23 minute read
How to Tackle the Issue
Here’s How to Tackle an Issue
BY CRYSTAL HYDE
As a public relations/ corporate communications strategist, I have spent a career working with extremely talented marketing communications leaders and always admire the way they look at the world — with creativity and focus that pinpoints target customers and speak directly to them, motivates them to act, connects with them and makes them a brand believer.
It’s increasingly common for Marketing and Communications to fall under a single umbrella within an organization because the skillsets have some overlap and the work we do together can boost both area’s efforts. Despite this compatibility, our approaches and the way we see the world are quite different. Let me explain as a corporate communications professional, I see myself as being in the business of reputation management. Of course, I want to enhance the brand and promote its positive attributes and benefits, but it is also and sometimes mainly my responsibility to protect the brand by identifying and mitigating risks, managing issues, and navigating crisis to minimize impacts on the brand.
I have watched my Marketing colleagues, similarly, make calculated risks when telling the brand story, attempting to win over customers, build a following, increase sales. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Their focus was (and should) always be about the customers and user experience of the brand. Then when these amazing brand builders work with me, we bring our worlds together, pooling our efforts to help retain the success they have built which can include defining a strategy to position a failing on the company’s behalf.
Often, my time is spent conducting a 360 analysis to determine how a given situation will be perceived not only by customers, but by employees, partners, the community, and the government. Then I focus on the company’s messaging, turning it inside out to see how it could be perceived, misconstrued, if they are legal implications, if there are positives to highlight. Essentially I pressure test everything the company or organization is saying to make sure it protects or enhances the brand, making changes and improvements to minimize risks.
Most recently, with the convergence of marketing and communications into a single area, the distinction between the capability of a marketing expert and a corporate communications expert has become blurred. Due to confusion because ‘communications’ is part of the MarComms handle, talented, smart and trusted marketing communications leaders are being expected to flex a rarely or never-used crisis communications muscle. During a global pandemic and a tidal wave of ‘issues’ hitting companies hard, high performing traditional marketing communications teams are finding themselves out-of-their-depth facing mounting pressure from executive teams to be responsible for crisis management, a skill that takes literally years to develop.
If you don’t have years to retrain and need to tackle a menacing issue or emerging crisis, here’s how to start:
Think through what it is you want to say about the issue, the one sentence that defines what you want or need people to know about your company’s position. Is there something the public needs to know? Is there a commitment your willing to make? Do you need to reinforce a key point (data point)? Is there a significant change to your business model that will address the issue head on?
Next, write down your key audiences — all of them, when an issue arises you do not have the luxury of giving one audience all of your attention you have to think about have every interested audience will view your response: employees (always employees first), customers, shareholders, partners, government officials, your local community etc.
Once you have defined your top line message and the audience who needs to hear it, go through your audience list and consider how each will receive your key message. While some audiences will love it, others may be opposed, upset, understanding and so on. Now that you understand the possible reactions you can start to either reshape the message to address vulnerabilities or customize the message to better address each reaction.
You will then want to spend time, using that same audience list, to determine the possible questions each group may ask and preparing the possible responses. Be candid and realistic when pulling together this list of questions, this is not an opportunity to choose the questions you want to deliver a slick marketing-type answer. These questions and responses are the grunt work of managing an issue by overturning every rock and attempting to address everything that could possibly come up, the good and the bad. You may never be asked one of these questions, but if you are you need to be prepared.
Further to the above exercise, let’s spend a minute defining a response versus and answer. Often spokespeople feel compelled to ‘answer’ everything that is asked though sometimes their eagerness to answer means they over share confidential information or speak to an area of the business they aren’t qualified to do. No qualified public relations practitioner will support or advise anyone to be dishonest; however, we will coach spokespeople to respond to difficult questions not necessarily answer them. Let me give you an example: Reporter: Do you think you will have to lay off employees if the quarter end results miss the mark? Answer: We might need to reduce our headcount; we are hopeful results will be strong, but we just do not know yet.
Possible media headline:
CEO doesn’t rule out layoffs if earnings miss
Response: I am not going to speculate about results that are not yet released. What I can tell you is that our employees are vital to our business success and we want to perform well and keep everyone working.
Possible media headline:
CEO hopeful for strong earnings this quarter
What is my best advice for a Mar/ Comms leader to handle a crisis? Take off your marketing hat for a moment because promoting an issue or selling its good side won’t get you anywhere, instead issues need to be met with candor and authenticity in order to convey effective and thoughtful management. Your audience needs to feel that you understand the issue and are actively addressing it in order to move on.
