Working in the World of Communications

PR & Comms is an interesting business. On the one hand you need to get to grips fast with products, services, industries and sometimes the politics within those industries. You also need to understand the passion many clients have for their jobs, what they sell and their beliefs and values. However, you also need to understand that what is an interesting read/watch for their customer so often you have two clients in mind - the client paying and the end user of their product or service. Each piece of content has to be pitched or engaged by someone else – normally someone who isn’t invested in the particular product or service or brand your client is hoping to sell, hence the reason they need your support.

Your role in communications is to make that piece of information interesting, relevant to the reader or watcher and bridge the gap between client and audience – it’s what we call “sprinkling the gold dust”. Although that sounds very fairytale it is actually a lot more complex than it sounds. To understand how to get the gold dust right you need to firstly understand your target audience. Or even audiences. Getting to grips with exactly who they are, rather than who you think they are, including their likes/dislikes, demographics, what they watch and read, where they go, where they shop – and backing those profiles with evidence rather than speculation. Secondly you need to understand how your brand relates to those audiences. Does it help them solve a problem, or does it make them feel better about themselves?

You need to make sure your point of engagement is different than your competitors – so the product you are promoting might clean dishes but why is it better than all the other dish washers in the market? You need to convey these point of differences to your target audiences, in a language they understand. So, if you are working in healthcare, for example, you will call the target audience patients for doctors, service users for social workers and tenants for those working in housing. You might talk about convenience if it is a local store, but value for money if it is aimed at students. Then you need to wrap all this up – the key messages, the target audiences, the customer journey, the gold dust - and ensure you are finding the right platform to promote it on.

Yet it doesn’t stop there. Once you have undertaken a communications campaign, you then need to think of a creative concept to be able to start all over again, saying the same messages, to the same audience, but in a different story, over and over again. Until it weaves into their consciousness.

Unlike other careers, communications isn’t an exact science. Sometimes you can be lucky – you hit a theme that resonates with the audience due to macro issues out of your control – so for example, talking about an online retail innovation as a major department store closes down, can help your story. Sometimes you can be championed by a celebrity or influencer – there are a few fairy godmothers in the world of fashion and beauty – look at the fates of Philip Treacy and Alexander McQueen once Isabella Blow took them under her wing.

Start Early – be bold, be brave

My advice to those wanting to get into the world of comms though is to start early and learn your craft. Start writing a blog, have a YouTube channel and get to understand how to engage your own audience first before you offer your services to others. Be bold. Be brave. Don’t worry what others think. Look at local opportunities that you can build into bigger ones. I wrote a travel column for my local newspapers while on a gap year, I took work experience at the news desks of my two local radio stations and slept on friends of friends’ sofas to work at now defunct Look Now and 19 magazines.

I stepped into the unknown by knocking on the door of my student newspaper office and asking Jay Rayner, yes the Jay Rayner, whether I could be commissioned for an article. Two months later I got the job as Joint Music and Arts Editor on Leeds Student. They were heady days and ones which I loved as I felt privileged to be writing something that someone might want to read. And persevere. I didn’t get onto the London School of Journalism (I think I scored about 1/10 on my general knowledge) and I didn’t end up editor of Cosmopolitan (although I did work for them in their marketing department).

Finally, find something you really enjoy and believe in. So if you are passionate about animals out of the office, look to work in comms for an animal charity or a pet store. Being genuine about what you are promoting and putting yourself in the shoes of the consumer is always easier when you feel the product or service is great.

Communications is a great career choice and one that can be massively satisfying but also very underplayed. Be prepared to work hard and find your niche and it can be a flexible, lifetime choice of career.

Capturing a Digital Nomad

Capturing the attention & imagination and the hearts & wallets of a target audience has always been a hard ask. There is no doubt this challenge has got harder as the market has become busier with more platforms to sell, more products and more services – and a nod to “less is more”, austerity and the “need over want” movement.

Clever marketers have used location and environment - through geomapping or hotspotting - to be able to place their customers and market to them effectively. However, what happens when that customer changes their location and their environment weekly, even daily? What happens if their working environment – like me on holiday – goes from an office in Brighton to the ski slopes of New Zealand? When your target customers’ constants are not constant and their needs and wants could be changing day in, day out?

The answer lies in the brand.

