December 7th, 2008
Integrity, business integration and the bottom line
The paradigm of a marketing-production dualism
Many people who attend the social networking events which I frequent fall into one of two camps: the marketers and the producers. The producers are primarily programmers, systems administrators and the like. The marketers sell other people's services, and often also their own knowledge on marketing. The marketers have a holy regard for the producers, knowing that depending on how they manage their relationships with these people and on how they placate them, they could get rich. The producers know this, and have either a secret or a vehemently overt disdain for the realm of marketing.
"Oh, is that what you do!" someone once said to me at a networking event in a brief conversation about my work, "I always thought you were in marketing!"
"Marketing?" I replied, aghast at having been categorised as one of those hyenas of the modern business world. "Good grief, no!"
I cannot recall with whom I had that conversation, but whoever you are, and if ever you come across this blog, I have thought about it over the past few months and I take that back: I am in marketing. And programming. And network maintenance, training and information design. Marketing is an integral part of what I do in everything that I do, every day.
The need for marketing-production integration
Brand strategy flows from business strategy. Business strategy is the fulfilment plan for an organisation's vision. Underlying the vision is the organisation's values, which reflect the values of the people who drive the business. This is true regardless of whether these issues were ever formally thought through and regardless of what (if anything) was documented by the roleplayers to reflect the values or the vision, the mission or the strategy.
People act in accordance with what they believe. If they believe that marketing sits on top of what the business actually does or produces, then small wonder that their customers and employees soon begin to distinguish between the real features and benefits of the product or service and "that which the marketing guys will tell you". Whatever mission or value statement the company has on its walls (or in the boring part of their corporate Web site) becomes irrelevant, because the de facto versions of these statements speak through the actions of the directors and employees, the systems which the bosses have put into place to serve their employees, suppliers and customers, the type and quality of products and services which they deliver, and the steps they are prepared to take to do so.
The foundation for integration
Our organisation has reached a stage now where we need to document our values, our vision, and our business and brand strategy. We need to do this because we have grown and because we are growing, and writing something down with finely chosen words will help us to focus our thoughts and to develop strategies which allow us to target our actions towards, clear, sensible, worthwhile goals. We need to contemplate and formulate our values and agree as individuals on what we are prepared to do, and why. I have certain expectations from my suppliers and associates. These expectations flow from my own convictions on what sort of quality I should deliver. They come from my values. I am sure that my customers, partners, suppliers and associates also have some idea of what they expect from me. Documenting my own values will help me to communicate to these people whether or not they can expect a commitment from me to fulfilling their specific requirements. Only after my team and I have documented our personal values separately and individually will it be sensible for us to sit down and integrate these values into something to which we can collectively commit ourselves. If people have never given much thought to what they believe about life, the universe and everything else, it is difficult to get them to undertake such an exercise in order to address the issues affecting the business' bottom line. But I work with a core team of individuals who even through periods of religious agnosticism, moments of self-doubt and weeks or months of psychological collapse have always had strong convictions about what they regard as good and evil, what is important in relationships, and what sort of place the world should be. And it shows in how they live.
The business case for integrity
During the past few months there has been a huge debate about whether or not to keep the springbok as the symbol of the national rugby team. The emotional nature of the debate is a very pertinent illustration of the fact that a brand is not merely contained in its external manifestations such as a logo on clothing or the words of a song, but that it represents that which binds your customers to what you do or which turns them away from you. Whilst that which binds or breaks can sometimes be dissected into specific incidents and examples of good or bad products or service, the resultant customer experience is not merely a sum of the parts, nor even the result of a synergy between the parts, but an emotional response to a complex and dynamic system.
I would perhaps go so far as to say that every decision made by a customer -- indeed any decision made by anyone in any situation -- is an emotional one. Even if your criteria for purchasing are based on an objective checklist of features, the final thing which you will be checking is whether you believe that your expectations will be fulfilled when you buy. How many voters -- even educated, intellectual ones -- go and sit down to study a matrix of policies and audited performance reviews for all the available parties and candidates before they choose where to place their mark?
People want to be able to trust your brand. They want integrity. If people lose trust in a brand, or fail to trust it in the first place, your bottom line suffers. You could go out of business.
The best long-term strategy for getting people to trust you is to be trustworthy. There is a close link between the concepts of "integrity" and "integration", and this link is not merely etymological. In order to save, maintain or build a business (or a state department, a charity, a family or nation, for that matter) we need to understand the need not only to integrate that which we do with that which we profess, but also to integrate every one thing we do with every other thing we do.
