand measures engagement through the customer’s journey.

  “Similar to a customer’s journey with a brand, companies need to drive awareness, engagement, and conversion of the company’s strategy with employees to ensure they viscerally understand it and how it benefits customers,” Wilson continued.

  “Just as it’s critical to deliver on each step of the customer journey, it is similarly critical to deliver on each step of the employee journey. Once this is in place, teams can focus on delivering outcomes that support the strategy rather than performing a set of activities that may be disconnected from the strategy. You have to keep pounding the awareness and engagement of the message and bake it into the culture.”

  A Shift in Perspective

  Shifting perspective back to the enterprise customer has meant that BlackBerry had to evaluate what they looked for in candidates when recruiting, particularly for the sales team. “We had to tell the business-to-business story through our recruiting process so we could find people who already understood what customers wanted and how to serve them,” Wilson explained.

  This proved especially true with the enterprise sales teams. BlackBerry had to help them learn to tell a different story that wasn’t about QWERTY keyboards and battery life. Instead, they talked about massive hybrid connectivity at the enterprise level and how people expect to work in a mobile-first environment. This makes security and privacy that much more important. From the enterprise sales teams to carriers, BlackBerry focused on teaching this audience to solve business problems for their customers and avoid leading with tech specs.

  Back that up one step further and you’re at research and development. Ensuring that these teams understand the brand story and the urgency of delivering it through a product experience means broader and deeper collaboration between groups. Researching around the enterprise customer and delighting them on their terms affected industrial design and the user experience of device software.

  Making BlackBerry Synonymous With Work

  The key to the success of BlackBerry’s quick turnaround, Wilson said, has been their ability to define a strategy and communicate it effectively and consistently to many audiences. To do that, the company clearly defined its story (making BlackBerry synonymous with work), told it with rigorous consistency, and worked to operationalize it in ways that drove growth and streamlined costs. Harnessing the collective influence of employees has given BlackBerry the ability to amplify the story through more people, making the new BlackBerry experience come alive for external audiences.

  One year into the job of turning BlackBerry around, the company is now on firmer financial footing, posting its first profitable quarter in years, and looking for opportunities to grow by delivering the communications, collaboration, security, and privacy required by mobile professionals.

  ENDNOTES

  101 http://bizblog.blackberry.com/2013/12/john-chen-open-letter/

  102 http://adage.com/article/btob/blackberry-marketing-chief-mark-wilson-talks-challenges/
294139/

  103 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141027115155-14119785-the-keys-to-executing-a-turnaround-the-right-way

  EMERSON BRINGS SEXY BACK

  As a 125-year old, $24 billion global manufacturing company with 133,000 employees heavily rooted in an engineering heritage, Emerson’s marketing team had historically struggled for attention and credibility.

  Since Kathy Button Bell became chief marketing officer for Emerson in 1999, however, she has reengineered both the company’s leadership role as well as marketing’s role within the organization. She kicked offher stint with a massive rebranding effort that dropped the “Electric” part of the company’s name and brought 35 autonomous sub-brands under one umbrella. Then she got down to business.

  A Well-Engineered Story

  Button Bell and her team have cultivated a brand story that resonates with businesses around the world and infiltrates every niche of the brand—from research and development to human resources and new business models. Emerson’s “Consider It Solved” story centers on reducing complexity and how the company solves people’s problems. Every story the company tells and every activity they take part in stems from the “Consider It Solved” story.

  “In the beginning, we realized we weren’t telling meaningful, problem-solving stories,” Button Bell said. “Back then, we told stories just about our products, but didn’t have a dialogue. Now, because of social media, we have 133,000 employees trying to tell stories and create a dialogue. We figured out how to aggregate it and keep it in sync so we didn’t appear insane as a company. It had to feel like there’s a main story.”

  Instilling a culture of storytelling doesn’t come quickly in any company. For an engineer-led brand like Emerson, it’s even harder—but doable.

  A key for Emerson’s success has been bringing the story to life internally first. By putting the “Consider It Solved” mantra front and center, Button Bell’s team has created an emotional connection with employees. Through color, light, and sound, she’s refreshed the perception of the brand, transforming it from an old, staid company to one that feels young, bright, and bold.

  It’s Never Been Done Before

  Button Bell brought a litany of firsts to the table. Drawing both on her background in consumer marketing research and the zealous curiosity of her boss, Charlie Peters, she embedded market research as core to the marketing team. From that research data, she focused attention on two vital areas.

  First: Marketing needed to move “upstream” and champion the voice of the customer by becoming intimately involved in research and development from the beginning. Emerson calls this “Stage Gate Zero.”

  “We launched products and had disappointing results,” Button Bell explained. “We saw that the research upfront didn’t ask customers what they wanted. Engineers ask feature-oriented questions, which don’t get to real innovation. Good market-research people get to benefits and what problems the customer wants to solve.”

  Second: Doubling down on market research meant that the Emerson marketing team had a better sense of where to reach their audience. In addition to tried-and-true trade publications, Button Bell expanded into TV (Fox News, the Golf Channel, CNN International, BBC, and domestic and international cable channels) as well as mainstream print media, digital, and airport advertising, all of which were unheard of for a traditional B2B brand.

