Training for More Effective Communication

In talking to clients, Pure Communications has become increasingly aware that traditional communications is going the way of the dodo – you know, where every communications team has its strategist, and its executors. More and more companies are looking for talented generalists, rather than specialists. With this in mind, training has become more important than before, especially when it means being able to add a few more strings to the bows of current staff.

Pure Communications therefore brings to bear decades of communications expertise in its latest offering of communications training courses. All courses can be conducted workshop style with up to 12 participants, or seminar style. Fees will be quoted upon a brief from clients.

Corporate Training

Brand ambassador training

People talk – it’s unavoidable. How can companies and their communications teams take control of the conversation to make sure that the conversations about their company is positive? This course – a half-day workshop – tells you how. Who should attend: HR professionals, corporate communicators, business leaders.

Brand evangelism/revival

When a company is going through a bad patch and the brand has lost of bit of its glitter, what is the most cost-effective way of making sure that the brand is talked about passionately by all its key audiences. This course takes participants through a phased, measurable, approach to developing and  implementing a brand evangelism and revival campaign. Who should attend: Corporate communicators and business leaders.

Brand traits and key message development

This highly interactive workshop works with business leaders, managers and marketing communications professionals to identify key brand traits and ’sexy’ key messages which can then be deployed through all communications campaigns and customer touch points. One key element of this workshop is a market landscape exercise which will test the efficacy of the messages to ensure that they are differentiated from competitors’ and are memorable. Who should attend: Marketing communications professionals and business managers and/or leaders.

Note: This workshop can also be run on a one to one basis to prepare top executives for a communications exercise.

Strategic internal communications workshops

Internal communications has been the buzzword of recent times, but very few companies use it to support corporate events – such as mergers, acquisitions and, as is more to the point today, for retrenchment exercises. The quality of communication between management groups and employee groups are directly correlated to staff morale and on-the-job effectiveness – and its brand as an employer of choice. Apart from teaching the basic differences between internal and external communications, this workshop takes participants through an internal communications campaign development exercise utilising current tools and budgets available to show that internal communications need not be an additional expense. Who should attend: Corporate communicators, corporate leadership team.

Corporate communications and corporate marketing

Public relations is often said to be the single best tool in the communications mix for building a brand. For one, it is cheaper than advertising. Secondly, there is a wide range of (cost effective) tools available to communicators to make sure that the brand is always visible. This workshop takes participants through a strategy development process for a corporate marketing and/or branding campaign using communications tools other than advertising and by the end of the workshop, participants should have the framework of an 12-18 month campaign ready to roll. Who should attend: Corporate communicators, sales and marketing leads.

Corporate writing skills training

This is a basic skills training course which provides tips and tricks to making corporate material, such as press releases, annual reports and brochures more readable and easily understood by audiences. Who should attend: Corporate communicators.

Interview skills/presentation skills training

This is standalone, or a component of the message development workshop. A modified version is also run with the Marketing No. 1, Marketing You workshop for individuals, or the message development workshop for corporate communicators and spokespeople. This workshop, which can be deployed as a half day seminar or a full day workshop, including a video-playback session for more rigorous training, seeks to train individuals to ace interviews and indeed, tough conversations of all kinds. These could be an annual general meeting, or a meeting of the board, or any meeting  you will have to sell yourself and/or your ideas.   However, because the nature of various interviews are different, the course content is adapted to provide a basic grounding in orientating messaging to the audience – whether it is a hiring manager, a seasoned journalist or a disgruntled shareholder group. Who whould attend: all corporate spokespeople, and anyone with products/servicecs to sell.

Of navels and key messages

Having been around the block a few times with various marketing teams, I find that there are very few companies out there willing to invest properly in creating effective, differentiated messaging – with the emphasis on ‘differentiated’. Too often, as a consultant, I hear people telling me – but we talk to our customers all the time, we know what they want.

In our most intimate relationships, we know that we sometimes soft soap the truth so as not too hurt feelings. Here in Asia, where sometimes causing someone else to lose face is a huge taboo, not telling it like it is is par for the course. So why is it that so many people say they know what their customers want? And if they really did know, why aren’t they closing more sales than they are?

Navel-gazing is  the latest corporate short-cut – understandable in the current economic climate but really, rather short sighted

I would like to suggest that more of an investment in terms of market research is called for – and I don’t mean an intern surfing the internet to see what’s out there. It is always (I think) worthwhile investing in an objective, blind or even double blind study to get a sense of the lie of the land, at least to benchmark your go to market plans. I have conducted numerous studies myself to benchmark messaging and positioning – and there has not been a single instance where I did not get an ‘aha’ moment.

