Five ways to keep your marketing department healthy

Internal communications case study

Public Sector

Public sector marketers have a tough job on their hands. They are asking consumers for money or support at a time when people have less disposable income and a greater fear of unemployment. All this on limited advertising budgets.

With these problems lingering in the background, it would be easy for marketers to feel vulnerable themselves, but those working in the public sector are reporting that “extra skills” training and better internal communications are helping ease concerns.

Alison Cowan, director of fundraising and marketing at Missing People, says the charity works hard to build relationships across the business, ensuring that marketers feel part of the whole organisation, rather than isolated.

“We’ve set up regular monthly team lunches where we use whatever discount vouchers are available at the time to get a cheap lunch. We take the opportunity to build team relationships and share ideas and issues,” she explains.

“We recently ran an all-staff session where we challenged the charity’s staff to ‘get to know’ the fundraising and marketing team. We shared a ‘secret’ from each team member and the rest of the staff had to guess to which person the secret belonged.”

Public sector marketers, she suggests, also benefit from the knowledge that their work helps improve society, which can be a powerful motivator even in times of recession when money is sparse.

“As marketers, it can sometimes be hard to stay motivated with very little to spend and the need to raise new funding. But we are lucky in that we only have to look at the walls of our office, which are covered in hundreds of posters of missing adults and children to be reminded of why we are here,” she says.

To reinforce the mission behind the marketing, the team also has weekly meetings with the people who deliver its charity services to the public. It hears their updates on the children and vulnerable adults who have called its helpline in crisis, as well as the families who have come to them for support as they search for a missing loved one.

This helps keep marketers in touch with the reason they do their job – an enviable return on investment in making a job personally satisfying.

Extra skills and internal communications case study

Business to Business

To the casual observer, the business-to-business sector may appear too corporate and profits-oriented to care about internal marketing. But it is this industry where marketers are often valued as core assets to the success of the brand. By using “extra skills” training to improve marketing capability and good internal communication, individual talent can be nurtured.

Electronic Data Systems, recently acquired by Hewlett-Packard, attempts to give marketers broader skills than those found in their day-to-day jobs alone. The company positively encourages marketers to look at other career areas to improve their capability.

Tina Green, its marketing director for UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa, was previously a director of public affairs before venturing into marketing. She explains: “In large business corporations, marketers don’t have to stay in marketing; they have the opportunity to take their skills across any part of the business and demonstrate their skills in that area instead.

This ensures that even if pure marketing jobs aren’t available, there are still career opportunities. “It means we can keep marketers motivated through development, so that when vacancies come up elsewhere they have the skills to fill that position easily,” she explains.

Green adds that it’s important to recognise personal sacrifices and make the company more suited to its marketers. She says that small concessions by organisations can often have a large effect on motivation.

“The challenging economic environment means marketers make personal sacrifices to complete work and while salaries are capped, we look to reward them in different ways like family days, discounted HP products and discounts from other HP commercial partners,” she explains.

At Google, the brand where most marketers want to work, according to Marketing Week’s 2008 Top Employers Survey (MW 13 November, 2008), it’s about keeping the job itself interesting on a daily basis so there is obvious skills development.

 Dan Cobley, Google’s director of marketing for the UK, Ireland and Benelux, says: “Business-to-business marketing is all about helping our large advertisers make the most of the opportunity, with research and events helping the salesforce engage with big businesses to understand what Google can do to make them more successful. The constant challenge makes the job more appetising to our marketers.”

Jirina Yates, head of EMEA marketing at business communications specialist Avaya, says that enabling staff to work flexibly, while maintaining regular internal communication, is the key to her team of marketers remaining motivated. Again, it is balancing this with a more personal touch.

“You can’t over-communicate; marketers expect to be communicated to and know what is going on and when. The key is to maintain a life-work balance. I do this by allowing staff flexible working patterns and running an open-door policy,” she says. “We also keep morale up by holding regular brainstorming sessions and exercise collective thoughts – sharing makes it all more bearable and keeps morale on the up.”