We are entering a world where choice is at a maximum. Whether it’s the choice of what to wear, the phone we use or the coffee we drink or the choice of where we work and how we work. With every one of your customers’ choices comes multiple options from providers offering better deals, different products with different benefits. To be able to make your product or service the chosen one of choice, customers need to know and trust your brand.

Good brand relationships are a bit like good friendships - they need to understand what you are about, and like a friendship, choose to have you as part of their life. It’s about having the same values so that whatever the situation you remain relevant to them – wherever and whenever. It means customers understanding what your brand values are and being clear in your communications about what your brand stands for and standing by it.

Like all the best friendships, you might need some time away from each other for a while – so maybe if that digital nomad is travelling you connect in work mode but not in rest mode. It might be that your brand is relevant across both work and play but like a good friend needs different things from you at different times. In brand terms that could be the phone that takes the best photographs and allows you to download them super-fast, but in work mode means has the capability to connect you to your colleagues on the other side of the world. For a coffee brand, that could mean a coffee cup that collapses so you can take your “keep cup” with you on the go, and a loyalty scheme that works across the world.

It also means knowing your place and not overstepping the line. So, for example, it might mean offering downtime on your phone or encourage less data usage for rest periods. It might mean no adverts during the weekend or after 6pm. It might mean no winter promotional offers for those travelling to hotter climes and vice versa.

There is no doubt that the way we live and work is changing rapidly – and mapping our customers’ lifestyles will become a tactical task, rather than a strategic approach. Understanding the strength of your brand and how you can adapt to their adapting landscapes will be the answer to a truly successful brand of the future.

Collective Communication

I spent a day this week confined to the halls of Olympia at a trade show for those in the learning industry.  As anyone who has attended a similar exhibition will know, they are full of companies showing their wares, those shouting about trends, the latest innovations and a ton of gimmicks - cupcake anyone?

As well as being exhausting for those present across the full two days, they often spark great ideas, put faces to names and hopefully a chance to firm up those virtual deals face-to-face.  As a consultant whose main objective is to represent clients, I am normally looking for the Next Big Thing. Not what someone else is showcasing but what the company I am working for can be doing. 

Having attended a number of similar events over the last few months across different sectors, you begin to start seeing some macro trends emerging. Not surprising when you think that most companies need to think about similar issues - technology, people, profit, etc.  But for the first time ever there seems to be a wave happening in all industries that could influence and infiltrate the way we work.

I have also been reading The Economist's MegaChange 2050: The World in 2050, whose authors touch on four different themes - People and relationships, Heaven and earth, Economy and business and Knowledge and progress - with a futuristic nod to what they think is ahead. 

And to me, it all seems to be coming back to one thing - User Generated Content. Crowdsourcing of intelligence, of ideas. Collective information and collective decisions.

As of the fourth quarter of 2016, Facebook had 1.86 billion monthly active users. If FB was a nation it would be the third most populous on Earth outside of China and India. So it is no surprise that Facebook is utilising this community not only to generate its own content but also to moderate and filter content for others.  Martin Giles in MegaChange 2050: The World in 2050 predicts what many of us already know that friends’ opinion count and that content will be curated by friends in the future.

However, the change for the future will be in the content that is curated. Moving from baby photos and updates on martial status, the news that will be shared from your friends will be world events, their opinions on these world events and their friends’ comments on their opinions. So effectively friends and friends of friends become the social filter of content.

The Pew Institute claimed that in the 2008 Presidential Election over 20% of US adults with access to a computer used social media as a way of getting information about the candidates and their policies.  Not news sites, not manifestos, but what their friends and influencers thought.

Social media cuts through social-economic status and allows us to talk to people we would never talk to about things we would previously would never discuss with all and sundry.

So what does this mean for brands? And how do B2B businesses work in an environment where more and more people are being influenced by the 360 Effect?

At Antelope, we believe it’s about being part of the conversation and having a voice in the debate around them. It’s about being transparent and realising there will be the naysayers as well as the advocates. It’s about promoting yourself, sure, but also about not being arrogant or cocksure.  It’s about showing your values and getting people to know you, as if they don’t know you, how can they like you?

It’s welcoming your users (your customers) to talk about you and joining in with them. It means being not only proactive in your content, but looking at the content about you and around you and participating in it. It’s seeking out the conversations in the corridors, by the water fountain and joining in.

