How to make a difference—in spite of the job
Published on 08/28/2000 under Ad Management
In his best-selling books on personal effectiveness, management guru Stephen Covey stresses planning your schedule to allocate time for “important” projects that haven’t yet reached the urgent stage. And in the spirit of putting first things first, the chairman of a large chemical company I once worked for had a favorite saying: “Well, I think we’re working on the right problems,” meaning that sufficient corporate resources were being focused on projects that offered the greatest potential returns.
But many people in the business world never have the opportunity to work on important projects. If your daily agenda is hopelessly loaded with dozens of trivial but time-consuming requests from higher-ups, it’s hard to affect anything that top management considers important—unless you count that big PowerPoint presentation they just dumped on you at the last minute.
The cruel reality these days is that many top managers don’t slow down long enough to think of marketing communications as a strategic function. (Marcom is a place you go to get brochures, ads, direct mailers and such after the strategy has been determined by marketing and sales management.) Like the small boy on the deserted sandlot who dreams of hitting the game-winning home run to win the World Series, we all dream about doing high-profile things that really will make a difference. It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophesy however; if you spend your entire day working on trivial projects, there’s no room left for any big-time assignments. And besides, who would trust those projects to you if the only thing you’ve ever done is administrative stuff? And then there’s the problem of money.
If your budget didn’t include any big-time projects last year, the odds are pretty good it won’t this year—or next year. (It’s called the Catch-22 Rule of Budgeting.)
Overcoming the status quo is difficult, to be sure. But there are ways to change this even if you’re just starting out, and you owe it to your company and yourself to try. Here are a few starter suggestions:
Monitor the competition closely. Any competitive program that signals a change in direction is worthy of note, no matter how modest. I recently noticed a competitive company advertising “packaged” equipment systems in a market where selling compo-nents is the norm. As a result, my client is considering a totally new approach.
Sometimes, it’s what your competition is not doing that’s important. By analyzing their communication strategies, you might spot a niche that’s not being covered—one that’s ideally suited to your company’s expertise.
You should circulate competitive ads and promotional materials to all interested managers on a quarterly basis. Be specific: analyze key messages, estimate spending levels, note unusual offers or calls-to-action. Don’t expect these people to uncover strategic changes on their own; they’re extremely busy, so it’s okay to state the obvious. If you’re not sure what to make of a competitor’s new program, identify someone you can talk to and ask them for help, which leads to suggestion No. 2:
Cultivate champions. When someone on the firing line requests ammunition of a different type, don’t reject their request because your budget is exhausted or because it doesn’t appear to fit with your current theme. Ask questions. Find out what’s driving their request. Budgets can be created, you know. Ever notice how easy it is to find extra money when the CEO wants to launch some new initiative? Which leads to to suggestion No. 3:
Attribute ideas to high-ranking decision makers. A sentence from the chairman’s letter in the annual report can become the rallying cry for a major new campaign. Tell everyone you encounter, “This is right in line with Chairman Smith’s vision for the company.” Who can argue with that?
Most certainly, you should not make the mistake of trying to hog your idea or main-tain ownership. If you do, it’ll never see the light of day. Try to get someone in top man-agement to embrace the idea and adopt it as his or her own. Then you can move on to suggestion No. 4.
Get the program started any way you can. Coming up with a million dollars for a new program when your total budget historically has been less than $500,000 is tough; even dedicated champions will shy away from asking for a 300% increase. However, if you can come up with $100,000 to start the new program in the final months of a fiscal year, asking for another $600,000 for the new fiscal budget is only a 100% increase. Plus, you’ll have extra support in getting this increase because more people will have been exposed to the possibilities through start-up presentations and initial program exposures. Then later, when you submit an additional request for $300,000 to extend the program into its logical next phases, it will be easier to justify.
Far too many companies are missing out on the sizeable clout that a big-time marketing communications program can bring to the table. In most companies, I would ven-ture to guess that marcom is significantly under-budgeted as a result of years of down-sizing, mergers and play-it-safe tactical thinking.
You can’t get where you need to be with modest, incremental annual budget increases. It’s going to take some paradigm-shifting increases aided by big-time strategic thinking to break the logjam. If your company is going through the marcom motions, maybe it’s time you started the process of creating big break from business-as-usual. In fact, I recommend that you always have a few of these initiatives in the works because if you’re not moving forward, you’re most certainly falling behind.