The mail must get through - or in our case the message . . .

A few years back I remember reading a report that suggested that the average person was on the receiving end of around 1500 marketing messages every single day. The vast majority of these make no impression whatsoever. If you don't believe me just try to produce a list of adverts that you definitely remember seeing yesterday - if you get to five you'll be doing well. This illustrates the scale of the problem confronting the marketing team that is about to launch a new campaign. Of course, this was before the Internet became ubiquitous, so I hate to think what the number would be today.

But marketing people are smart - they employ a full range of tricks and techniques to ensure that their particular message has impact and is memorable. Undoubtedly, one of the most important of these tools is repetition. These days that doesn't just mean multiple inserts in the same magazine or regular placement. It means achieving consistency and synergy across multiple communications media and has given rise to new service lines from advertising agencies to design campaigns that support multiple, parallel communications threads. This is all very clever stuff.

In an ideal world the message should reach the customer with the clarity and impact of its original conception - at the same time everywhere in the world. This becomes really important if you sell globally. The moment the message becomes public the competition can start to compose their response - so delays carrying the message to the furthest outpost of the business are really bad news. Likewise, the "Chinese Whispers" problem - when the message changes slightly each time it is repeated - is equally destructive. Instead of reinforcing each other, different deliveries to the same customer may even contradict each other.

In addition to all the somewhat abstract measures about brand values and unprompted recall, what you also get at the end of all this effort, and very considerable expenditure, is someone who holds up their hand and says "come and talk to me" - a prospective customer. This is definitely the bit of the whole process that the sales team likes best.

The thrust of this article is to point out that it would be really helpful if the sales person is equipped to have a conversation with the customer that bears some passing relationship to the message that attracted the customer's attention. This is really about ensuring that the company's communications have integrity and consistency. It all seems straightforward enough - even obvious - but it can be remarkably difficult to achieve.

The lesson of Eli Goldratt was that the speed of the scout troop must be set by the slowest person - if they are all to arrive at the same time. Using this analogy, you shouldn't actually launch the campaign until the delivery mechanism has been fully primed to deliver the message. Interesting idea - I'm not sure it will catch on.

Bob Brown

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Also in this issue . . . .

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