30 October, 2009 • 4:57 pm
First, a HAPPY THIRD BIRTHDAY to Death To Internal Marketing (DTIM).
Hard to believe we’ve been having this conversation for some 1,100 days.
On to business…
I am currently working on several strategic corporate brand positioning exercises, all including important employee engagement requirements, for very different businesses. Different sizes, geographic scope, and industries.
Yet their stories are remarkably, eerily similar.
All have started as “provincial” players who excelled at one thing. They got a bit bigger and more confident, and started adding services both organically and through acquisition.
All of their brands face similar challenges:
- product or service lines that have broadly greater equity than the emergent “Corporate” monolithic brand that is seen to be required to bring clarity, order and efficiency to ensuring the brand strategy supporting the business strategy.
- cultural differences at both social and corporate levels, internally and with client/customer/marketplace
Something tells me that if all of the projects I am working on have such similarities, it must be a broader brand issue — SMEs finding their feet in new markets and a requirement for more sophisticated brand strategy. Which requires investment.
I think we will see some interesting developments in SME branding in the coming year…
Filed under: Uncategorized
8 October, 2009 • 3:36 pm
“Why is there so little innovation in internal communication and employee engagement?” was the question. My answer is, “Because most internal communication and engagement associations are inwardly-focussed.” We tend to follow trends, not create them (example: social media).
A great example of the kind of thinking our profession needs is this example - from Coca-Cola. In short, when you own 70% of the soft drink vending machine market and your approach hasn’t really changed in a lifetime, where do you look for inspiration? I suspect many IC peers would look at other soft drink vending operators and ape what they are doing.
Coca-Cola looked at medical devices. You know, things that mix substances with water to dispense medicine for diabetes or chemotherapy and so on. The result? The next generation of vending machine that serves more than 100 products.
I know, I am ranting against my industry. You’d be used to it by now. The thinking that got us here won’t get us somewhere more interesting. Maybe TowersPerrin will go buy Linkfluence, but I somehow doubt it.
Filed under: Uncategorized
6 October, 2009 • 3:11 pm
A good article over at BusinessWeek on how design thinking is gaining pace and starting to gain traction. In essence it’s broader, more creative thinking about how to solve problems and drive strategy than traditional silo-managed and owned ways of working. Dave Armano pushes it into social media and the idea of a “collaboratory“. Have a gander…
It links in to systems thinking and Dan Gray and my ongoing crusade against an internal communications / change communications / employee engagement / employer brand community that seems hell-bent on driving incremental competence-led changes rather than higher-level approaches to delivering more to the organisations we work with.
In other words, to paraphrase Einstein, the thinking that got us here is not the thinking that is going to get us out of here. It’s not about better employee surveys, or using social media as a communication channel, or getting better at writing for the web, etc. These are all tactics, and valulable ones, but we need to be looking at a new toolbox, or a bigger van…
Filed under: Employee engagement, brand, brand engagement, digital engagement, employee communication, employer brand, hr and brand, internal communication, internal marketing, organisational communication