CRYSTAL HYDE, Principal & Certified Executive Coach at Scout Communications Scout Communications Inc., uses the power of communication to solve business problems, train leaders, coach emerging leaders and teams to deliver effective messages and proven results.
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Mastering the practice of personalization can seem overwhelming for marketers, leaving them to wonder whether the cost and effort is worth the trouble. But giving up on the dream of one-to-one marketing would be a shame.
BY STEPHEN SHAW
When the era of Big Data dawned in the early 2000s with the explosive growth in web traffic, marketers swooned at the potential for personalized messaging: at long last, the dream of one-to-one marketing seemed within reach.
Yet as the years rolled by personalization remained a buzzword: the practice never caught up with the rhetoric. In a McKinsey survey last year, just 15% of CMOs claimed they were “on the right track with personalization”, stymied by a chronic lack of resources. Meanwhile, customers have come to view personalization as promotional gimmickry, urging them to add one more item to their online shopping cart.
In recent years, however, a new generation of AI-powered technologies has made it easier than ever for marketers to personalize the customer experience. Which is why in 2019 the Association of National Advertisers named personalization its “Marketing Word of the Year”. But then at the end of last year the research firm Gartner came out with the glum prediction that five years from now 80% of marketers will have abandoned their personalization efforts due to a lack of ROI or the “perils of customer data management”.
Personalization is hard to get right — even with the latest technology. But the reasons go far beyond the technical complexities of mastering personalization. It has more to do with marketers treating personalization as an afterthought. Viewed as a basic customer expectation, personalization becomes too important for marketers to give up on.
Being Better Look over the shoulder of any digital native absorbed in their phone these days and it is easy to see why marketers are struggling to connect with them. Headphones on, eyes glued to their screen, they live in their own personal media bubble, frenetically scrolling, tapping, texting and swiping, messaging their friends, checking their newsfeeds, sharing their pictures, maybe even watching a video or playing a game.
Jamming sponsored posts in between their social feeds or stuffing e-mail in-boxes with “best guess” offers or blitzing them with push notifications just forces them behind a privacy wall. The same is true of every other invasive tactic — web site pop-ups, infobars, digital ads, video pre-rolls, the list goes on. So people have learned to screen out the street noise — skip and block ads — “cut the chord” — insulate themselves from blatant commercial pitches — and seek sanctuary on ad-free media platforms.
As long as marketers persist in making campaigns the basis of their planning, their brand messaging will never be able to compete against the constant barrage of media distractions. Instead, they should find ways to be useful in the moment, whenever personalized assistance is needed, based on individual need and circumstances. And that means shifting the marketing mindset from “What can I sell you today?” to “How can I help you?”. As Seth Godin says, “Marketing is driven by better. Better service, better community, better outcomes”.
Personalization should never be considered synonymous with targeting. It should not be limited to “you may also like” recommendations. Instead, it should be woven into the fabric of the total customer experience, helping to make it “better”. Better at delivering advice. Better at answering questions. Better at making the experience seamless across devices and touchpoints. Better at delivering timely service and support. Better at anticipating customer needs.
Take the example of the caloriecounting mobile app LoseIt!. It stands out from the galaxy of weight watching brands by offering real-time analytical reporting such as pattern detection. For example, the app will figure out how specific food items influence the amount of weight gain or loss: “We’ve noticed that on days you incorporate muffins, you tend to keep your total calories lower”. The reason LoseIt has grown to 30 million members is its commitment to being “better”. Every new feature is born out of a singular crusade: to fight the obesity epidemic by making people more conscious of their food choices.
The biggest barrier to personalization is that so few companies take a holistic view of the customer experience. Most are still organized around product and channel silos. And while customer journey design can make it easier for people to interact online, a different planning approach
is needed to individualize the experience, making it more relevant and useful. Marketers have to give up transactional thinking (“How do we get a user to click and convert?”) in favour of asking, “How do we make the experience better for the user?”.
A Unified Experience The first step in the process is to map out a “value matrix” which defines how the company will apply personalization in the service of customers. That matrix can then be used to prioritize the opportunities based on expected outcomes (such as higher satisfaction and retention).
