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Business Review 2006 from
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Keeping the ship on course
Matt Reynolds
director, MRT Marketing
The careful design of communication content is of paramount strategic importance to every sort of business.
It can be used to galvanise personnel within a company, favorably differentiate a business against other similar organisations and act as the underlying catalyst to achieve sustained growth.
Company personnel need to be educated about communication content and consistency so they can truly appreciate how their communication affects the success of the business. Communication skills should be nurtured and refined accordingly.
Not to put too fine a point on this, an organisation can be regarded as a ship sailing towards its business vision, using numerous directional strategies to reach each port along the way. Each and every communication breakdown, resulting from communication content apathy, veers the vessel off course. The number and extent of communicaton breakdowns experienced will dictate how far the ship is adrift from its intended destination, which may result in a number of ports being missed and the ship losing its way altogether.
ClichÈ
The somewhat clichÈd 'power of communication' is often taken for granted by organisations. In the main, communication is centralised through marketing departments.
These departments are often perceived by the other parts of the business as enigmas that are in turn conditioned to solely undertake functional, administrational and reporting roles as directed by senior managers and directors.
This diminished level of marketing responsibility shrouds the communication potential that could be realised.
The fundamental indicator of success of any marketing department is sustained organisational growth. Within a fluid company, communication runs in a continual loop from top to bottom ensuring that everyone understands, embraces and contributes to the identity of the company, strategic vision and resulting strategies.
Planned marketing activities are presented to personnel who are actively encouraged to provide feedback. Feedback is considered and acted upon prior to campaigns going to market. In this way, personnel take ownership of all marketing activities and the marketing department's efforts are understood as having strategic importance. The company has one voice and complete belief in the strategic vision. Beyond this, the communication loop extends outwards to project the shared company identity and specific messages to its customers and contacts. Customers that enter into dialogue with the company, as a result of the marketing activities undertaken, receive consistent communication that reinforce their expectations; greatly increasing the likelihood of securing additional revenue. This dovetailed internal and external communications approach creates the most favourable conditions to generate significant returns from any marketing activity undertaken.
This business scenario paints a picture of an ideal communication framework. However, it does not highlight what communication content brings to bear on all of this.
Every type of communication contains a message that is open to interpretation. Thoroughly appreciating how messages are likely to be interpreted by the target audience is key. Without this level of understanding, any communication conveyed within, or projected out of an organisation will be lost in translation.
Vision
Personnel will find it difficult to embrace a unified company identity and strategic vision, and in turn customers will receive mixed organisational messages; adversely affecting their trust in the business offering.
By adopting a philosophy of strategic communications, organisations can create the necessary cultural change required to sail the company on the course intended. This philosophy embodies evaluation and review of the business, its' vision, strategies and culture; an appropriate communication change programme for the entire organisation; and the development of personnel charged with responsibility for content communication. These personnel should work throughout the organisation to ensure that all communication content is considered and has a positive and correct bearing on the business. Their role should extend from advising and assisting Directors with business strategies to educating staff on business to business/customer correspondence. Communication content should be driven from within an organisation to take account of all advertising, personal selling and public relations activities.
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