Transparency and good communication are also the watchwords at office solutions company Ricoh, with messages from senior managers encouraging staff.

Ricoh UK marketing director Chas Moloney says: “Constant positivity from the chief executive and board of directors helps to keep everyone feeling motivated and valued. It helps to inspire marketers with tools, ideas and opinions.

“We are in a tough environment, so any sense of positivity is well received and helps to keep marketers creative in a quest to maintain high market share.”

Internal communications case study

PR

The worlds of marketing and PR have become increasingly close over the past few years as techniques such as “word of mouth” grow increasingly important for getting the most out of campaigns.

Despite this increasing demand for its services, the industry has been hit by the recession and has seen budgets and new business shrink, while existing clients rely on them to avoid negative reports. As a result, PR industry chiefs are turning to their core skill of communication to keep executives motivated.

Richard Millar, chief executive of WPP-owned agency Hill & Knowlton, says: “Times are tough internally and externally, so you have to over-communicate with your staff to ensure that they know they are valued and are doing a great job.

“You can’t shrink the volume and leave people in fear for their job safety. We realised this and stopped using digital means to communicate with staff, favouring the face-to-face approach instead.”

Hill & Knowlton chooses to focus on explaining challenges and heralding achievements with its staff on a weekly basis. It also boosts morale by doing collaborative charity works and team-building exercises. Millar adds: “By using opportunities to address negatives through team-bonding and brainstorming events, we know we are getting the best out of our team and keeping them motivated.”

Scott McKenzie, the chair of the internal communications working group of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, heralds this approach. He says: “It’s essential that companies are seen to be investing in people, even with limited resources. The use of internal marketing helps to encourage staff to do their best against all the economic turmoil and expose their talent as best they can. When they come out of the worst, they can apply the lessons they learnt in future endeavours.”

But David Bells, a director of Garnett Keeler Public Relations, warns that any internal communication must have its roots in reality to seem credible. Transparency is more important than putting a good spin on a situation.

“Initiatives to maintain morale must be grounded, believable, credible, evidence-based and must have integrity.  It isn’t about what happens at the interface between management and employees; there is no magic formula for using communications to raise morale when the news is bad,” he argues. “Employees are generally not stupid and will see through any such programme pretty quickly.”

Those firms that manage to get it right, however, will achieve a reputational boost that will take the company far beyond the short-term bad times; those seen to be “spinning” or ignoring the situation will suffer. Lorraine Barker, head of the PR division at recruitment company Major Players, says that PR consultants are relying on word-of-mouth feedback to determine if a company is worth joining when the economy recovers.

She says: “If a company ignores the power of internal marketing and employees are left distressed, then it will suffer when the economy lifts and candidates look for new positions. To the employee it becomes apparent that the company doesn’t recognise good talent and cannot nurture them.”

Creative push and mentoring case study

Marketing Agency

Marketing agencies have faced the effects of the recession first-hand as their clients begin reducing budgets and cutting back on media expenditure. Traditionally hubs for young creatives, pressure from clients to cut costs has meant that agencies have cut back on their own expenditure.

Ian Millner, chief executive of Iris, says the onset of the recession has had a “massive impact” on the independent agency. It has had to come up with initiatives to keep morale up among those people developing creative ideas.

“We’ve gone from increasing business 50% year on year to having clients asking us to freeze work for a period of time,” he says. “We had to re-evaluate our spending drastically, which led to a decline in morale and questions as to whether we had become too corporate.”

To address the issues and keep the balance of idea-generation high and costs low, Millner began a programme of communication with employees, explaining clearly why things had changed and challenging people to see the creative opportunities posed by the situation.

“It was all about making people feel empowered and making sure they realise how important they are to us. We set up regular meetings so that people could come together and co-create new creatives. Each agency division also set up their own morale-boosting events like ‘Mad Hatter tea parties’,” recalls Millner.

The new approach aimed to ensure that marketers were able to keep up creative development in their career. The agency also started a mentor programme, graduate scheme, a development academy and “have your say” opportunities.