For example, different treatment strategies can be applied to first-time versus repeat customers; frequent versus occasional users;
PERSONALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES
CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM A central data store used to assemble unified customer profiles from disparate sources for on-demand use by realtime interaction management platforms.
IDENTITY RESOLUTION SYSTEM Used to create a single, persistent customer identifier by linking multiple online and offline identities through record matching.
PERSONALIZATION ENGINE Used to create more personalized messaging and offers based on heuristic rules or machine-learning.
INTERACTION MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS Used to support contextually relevant customer experiences across multiple channels.
single versus cross-category buyers; passive members versus brand advocates; as well as to different loyalty segments, lifestyle cohorts, demographic groups, and so on. The tricky part is coming up with the right set of nested segments (e.g. high value + long tenure + highly engaged + brand loyalist) deserving of their own personas. Rules can then be created to customize the experience for each segment, knowing their shared attitudes, beliefs, interests and habits.
At an individual level, the strategy should revolve around specific moments in time, when a timely intervention — say, a recommendation, an alert, a status update, a reminder, a newsfeed — can make the customer journey friction free. This is where personalization technology can play a huge timesaving role, relieving marketers of the heavy analytical load involved in generating the conditional rules (e.g., “if-then-else” statements, “and/or” logic). The toughest part, of course, is to ensure a unified experience, applying a consistent set of rules, regardless of the device or touchpoint.
Once the personalization strategy is set, marketers can move on to cross-channel planning, figuring out how to deliver the best possible experience based on everything they know about customers — their observed behaviour, stated preferences and implicit intentions derived from their web sessions (“How much time did they spend looking at that product page?”).
The website is usually the best place to start by showcasing the most relevant products or solutions according to the browsing history of repeat visitors and customers. That can be done by setting up dynamic blocks of content offering individualized product recommendations; swapping out generic text and images in the “hero carousel” to suit each persona type; streamlining the navigation to accommodate a particular segment; promoting relevant content based on reading history; and finetuning search results according to known interests.
By factoring in both shopping behaviour and historical buying habits, e-mail content can be fully personalized, informing subscribers of their loyalty status and privileges; introducing ancillary products related to a recent purchase; providing advance notice of local sales events; announcing new merchandise in their preferred categories; or letting them know how soon to expect a resolution to their service ticket submission. Similarly, a mobile app can use location data to deliver geofenced notifications; support in-store navigation; or use bar code scanning to provide on-the-spot product comparisons and ratings.
Zero Latency None of this is easy to do without a single unified customer profile — one central place to store all of the data — plus the ability to act on it in real-time. But as Gartner observed, customer data management is usually a black hole for most companies due to systems fragmentation. To make personalization something customers truly value, the individual-level data must be instantly accessible, otherwise the appropriateness and timing of the real-time response is compromised.
Too often, when a customer visits a brand web site, opens a follow-up e-mail, uses the mobile app, reaches out to the call centre, subscribes to a newsletter, or clicks through to a landing page, each interaction is captured in a separate database, often without an identifier flagging that individual as the same person. In that all-too-common scenario, personalization is limited to each channel, failing to take into account all of the other interactions, even though one may have led directly to the other. The exact stage of the buying journey is unknown (are they researching, evaluating, ready to decide?) — multiple buying signals get lost — true intentions go unnoticed. This failure to piece together the full picture also causes unnecessary redundancy and frustration (“You’re asking me to give you that information again?”).
Identity resolution addresses this blind spot by linking an individual with both their terrestrial and digital identities, associating, for example, a household address with an e-mail, IP address, and one or more device IDs. An identity graph stores all of the possible identifiers in a single database. That way, a persistent customer identifier can be used to link interactions across channels, helping to connect, for example, a web site visit to a recent call centre inquiry. The graph is constructed with the help of a speciality vendor (like LiveRamp) which uses matching formulas — both deterministic (absolutely positive)
and probabilistic (highly likely) — to come up with a universal master key.
