Marketing Communication Twice Removed, By Jill Schuller
The name of my marketing firm has the word “communications” in it. Why? Because while considering our role and mission, it boiled down to the fact that marketing is just an exercise in communicating with an audience. All businesses communicate their strengths, benefits, and their compelling reasons to choose their company or product over a similar one. Communication is external and internal, and it affects every facet of every organization.
For marketing, we focus on communicating a message that resonates with the end customer. But the key to unlocking that effective message is more complex than filling out a few answers on an intake form: it relies on understanding what problems a company has to overcome, interpreting those problems, having clarity about their target audience’s needs, matching the problem up to a solution, and then finding the best vehicle to drive the message to the buyer and the buyer to the client’s door.
In years past, face-to-face meetings to do ‘discovery’ to develop an understanding, as well as to review creative strategies and solutions, were the only way we did business. Now because so many companies have clients well outside of a quick driving distance, we use teleconferencing and emails and text messages and ftp sites. We have a whole slew of communication tools to make things more convenient and timely, but sometimes go too far and remove us from the face-to-face contact between client and provider.
Which raises a conundrum: Are all the latest communication tools improving communication or complicating it? Is there any business person out there who has not, at least once, expended triple their time trying to re-explain an email to someone that may have misinterpreted the intended message?