The need for total business integration
My company produces and sells project management training. Our experience particularly over the past year has taught us a number of things -- inter alia, that the needs of real people out there, and the project management training available, are seriously out of synch. The generic courses available need to be completely overhauled to provide the necessarily relevance. If we do not start redesign our public offerings now, and if we do not put in place a plan for continuous improvement, we will not be able to continue marketing with integrity.
Another thing we have learned from working with numerous corporate customers, with governments, NGOs and individual students, is that in most organisations, there is not only an unhealthy segregation between marketing and production, but between most business functions. This is not entirely news to us, and the issue around functional silos is well-documented in business literature, yet not well addressed in business. Many organisations send their employees on project management courses while the bosses do not understand that projects are the things we do as organisations to execute strategy, and that they themselves are the ones who need to come for specialised training first, so that they can understand what is required of an organisation to ensure that project work integrates appropriately and that project managers can carry out their mandate with integrity. When we speak about buildings or cars, we speak about "structural integrity": the various parts must work together in such a way that they support each other. Without that integrity, the vehicle or edifice becomes dangerous to its users or to anyone who happens to be nearby. We endanger our customers, employees and suppliers if we do not do things in an integrated manner. We place the budget, the time-frame and the scope of a project at risk if we are not able to manage in an integrated manner. Since business strategy is driven through projects, poor project management is very bad for business. If we do not provide our employees with integrated systems based on integrated trans-functional business strategies, we make it difficult for our employees to keep promises to customers, and thus force them to compromise their personal integrity, and our own integrity as leaders becomes questionable.
Does that which you produce integrate with the claims you make in your marketing materials? Do your IT systems provide you with the capability of going the extra mile for the customer, if that's what your value statement says you are prepared to do? Do the e-mail messages which your staff send to customers look like lolcat whilst your corporate Web site reads like an essay by a 19th century capitalist? Do your business functions integrate? Do you have integrity?
The importance of appreciating complexity
Values are fairly simple. But as soon as we think that putting them into practice is easy, we will lose the plot. That's probably why the great religious writings of the world are fairly fat books rather than short ten-point tracts. By nature we want to simplify everything in order to be able to choose quickly. "Microsoft: bad. Open Source: good." or "White: good. Black: evil" makes it easy for us to take quick decisions and to move on with life -- but not necessarily to do what best serves our real values. I know of a large organisation who has many employees who are very frustrated and struggle to get their work done effectively via workarounds simply because their organisation has the strict policy to use only free open-source software, whereas some business functions could be far better served by actually buying a proprietary tool designed to do precisely that job efficiently. The policy was formulated no doubt as a result of their bosses' values, which centred around the notion of freedom. Yet by imposing the rule, they have created an environment for their non-technical staff which is anything but liberating.
The bottom line
Integrity comes from integration. Integration comes from integrity. If what you produce is bad, but you package it well, you are lying. If what you produce is good, but you package it badly, you are also lying. Every human being has a personal battle with hypocrisy, and we choose to fight this battle in different ways. Some set lofty goals for themselves, and live in constant confession of their imperfections and their need for God. Others make the same lofty claims about what they believe, yet are not prepared to entertain any counter-claims based on the evidence of their actions. Yet others present themselves up front as thoroughly amoral, so that no-one can be disappointed.
In business, and in government, and in all other organisations, the same constant battle with hypocrisy plays itself out on a collective scale. It never stops, and it should never stop, because even if we achieve all we claim to be, complacency will destroy us. I work closely with numerous partner organisations, amongst others an organisation which was once the best in its niche. Their marketing department is still riding on the momentum of that past glory, selling their own offering as the best one-size-fits-all shoe for every foot. Until recently no-one who works there had any idea that the big wide world out there had changed, that what they are selling addresses the needs of a generation that has gone and that modern man prefers shoes which fit the individual, or at least which come in sizes and a variety of styles to meet different requirements. Oh, these guys may still be the best, simply because their competitors are worse. That's probably why they still have sales. (People will return to the same junkfood vendor several times because they fear that the place across the road might be even less suited to their real requirements and they are not prepared to take the risk by spending the money to find out. Forgive the change in metaphor.) But being the best is not necessarily good enough. Had a few key individuals not started to see what was happening -- largely as a result of their own personal integrity and belief in integration (not to mention a lot of moaning from me and my team) -- a once-flourishing enterprise may have come to ruin within a year, as old competitors rose to meet the same mediocre quality standard, or as some new competitor emerged to really fill the gap. Integrity requires maintenance.
And I have a lot of work to do.