Millner says the mentoring and emphasis on opportunities has helped boost the agency staff’s spirit. “It’s all connected to eradicating the circumstances from external factors and bringing back a culture so that when clients ask, our teams are always happy and able to give them their creative best.”

Jeremy Shaw, chairman of Kitcatt Nohr Alexander Shaw, says that companies that help employees develop ideas and see creativity as a positive influence, rather than a costly nice-to-have, are those which will benefit in the long term.

“They thrive on innovation, growth and change. So it’s tough to keep the marketing troops happy when budgets are cut. But smart marketers can thrive on this too,” he says. “Just as great creatives can come up with wonderful ideas on a restricted canvas, so smart marketers can relish the extra spur to innovation and imagination that restricted budgets bring.”

He adds: “We have to work smarter. Delivering great campaigns on low budgets brings a satisfaction of its own. The real officer material emerges more quickly from the ranks.”

Internal marketing academies and creativity case study

Consumer-facing brands

Many consumer-facing companies are trying to cheer up customers through the recession with cheerful and optimistic campaigns but internal positivity can be tricky when brands are chopping marketing staff.

The insurance sector is one of many industries to have felt the strain of the recession. RSA Insurance Group’s group director of strategy, marketing and customer, Clare Sheikh, says developing a marketing academy for the organisation has helped to keep employees motivated.

“We have embedded marketing into the heart of our company so that anyone can learn about marketing skills and use them in their future careers,” she claims. She says this lets marketers learn “any aspect of the company they want to” and boosts both the working patterns of the business and the individuals.

“It’s all part of sustaining engagement and developing our brand internally, helping anyone determine their own career path,” she adds.

Other companies such as telecoms business TalkTalk are also using its external brand activities to engage its marketers and other employees. TalkTalk sponsors TV talent show The X Factor and took a roadshow to all of its business sites. It gave employees the chance to become “bright stars” by creating their own dances for the idents appearing on ITV during The X Factor. 

Olivia Streatfeild, TalkTalk’s marketing director, says: “It’s vital to drive engagement, excitement and buzz around the brand

and ensure that marketers feel that the brand’s relaunch is a project worth feeling motivated about.”

Jean-Michel Boujon, head of marketing for recruitment website TheLadders, says this sort of activity helps keeps marketers interested and motivated in their jobs even when financial career development is not an option. “If employees can understand as a business and a team what you are working towards, it puts the decisions and changes that are made along the way into context,” he claims.

Retailer HMV has also been conducting its internal marketing by treating its marketers in the same way they in turn treat their consumers. Gennaro Castaldo, director of communications, explains that the firm’s brand proposition about getting closer to music, film and games works just as well for motivating marketers as consumers.

“It’s about bringing everyone together through their passion for the product. We’ve also been developing our CSR and community engagement activities and these have had a huge galvanising effect, especially at store level,” he reports. Involving marketers on pushing society-friendly initiatives can be a cost-effective way of keeping interest levels high.

In the manufacturing sector, which has had to reduce supply due to plummeting levels of demand, businesses are relying on internal communications programmes to push the future potential of a marketing role, despite a lack of activity.

David Warfel, director of global marketing at Zippo, says a positive mentality has been essential. “It’s all about trying to get marketers to recall how good things were when we were busy, and trying to instil that positivism back into the mindset of the marketer by reminding them that the best is yet to come.”

Top tips

Internal marketing

• Build trust and improve retention by developing a good internal marketing and/or communications plan that is open and transparent at all times;
• Ensure that your department/company’s organisational goals and talent strategy are obvious to your marketers, so they feel they have objectives to meet;
• Consider extra training or development opportunities, either internally or externally;
• Put in place career paths for marketers so they feel they can become corporate leaders in the future;
• Find ways to incentivise staff as alternatives to bonuses and monetary rewards – days out, discount vouchers, flexible working, career development;
• Explore as many learning and development opportunities as possible through external and internal mentoring and coaching;
• Ideas come at no expense – they can even save money. Companies with ideas are also better places to work and this ensures higher morale;
• Encourage more teamwork across the business and help staff identify any mutual opportunities or problems common to the whole business.