It means a well planned content strategy and one that is agile and flexible. It means having a genuine voice. It’s a little more complex than the odd blog, the occasional tweet and posting across Hootsuite. That’s why companies who hope to be around in 2050 are already the ones who are not only listening to their customers, but those allowing them to talk.
 

All I Want for Christmas...

So December is edging closer and closer. The John Lewis advert is live. There is a nip in the air. My children have already written their lists to Santa. Christmas is definitely around the corner.  As young innocent faces look with excitement and anticipation at the presents stacked under the tree, their eyes glinting with the fairy lights and advent candles, the question is 'Will they get what they really want this Christmas?"  And if they do get their heart's desire, will it really live up to expectations? Change their life?  Make them better, funnier, prettier, and more popular?

Marketing and communications campaigns can be a bit like Christmas morning. (Bear with me here, it’s not as tenacious as you think).  The client briefs an agency, or a consultant, or an in-house team looking for them to transform the hearts and minds of their customers with a succinct, stylish, engaging and impactful campaign that raises awareness, gets 10,000s of inches of media coverage, is a viral phenomenon and of course, drives their product or service into the number one slot in their market.

However, sometimes, just like Christmas presents, what the client thinks they want as opposed to what they really want or need, is quite different. And often the challenge is getting clients to realise this, understand the gap between customers’ perception and their own and put their trust in a good communications consultant, either internal or external.

A great example of this is clients who tender out for a new website - new branding, new copy, new approach. Often well needed as company websites are like mattresses, well used and often out of date, although essential, often forgotten.  So the client brief explains the history of the company, what they do, who they are, and why they are wonderful. Yet, do they think about their customers’ needs? Do they address these needs? Do they tailor different areas for different audience sectors? Or do they stand on top of the mountain and shout loudly about how great they are? The agency that doesn’t massage the client’s ego, but thinks about the best way to engage with their audiences, is the agency that in the long term will bring the best return on investment.

It is like the guest at the dinner party who sits all night talking about themselves, without asking questions to their neighbouring guest, or even tempering the conversation to mutual interests.  What will be the lasting impression of the guest? A bore. A massive ego. Tiresome. The guest who listens, who carves their conversation according to the interest piqued by certain subjects and who enquires as well as engages will be the one that everyone wants to be friends with when the dinner plates are cleared away.

So back to my Christmas analogy.  If you don’t get what you really want for Christmas, don’t despair, it could be the exact thing you need this Christmas, but just don’t realise it.  Don’t be swayed by the glossy wrapping paper or the branded box, take a real look inside what is on offer.  And if you still can’t see the value, there is always next Christmas. 

"If you always do what you've always done...

...you'll always get what you've always got."  Henry Ford. 

It's easy to keep doing the things you have always done, the way you have always done it. It feels safe, it often feels right.  

How many successful women and men of our time have been doubted in the beginning? Walt Disney "lacked imagination and had no good ideas" according to his previous employer; Anna Wintour was seen as "too edgy" and Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard before starting Traf-O-Data that folded.  Even Steven Spielberg was rejected three times by the University of Southern California School of Theatre, Film and Television.

Change often feels difficult. Looking at things differently, thinking differently and persuading people to do things differently - be it your manager, your team, or even your partner - can be an uphill battle. That's why many enterprises work with management consultants or with change management strategists to give them a structure and support through change.

At Antelope we believe in change. Life is changing constantly, with time never staying still and brands, consumers, suppliers and teams needing to evolve to keep up.

In the world of communications, we believe the change that has taken place with the onslaught of the Internet brings amazing opportunities for our clients. From the days of silos of communication with newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations we now live in a world of omnichannel or integrated communications, heralded with social media feeds, visualised through images and infographics and endorsed, if you are lucky, through your customers on review sites and forums. 

That's why we offer an integrated approach to our communications. We take the essence of what you are, what we call your "gold dust" and then we use this as the crux of your messaging for your inbound marketing - writing your blogs, tweeting and posting your comments - and then repurpose this content for your outbound communications - newsletters, advertising, PR and media placement and email communications.

We believe what we do is different. And we believe the benefits of what we offer are different. Fancy a change? Let us help you be different.