The other massive barrier to overcome is designing a data architecture which supports zero latency (go back to that digital native with their manic thumbing). It requires converting the “big data” running through the digital bloodstream of the company into actionable prompts like instant call-outs, auto-notifications and triggered alerts. But the response cycle time of most companies
today is still measured in hours, never mind milliseconds, a relic of an earlier era when daily or weekly batch updating was the usual practice. “Fast-twitch” Ecosystems Today companies at the leading edge of personalization have developed “fast-twitch” data management ecosystems which ingest streaming data in real-time at the moment of interaction. Rather than rely on traditional relational data stores, data warehouses, data lakes or CRM systems, they have opted for Customer Data Platforms to skirt the delays and bottlenecks that can occur pulling data from different “systems of record”. A CDP is a “master data store” which assembles unified customer profiles by pulling together every bit of available data from multiple sources using a single API, including active web session events like “checkout in progress” or “order paid for”, and makes all of it available on demand to “systems of engagement”. For example, a web site visit by an addressable customer, tracked using a JavaScript plug-in, will set off a sub-second chain of commands that lead to a contextualized response as the web session is in progress.
The job of message generation is typically controlled by a standalone personalization engine where the engagement rules are stored and activated in
real-time. Based on the customer data passed through by the CDP (e.g., CID, segment code, event flag, last order, etc), the associated personalization rules are invoked, instructing the web content management system to serve up a specific page or block of content. To make rule development scalable, machine-learning algorithms are used, which comb the data to find groups of people similar in their choices and behaviour; select offers with the best chance of converting based on known affinities; and recommend content based on viewing history. The data can be as granular as time spent looking at a specific page or longer- than-usual hovers over content, actions which might reveal possible preferences or interests.
As companies grapple with the growing customer demand for more individualized attention, marketers will have no choice but to master the practice of personalization. Some marketers may find it too hard and give up, as Gartner says. But now that one-toone marketing is finally technically feasible, that would mean giving up on the opportunity to “be better” at meeting the expectations of customers.
STEPHEN SHAW is the chief strategy officer of Kenna, a marketing solutions provider specializing in delivering more unified customer experiences. He is also the host of a monthly podcast called Customer First Thinking. Stephen can be reached via e-mail at sshaw@kenna.ca.
Understanding Canadians’ Behaviour in a Pandemic Age
BY RUPEN SEONI
It’s no understatement to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on Canadians’ movements in their daily lives. We are all living with business closures, stay-home advisories and physical-distancing orders. And these efforts are critical to the public health response to contain transmission of the virus and flatten the curve.
But has everyone been complying with the stay-home requests? Not surprisingly, across our diverse country, we see different rates of compliance.
Environics Analytics (EA) conducted an analysis of who was Out-and-About across the country as published in the Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, Winnipeg Free Press and covered on CTV.
More important than simply understanding the movement patterns of Canadians is truly understanding who these citizens are –their demographic profiles, socio-economic situations, behaviour patterns, and critically, their attitudes and values. It is this aggregation of privacy compliant data at the small geographic level that allows us to draw insights about the population that can then be used to inform public outreach, program development and communications. [Details on how we used mobile movement data and EA’s authoritative databases are provided at the end of this piece.]
So what did our analysis find about different population groups as it relates to being Out-and-About during the COVID-19 pandemic? Here is a snapshot based on EA’s PRIZM segmentation system where we compared segments that share some common characteristics but differ in their Out-and-About compliance: 1. Higher Out-and-About rates as you move away from downtown cores. Let’s look at two PRIZM segments that contain empty nesters: one that is quite urban; the other rural. These are two older PRIZM segments (large population of 70+ years), 19 Grey Pride being a middle-class segment of retirees in urban apartments, while 54 Serenity Springs is a small-town segment of lower-middle-income retirees. Both segments are more likely to have the co-morbidities of concern for COVID-19 but the key difference between them is that 54 Serenity Springs is much
more likely to be Out-and-About (15 percent above the Canadian average while 19 Grey Pride indexes 11 percent below the Canadian average). And since both segments index well below average for using social media for health-based recommendations, community-based approaches for communication are likely to be more effective.
2. Lower-income residents are out and about more. Our second example looks at two groups of downtown dwellers — living quite close together - a relatively affluent segment found in gentrifying central neighbourhoods compared with struggling apartment dwellers. Found within urban centres, sometimes not far away from each other, these two population segments are both relatively young, but at different ends of the socio-economic spectrum. Their Out-and-About rates are also different with 68 Low-Rise Renters showing rates 15 percent more than the Canadian average. This same segment also indexes lower than 12 Street Scenes as well as the Canadian average on the psychographic “Effort Toward Health”*, which could mean that physical distancing is taken less seriously. A better understanding of their circumstances could help reach them to ensure they know how to take precautions. * The commitment to focus on diet, exercise and healthy living to feel better and have a healthy, wholesome lifestyle. A willingness to transform one’s lifestyle through exercise and radical changes to diet.
