Marketing Intelligence by Iain Johnston

Last year I wrote in this column about how your own staff can determine whether your multi-million pound investment in a marketing communications campaign succeeds or fails.

I wrote about how the brilliantly trained Virgin Trains staff can live and breathe their brand and keep passengers smiling, even when the rail network is in chaos, the wrong type of rain is falling, and a badger is on the line.

And as my friends at The Team will tell you, the best service brands are rooted not just in some head of marketing’s ideas for glory, they need to be built on the strongest possible foundations of staff involvement, engagement and everyday action.

More recently, just before my recent holiday (about which more later), creativematch carried my thoughts on the theme.

It is nearly always logical in early stages of planning a campaign with clients that we discuss how a particular communication or message fits in the wider context of their plans and the market. We would always want to address how the campaign will be trained in with staff ahead of time, so they are ready to “live and breathe” the messaging when it hits the media. There is nearly always complete agreement that we should plan appropriate levels of time, critical path and budget to ensure we get the brand right internally before heading out to our customers.

Great.

But when budget pressures arrive, it’s often the internal stuff that goes first: “oh, we’ll get people together for a brief…<whispers: did you get that email out to everyone….?>”

Or worse still, it never ceases to amaze me that the internal launch of a campaign can be an afterthought. Companies will spend millions on a particular marketing campaign, with every element finely crafted, researched and fine tuned to the n-th degree, and yet the first their own staff hear about it is when they see it in a publication, hear it on the radio, or receive it themselves through their letter box.