  “We learned that our core audience was comprised of decision makers at global Fortune 1000 companies,” Button Bell said. “These were the top executives in the world. We’re more likely to catch executives watching these channels as they travel around the world than we are while they’re in their own homes.”

  Marketing Moves Mainstream

  In recent years, the biggest trend has been to elevate the role of marketing within Emerson so that people acknowledge and recognize its importance. To set aside apprehension and to build engagement with others outside of marketing, Button Bell has excellent examples of what has worked well. One example is The Extra Mile blog from Charlie Peters, Emerson’s senior executive vice president (TheExtraMileWithCharlie.com). The blog has a central strategy that tells a consistent story over time. Peters’ online presence took into consideration the cadence of his tweeting to drive traffic to his blog, which has realized great success. Peters’ efforts reflect well on Emerson and educate people internally about opportunities.

  Emerson uses the success of Senior Vice President Charlie Peters’ blog to build engagement with others within the company and show the success of content efforts. Credit: Emerson

  “We’ve taken an extremely senior executive and turned him into a communications vehicle,” Button Bell said. “We’ve allowed him to be personal. Charlie’s an expert on business, but he’s also a runner and an expert on that, too. He shares letters to his son in Afghanistan. Life lessons from a different decade. It’s interesting and poignant, not just the normal business topics. You can’t fake Charlie’s level of authenticity.”

  Button Bell also looked for ways to break down silos and mesh functions whenever possible in order to keep the voice of the customer front and center. Turning toward things that aren’t traditional marketing responsibilities, like integrating the internal and external message and experience, has been a big reason why Emerson has been able to drive a successful, cohesive customer experience.

  Button Bell’s team has redefined the different flavors of roles that marketers need in order to inspire employees and build collaboration across the enterprise. Drawing on career resource information from the University of Michigan about the traits that make a successful marketer, Button Bell went beyond looking at functional roles, and instead focused on the bigger picture. She outlined the functions as:

  Project Manager: Role–execution. Project managers not only run programs and manage campaigns, they oversee IT projects. They also implement the recruiting messaging for human resources, so the company brings the right talent into the organization. This role makes sure that marketing collaborates with other functions within the company.

  Analyst: Role–analyze. This team member is in charge of assembling and mining databases for relevant information. He or she also manages quantitative research.

  Artist: Role–communicate. As a communicator, this marketer “architects” the brand and oversees how it’s being expressed. He or she sculpts the image and perception of Emerson, and articulates the range of knowledge that its experts share.

  Psychologist: Role–feel. By smashing the traditional engineering perspective of a highly rational-based approach to customers, the psychologist understands qualitative market research. He or she then develops personas and explores customer perceptions of Emerson’s brand and product.

  Emerson has defined the different roles they need marketing to fulfill in order to connect with customers, understand research, articulate learnings, collaborate with other groups, and then manage and execute the work. Credit: Emerson

  Orchestrator: Role–lead. As an orchestrator, this marketer keeps things humming so all the parts and pieces are choreographed to get things done. He or she advocates for the customer experience. By connecting to other functions and integrating with internal audiences, the orchestrator also drives relationships and the reputation of marketing within the organization.

  “Business-to-business companies, especially the more you get into manufacturing and heavy industrial companies, value the project manager and analyst,” Button Bell pointed out. “Those are things that engineers can get their head around. Some may see the point of an artist, but not necessarily value it. But when it comes to the psychologist and orchestrator, that’s where marketers bring incredible value, but you can’t measure it in a traditional engineering way. Marketing teams need this blend of flavors in order to evangelize the customer and create a seamless, intuitive business experience. That’s incredibly hard, but critical, especially in complex, siloed B2B companies like Emerson.”

  The Empowered Employee

  Coming back full c
ircle to where Button Bell started—with employees— in order to empower and elevate marketing, she needed to expand the idea of the empowered customer to that of the empowered employee.

  “We’ve all acknowledged the empowered customer, but it’s time to recognize the empowered employee,” Button Bell asserted. “The digital age has brought exceptional transparency and honest views to all employees. We need that for a company the size and scale of Emerson. In order to successfully drive cohesion and a seamless customer experience, we have to communicate as aggressively and consistently internally as we do externally.”

  There’s no group within the enterprise more suited to take on this task because marketers are natural communicators. Button Bell’s team is taking its skill in mapping customer journeys to create an employee journey. This will help the company understand what matters to potential high-performing employees, how to find them and capture their attention, how to woo them into an employment relationship, and how to nurture, grow, and retain them as valuable leaders at all levels of the organization.

  Marketing has the talent to help human resources narrowly target an employee audience—just like it does a customer audience—–and bring the Emerson brand alive by creating passionate, emotional connections.

  “The experience generation is coming up behind us, and we will need to create incredibly customizable and personal experiences,” Button Bell said. “As marketers, we give customers as well as employees something to aspire to.”