3. Age is not necessarily a key differentiator on Out-and-About rates. We have recently seen news reports showing young people congregating in public spaces, putting themselves and others at risk of infection. Our data indicate that urbanity and socio-economic status (discussed above in the other examples) may matter more on Out-and-About rates than age.
As examples, in the two pairs of PRIZM segments above, each pair have similar urbanity and socioeconomic status but one segment in each pair is young, the other older.
Within the first pair (52 Striving Startups and 63 Lunch at Tim’s), despite the age differences, the Out-and-About rates are higher than the Canadian average (21 percent and 12 percent respectively).
In the second pair (11 Urban Digerati and 01 Cosmopolitan Elite), the segments tend to be well-educated and affluent, living in the downtowns of Canada’s largest cities. Again, despite their age differences they were both less likely to be Out-and-About than average (15 percent below average and 36 percent below average respectively).
Data-driven insights to inform COVID-19 recovery Governments have enacted a variety of orders, legislation, guidelines and enforcement to get large numbers of people to stay home. Further improving compliance will require more nuanced strategies targeted to specific populations who cannot, or will not, stay home.
But being able to provide rapid insight into populations of interest can inform a range of additional initiatives critical to the social and economic recovery process from this pandemic. With over 30,000 indicators of behaviour and demographics for neighbourhoods across Canada (available at the 6 digit postal code), we can support government departments at all levels with efforts such as economic impact analysis, program design, the identification of target populations and the definition of media strategies for communications.
Here are several immediate and relevant use cases for these insights: ❯ Stay-Home Compliance
Messaging by Public Health:
As identified in the analysis recently published in the Globe & Mail (referenced above), more targeted communication strategies are required to continue to improve compliance with stay-home regulations across the country and by population segment.
Essential Worker Messaging:
Local data on essential workers combined with demographics, psychographics and media preference information can help ensure these key workers are taking precautions by reaching them with the most effective messaging. Identifying Top Congregation Points to Monitor Physical Distancing: Privacy-compliant mobile movement data can be used to identify where people continue to gather (per recent news item on CBC) and to understand their characteristics in order to intervene proactively (e.g. targeted public health messaging). Exposure Risk Notifications: Consent-based, anonymized human movement data can identify more people who could have been exposed beyond those that COVID-19 apps can identify, thereby improving the effectiveness of notification efforts. Understanding Frail, Socially Vulnerable and Financially Vulnerable Populations: Our health, demographics and financial databases were used to create purpose-built indexes for these three populations that need support. The indexes help target program communications to those who need support, improving their efficiency and relevance.
These are just a handful of examples that demonstrate how understanding where particular citizens live, what their socioeconomic situation looks like, how they behave and how they think can materially impact social and economic programs during this pandemic. And the analysis outlined above is available quickly and easily through our cloud-based ENVISION software platform, in reports, tables and charts that clearly describe catchment areas, municipalities and the characteristics of neighbourhoods.
Canadians are a diverse population, as diverse as the country is wide. We behave, think, consume and generally act differently based on thousands of attributes, including where we live. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown this to be true when it comes to compliance with movement restrictions and similar data-driven insight can be applied for additional use cases. We are proud to be using our data and analytical capabilities to assist with addressing the COVID-19 outbreak and to help flatten the curve. We will continue to do so, including helping get Canada back on the road to recovery and beyond.
RUPEN SEONI is a Senior Vice President and Practice Leader with Environics Analytics and has more than twenty years of experience in marketing analytics, working with organizations of all sizes to unlock the value of information in decision-making and business strategy.
Key Notes:
Methodology Statement: EA has a privacycompliant database called MobileScapes developed from aggregated mobile phone movement data from multiple sources. Using these data, we identified devices that were “out and about” during the daytime for weekends from early February to early April. The measure of Outand-About was devices that were observed more than 100 metres from their inferred home postal code at least three times for ten minutes each in a day. We chose weekend data because the largest percentage of the population would be free to choose their activities on typical non-workdays. We aggregated the data to various geographic areas to understand the patterns at a national, provincial and market level. Next, we analyzed the results through the lens of our PRIZM segmentation system. PRIZM assigns every Canadian postal code to one of 68 lifestyle types based on demographics, socioeconomic status, diversity and psychographics. This analysis helps identify areas where the populations may not be taking the stay-home orders seriously enough and provides insights into who they are and how to motivate them.