With good planning, this study could be good for up to 2 years. Isn’t two years of certainty (or as much you can get these days) worth investing in, rather than navel gazing and second guessing?

This single exercise could yield huge dividends – in terms of corporate strategy, product development strategy, marketing strategy and yes, differentiated messaging.

For when you communicate in a way that sets you apart from the competition, you are memorable. And isn’t that the name of the game – to be set apart so that customer remember what you stand for, and that (hopefully) is something that they want in a product/service/partner?

I train corporate spokespeople and communicators in message development, and sometimes we are grasping at straws for differentiated messaging – simply because we don’t have data to build a message platform. And when the leadership  team of a company cannot articulate why their product/service is better than the rest, we’ve got problems.

The world is changing right before our eyes – companies we once thought inviolate are slowly, painfully crumbling. We would have bet the farm on Citi a scant year ago, but today, the sun rises daily in a world where Citi is teteering on its foundations.  Now, more than ever, research is called for, because we really can’t see beyond our own noses and objective research is the best thing we have to navigate by.

Of digital conversations and internal marketing

When the internet was the best thing since sliced bread – a decade ago – marketers all round the world could not wait to deploy their online marketing campaigns to target millions of customers, both current and new.

Today, ironically, as I reflect on why I am such a believer in the use of digital communications in internal marketing, I realise it is because this medium’s single best value proposition is the basis of its promise years ago – the ability to build intimate relationships with many, at the touch of a button, at the fraction of the cost of a traditional direct mail campaign.

Conversing with select, discrete communities is a key strength of online communications

What makes the online medium more powerful is that groups of people can interact with each other, sharing information and shape perceptions almost as and when information hits the ether and travels across the world in a heartbeat. The challenge for digital communicators is to influence the ongoing conversation and to manage the noise.

What’s the difference between how we perceive the online medium today, compared to a decade ago?

Firstly, today we recognise that to see it as a means to build an intimate relationship with millions of people is oversold. It is a great means to pull these millions into the shade of the corporate brand umbrella but greater intimacy is still elusive.

However, using the online medium to communicate with discrete, known audience communities – to employees, particular customer sets (such as premium customers, or all customers who like the colour green, for example) and partners – is coming into its own, especially with social networking sites being leveraged by marketers.

For companies whose products and services are costly and take months to install – such as all kinds of infrastructure vendors – a site for project teams to share information and learnings is a useful platform to smooth the implementation process. A simple blogsite would do the trick here.

Second, we have realised that no matter how powerful, or cool, there still no substitute for face to face communication, or more tactile interactions with products and services. The online world will never replace bricks and mortar – well, at least not in my lifetime, simply because human beings still want to be able to see, touch, smell, hear and talk to gather experential knowledge. Part of this is because there have been instances in the past where the digital face presented to the world was not all it was purported to be – hence, online interactions are therefore tinged with some sceptism. So, traditional marketers can breathe easy.

Last (at least for this post), we have realised that to build an intimate relationship with many, a huge investment is needed – if not financially, then certainly in terms of resources to keep the conversation going. One side-effect of the pervasiveness of the internet is impatience. People can so easily click out that if new information and answers are not available almost immediately – certainly within 24 hours at the very most, a relationship opportunity is lost. And, like most relationships, it would take more to recover, than simply to build it from scratch. Thus, to keep budgets manageable, marketers and communicators have scaled back their audience targets, and campaign parameters.

Bottom line? The digital medium has emerged as the ideal platform for internal marketing. Staff audiences are discrete, profile-able based on their HR records, have implicitly given their permission by joining the company, and have a stake in the company and its business. Plus, most companies at least have email, thus they can be communicated to. If they have an intranet, then the stage is set for internal marketing campaigns to influence corporate culture, staff perceptions and behaviour.

Role of HR in Employer Branding

Good employers build a sense of unity and pride of belonging amongst staff

Is it possible to build a strong employer of choice brand position without the involvement of human resource partners? It certainly is possible, but – to my mind – this is a path that is fraught with problems, stumbling blocks and wrong turns.

Building an employer of choice position in the general market place begins inside the company, and in building brand ambassadors amongst staff. If people say good things about their employers, prospective employees tend to believe them – much more than anything they might read in the newspapers or hear on the radio. If people are lining up to join a company simply on the basis of their perception of the brand (I’d really like to work with that company) then you are a preferred employer.

Apart from financial stability and strong business prospects, a preferred employer is also marked by a halo of several intangible traits – they tend to treat their people with respect and all that entails. HR policies are front and centre in building a framework that builds a corporate culture that staff can feel proud of.

