Do You Craft Meaningful Communications for Your Stakeholders?
Companies, once the vital backbone of our communities, provided opportunity, stability and security and were regarded as good citizens that would act in the interest of the communities they served. However, no one can deny that customers no longer automatically confer to companies the trust they used to command. Much has been written about the breakdown in this trust, once such a very valuable goodwill asset. Regardless of the arguments of theorists, one way or the other, about how to fix the problem, the final analysis is the same. At the very least, customers must consider communications from your company credible in order for those communications to stir them to action. Therefore, restoring confidence in corporations requires a new approach.
Is your company communication style outdated?
Long gone, in fact, are the ‘old school’ days of company communications. You can no longer market to customers solely on the basis of their status as consumers of your product and service. You can no longer generate public press exclusively for company shareholders. And you can no longer focus policy and performance communications toward employees only. Especially long gone are the days where effective messaging included communications that were extensions of the old corporate paradigm. That paradigm used selected messages, such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), conceived by the public relations department for the sole purpose of creating a positive “halo” around the company. The problem was that such messages did not always represent the fundamental core values at the organization, nor did they always represent true changes in company policy or purpose.
How do you need to communicate instead?
Remember that the availability of today’s technology can open all the “back doors” at your company. Such access can allow stakeholders to document and to share all kinds of information about your company over vast media channels. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before the core values of any organization are made transparent to the marketplace.
Mindful Marketing takes care of such concerns! As a first step, Mindful Marketing has you take stock of the core values that are the true cultural DNA of your organization. You will then use those values to craft your communications so that they document your core, i.e., the values that really count to you and to your company, the values that will connect your company to your clients and your customers in a very substantial and valuable way.
A Mindful Marketing Model of communications will sustain your brand over time. It will also build the trust level that is so necessary to ease transactions between your stakeholders and the communities in which your brand has impact and relevance.
Key Point – Once they are identified and established, a company’s core values facilitate the crafting of consistent communications across sectors, industries, markets and audiences that are authentic and credible stakeholders in that company. Company communications about your core values help bridge any of the gaps between the various roles (i.e. employee, customer, investor) that stakeholders may have in relation to your organization.
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