Articles by DaleWolf

One of the things that I love about this business is how disciplines that are seemingly specialties often blur together. Take Direct Marketing and Public Relations, for example.

On the one hand, they are very different. You could say DM is targeted and PR is mass. Or you could say DM is promotional and PR is objective. Or you could say DM is using your own media and PR is using someone else’s medium. Or DM is …

This discussion popped up here lately cause I am in the process or reorganizing our Direct Marketing department into one that looks a whole lot like the promotional agency I used to own. I have been frustrated lately about how ineffectively many of our marketing managers use DM. So we’re going to put in an account team structure and mold our project managers, our database automation team and our creative team into one unit that serves our company’s direct marketing needs more effectively. But this post is not about the reorg. It’s more about the observation that our PR Director and I got into as we discussed the reorg.

We began looking at what kind of work would flow through the DM agency. It was real clear that informational communications like collateral was not DM and it was not PR. And it’s pretty clear that when a mailer is sent to a list with an offer to cause a response that we are talking DM. And it is pretty clear that when a news release is sent to the media that we are talking PR.

But what about our company’s eNewsletter that is run by our PR department … but carries links to promotional opportunities like new white papers and webinars or free downloads of software? The newsletter goes to 135,000 opt-in subscribers who generate a huge percentage of our web traffic, many of whom register for various offers and are entered into our lead generation process. Is the eNewsletter a DM tool disguised as PR, or is it really a PR tool that builds our reputation as a thought leader?

Another example … our corporate blog is run out of our DM department. It clearly is designed to build our reputation as a thought leader, but it’s real task once we build up the audience is to create visibility for our products and promotions with C-level decision makers.

DM increasingly must deliver content that is contextually relevant and sensitive to prospect needs, based on their interests and their stage in the buying cycle. These offerings look more and more like PR. When we run our 6-page ads in special editions of Fortune magazine, we are promoting the concept of “simplification through innovation” and encouraging readers to register for our promotions at a microsite.

And now, a more PR-centric example. The boilerplate in all our news releases contain hyperlinks back to special pages in the website where we can then launch a promotion and create a sales lead.

The good thing is that the PR Director and I are not territorial. We are both focused on the objective of growing our company’s business. And the blur will continue.

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Last week, I gave a presentation to our worldwide marketing department on the need for continuity in our branding. At issue, is that we have as a company developed a position statement that is centered on the value we bring to our clients. But our various product teams tend to ignore this positioning, and instead offer out to their prospects and customers entirely different messages. I contend we can afford to support only one brand, that of the company as a whole and that each product within the company should be promoted by linking to the single brand statement.

I chose to tell them a story … one of complexity.

Complexity has thwarted mankind whenever he wanted to do something big.

The pyramids of Egypt – one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – were incredibly complex and massive projects. They could not have been built without the use of one of the Seven Simple Tools – the lever. Even today, when we construct our skyscraper buildings, we use simple tools to do big things … the cranes we see hovering over construction products are built using the pulley.

Flight is another example of conquering complexity with simplicity. After many failed experiments with weird flying contraptions, Orville and Wilbur Wright applied Newton’s simple law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. They used a propeller to force air across and under the wings of their plane and created uplift.

But building today’s commercial and military aircraft is yet again complexity at an even higher scale. How is it that Boeing can build planes that involve thousands of components and hundreds of processes? The Law of Complexity is a mathematical formula (n2 – n = R). This says that for every element in a process, we can now calculate the number of interrelationships that form up into complexity.

When there are two people talking together there is an output from one person to the other. And a reply back to the first person. That is 2 x 2 – 2.  There are 2 relationships. If three people join into conversation, we now have 3 x 3 – 3 = 6. And if there are 10 people in a conference room talking with each other the formula is 10 x 10 – 10 = 90. The number of relationships is growing geometrically; not arithmatically.

Now, rather quickly we can see what complexity is doing to our conversation, or to the production of a Boeing 777 or a can of coke. We can see rather quickly why manufacturers need software to simplify their manufacturing processes. We can see why manufacturers invest so heavily in Six Sigma to eliminate processes and waste from their production systems.

But we can also see the impact of complexity on our conversations. If our CEO were the only one telling our customers what our company brand value statement was, it would be a simple communication … he would deliver it precisely the same every time and the delivery would be clear to all. But we have 900 employees. If we all told the company’s story differently, there would be 900 x 900 – 900 different versions of the company’s story. That’s over 80,000 permutations.

It is mandatory of all of us in marketing to get our brand message right and then to do whatever possible to get everyone saying it the same way. The Law of Complexity makes it clear how damaging unclear communications can be.

 

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