The management of human capital really has to be a strategic function, one where top human resources executives work with business leaders to assess key business challenges and targets, and determine the type of workforce required to respectively manage and support these.

More than that, HR can hold up a mirror to management decisions, highlighting the various implications of management decisions on certain intangibles such as morale, motivation, and retention.

Sometimes, people management is not just about salaries and stock options. In fact, as the world moves into knowledge management and the term ‘knowledge worker’ becomes more prevalent across industries, a different style of management needs to be evolved here in Asia. Knowledge workers typically are more critical, more independent and demand to be treated as human beings rather than as cogs in a huge corporate wheel. Work-life balance is important to them, as is recognition. Talent management acquires different layers of meaning with this new workforce attitude.

Trust has to become central in the employer-employee relationship. Partnering, dialogue, coaching and persuasion are all words in human resource management that needs to enter mainstream corporate lexicon.

With knowledge workers leading the emergence of a sense of empowerment in many sectors of the workforce, HR as a function has never before been so well placed to stake a claim in strategic management. A scant decade ago, HR tended to largely administrative. However, with a dynamic and fluid business environment, companies are increasingly realising that strategic human capital management could not only increase business efficiencies and profitability, it could influence the company’s longer term survival.

Eye on the 8 ball

I read today of how both the CEO and chairman of Alcatel-Lucent had left the company, in the wake of increasingly poor business results. I sympathise with the people who are working with the company. A scant 18 months after a merger that threw the organisations of he two companies into turmoil, the staff of the new company are now basically leaderless. (The news report did not say who would be running the company in the interim.) I can imagine the uncertainty eating into the ranks.

Communications at this point in the company’s history would be critical. Poorly done, it would only mean staff might experience a crisis in confidence in their top executives, and more than that, begin to exhibit unproductive behaviour, such as standing around water coolers (or what passes for these in the Alcatel-Lucent offices) discussing job security.

This is where what I call strategic confidence comes in and it has two parts – first, when executives take communicators into their confidence, confiding in them strategic business issues and second, when their see this confidence paying off in terms a communications program that makes a positive and lasting contribution to corporate branding.

Communications really only begins to pay off when corporate leaders take their communicators into their confidence. Until this happens, corporate communications is very often more of a tactical function. And while communications does not influence the actual business decisions,  the communication of those decisions becomes more effective when PR professionals are kept in the loop as early as possible.

This gives them a strategic perspective of the business at the helicopter level, and all its associated issues. The savvy communicator can then identify potential communications pitfalls, prepare executives for any negative (or even positive) fall-out, and even leverage these in the ongoing effort to protect and build the corporate brand – in front of both internal and external audiences.

Only when this type of ’strategic confidence’ exists at the highest ranks of the company can communications live up to its promise with strong, multi-layered programs to support the business and corporate direction. This type of PR practice usually comes from experience, from a strong business focus, and the ability to ‘link minds’ with executives. One kind of confidence leads to another, with the result being great communications, as opposed to merely adequate.

Back to Alcatel-Lucent. Their communications team in their Paris headquarters would certainly have seen this latest announcement looming, and at the very least, would have been briefed prior to the press announcement. They  would have put in place a tactical campaign to control the fallout. But if they had been involved strategically, well before this announcement, or if their communications leader were savvy enough to see the writing on the wall, a program would already have been in place to evolve and hold staff attention away from the executive floor and water cooler gossip – and on ‘business as usual’

Internal Communications – What’s the Big Deal?

The recently published 2008 Vedior Asia Pacific Employment Trends Survey (see below) said that the top three areas where the talent shortage was having a negative impact were increasing workload and stress among staff; increasing staff turnover; decreasing company performance.

Bottomline: human capital (especially in terms of hiring, morale and retention) is increasingly an issue discussed in the executive suite as a key strategic business element. But where does internal communications come into play in this scenario?

Very often, as pressures to grow the revenue line increase, human issues take a back seat to anything that can be linked directly to sales. HR and all its attendant issues are seen as secondary. This means executives tend to focus on meeting numbers and targets – and so they should. In a workday crammed with priorities, however, it is sometimes hard for executives to find time to focus on issues to do with staff motivation, retention and communication as part of their integral job functions. As a result, the human relationships – the manager-team relationship is fraught with problems that eventually lead to lower motivation, reduced effectiveness and eventually, if left unchecked, higher staff turnover.

What is worse, when staff leave, they do not have anything good to say about the company. If this becomes widespread – and in this age of speed-of-light communication, information spreads like wildfire – it can become difficult to hire because people would be reluctant to join the company. Additionally, if morale is low, new staffers are affected and could find it harder to adjust to their new work environment.

