"I went in-store and found that our point of sale material was still tucked behind the till in its wonderfully protective packaging, having been dispatched by courier to get there on time for the launch. Not only did no one in the outlet know anything about the campaign but the store was completely out of stock!"
With the amount of strategy, planning, resources, time and of course the money it takes to create a brilliantly engaging campaign, it is always so disappointing to find out that the whole thing falls over at the very last stages in the process of getting the product into the consumers hands.
The issue is simply that organisations have got it wrong! Structure your business to deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time. Plan for your retail environ. You know that point of sale material gets lost. Hire a field force to deliver the communications and more stock, as necessary. Build the allowances into your budget for channel engagement. Bring the effort to life by building rewards for the channel into your program - use mystery shoppers and simple targets.
Those are just tools. The spirit of engagement sees us building a competency in business to ensure the entire cast are on stage and in place ready for the curtain to be raised and for the play to begin.
Every week millions of dollars of printed material and information is wasted - sent to the wrong people or sent in the wrong manner. At Bamboo we simply make it count or don't do it.
Monday, January 08, 2007
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2 comments:
At what point do we expect corporate stakeholders and their management teams to put advertising and promotional campaigns under the same scrutiny for wasting valuable carbon resources as they do already for their contribution to sales growth & shareholder value? 'Effect' & 'impact' must be measured and assessed in all quarters of a business' activity. Does this present a bleak future for agencies and their suppliers peddling everything from cheap unwanted plastic branded nonsense out of China to carbon burning promotions offering dozens of free flights ... or is this an opportunity for brands to recruit a new type of consumer and lead the way in changing attitudes and mindsets.
Supporting your people in the channel to help them engage & delight your customers with a complete experience should be single minded. This touch point for brands with their customers is the litmus paper - where the billions spent on brand building can be reduced to nothing in a nano-second. I spent hrs, dozens of occasions on the phone to a certain Telco with them convincing me to switch ... finally after plenty of analysis I agreed and signed a contract promising them my business for a year. 6 weeks on I have not heard a dicky bird, no 'Welcome Mr Twisleton-Wykeham, we're delighted to have you on board' - nothing, zilch. Don't even know if I'm actually consuming their services or not. In fact the only correspondence I received was from my old Telco with a very sweet and seductive offer to return to their arms. So the aforementioned Telco can shove their warm & fuzzy flipping animal ads up their snare drum - and take a moment to ponder the impact of their badly managed channel activity - successful in a business sense - the balance sheet - disasterous from a PR perspective. SORT IT OUT!
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