Internal communications steps into this breach by:

a) working with HR and executives on programs to increase staff commitment and motivation

b) working with the leadership team to discern human capital issues, and managing them;

c) building brand ambassadors amongst staff, and an employer brand that will attract and retain top talent

The competitive business environment translates to increased workplace stress. Staff need to marshall all their resources to focus on the job at hand because companies are less forgiving these days, and everyone needs to hit the floor running. Communications, efficient and accurate information disemmination and superior acculturation and orientation tools all work together to increase commitment of existing staff, while shortening the ramp-up time for new staff.

Internal communications therefore is a critical strategic tool which can make a significant contribution to business effectiveness by helping to build a highly motivated, high performance teams.

Image Issues?

ARE you worried about how other people see you, or your company? Maybe you have received feedback from customers which is not exactly complimentary and which affects people’s willingness to do business with you, or buy your products?

Or perhaps you just have a niggling feeling that all is not as it could be.

In complex re-positioning campaigns, PURE Communications will run an audit among key audience sets to determine how clients are perceived. There are various methodologies to be deployed, depending on the nature of the information required, size of the audience set, and the client’s budget. There is no one-size-fits-all, and the questionnaire is developed to encourage brutal honesty, with a check and balance mechanism to test and verify information within the context of the audit.

The audit could be of particular executives, company’s products, businesses, or its competive positioning. Ideally, it is always part of a strategic perspective on how the client’s reputation management program will be rolled out.

Among other objectives, an audit is used to benchmark the communications campaign. At regular intervals, smaller audits are conducted to assess whether or not the campaign is on-strategy, so that adjustments can be made. Some clients prefer to do a major audit every year as part of campaign planning year-on-year. For companies with a complicated business, this approach means that investment into communications can be made based on facts and data on the several parts of the business. Guesswork never serves anyone well and in fact, every audit yields information which comes as a surprise to businesses.

Efforts are made to give the client a double bite of the cherry by identifying information that could be unearthed by the audit that might be interesting to some of its key audiences. This information can then be given ‘legs’ and used as fodder for a communications campaign.

Top dog or bulldog? An audit could very well confirm your worst suspicions, or even reveal that you really are just a big fish!

PUREcommunications – Mission and Methods

PUREcommunications is a full service Singapore-based PR agency that focuses on excellent strategic communications. Primarily, we focus on the conversations our clients have with their customers, staff, investors, partners, and other stakeholders, working with them to ensure the desired outcome is achieved. Our core business is developing communications strategies, positioning and messaging, and campaigns to strengthen preceptions of our clients.

We deploy, either directly or with our carefully selected partners, a full range of communications platforms, including digital media, press relations, events, direct marketing and advertising. The core and extended account team is hand-picked depending on the unique needs of the client.

PUREcommunications has a track record in the high technology industry, and has a special interest in strategic internal and customer communications to support organisational change and development, and in corporate social responsibility and community relations.

Our client list includes companies in the retail, medical and high technology industries, as well as not for profit organisations. In all instances, the campaigns centre on building new brands.

To contact us for a no-obligation discussion on your reputation needs, email our Principal Consultant on simone.vaz@purecommunicationspr.com

About our Principal Consultant and Strategist

Simone Vaz is a corporate, financial and marketing communications professional with extensive experience in technology marketing communications, as well as corporate communications. She has worked internationally, with industry leaders as a journalist and a communications practitioner, both on the client and agency sides. Most recently, she spent several years in Shanghai, P.R. China, leading Asia Pacific corporate communications and brand evangelism for top global telecommunications equipment provider, Alcatel-Lucent.

Her client-side experience also encompasses corporate and marketing communications with blue-chip corporations such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM, where she led an integrated marketing communications team for advertising and brand management, direct, online and events marketing.
On the agency side, she has worked with Microsoft, Network for Electronic Transfers (NETs), Compaq Computer, Motorola, the IDA, as well as the Ministry for Information, Communications and the Arts, as well as a host of consumer companies such as Brand’s Essence of Chicken and Inter-Continental Hotels. She has also lectured in MBA courses in relationship marketing and communications, and has been a conference speaker in regional internal communications and branding events.

A certified trainer, Simone has also trained clients (both in-house and as an external consultant) on various aspects of the marketing, branding and communications value chain – including developing a strategic marketing and communications plan, developing unique value propositions for products and/or services, using public relations to build corporate and employer branding, internal and HR communications, crisis preparedness and crisis management, media relations and media interview skills, and corporate writing. She has trained executives from CEOs to mid level executives in personal branding and communications.
Simone has an Honours degree in English Literature from the National University of Singapore and an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management, in Sydney, Australia.