| | By Mick James
Many years ago I
worked for a local
authority that was the
target of a quite
vicious, politically
motivated campaign in
the local papers. Every
week they’d print the
most exaggerated or even
completely fabricated
stories about our waste,
corruption and general
inefficiency. Of course,
we knew these stories
weren’t true. The ironic
thing was that we had
all encountered far
worse incidents, but
no-one wanted to give
more ammunition to the
enemy.
Consultancy’s a bit
like that, although the
internal picture is (I
hope) somewhat rosier
than local government in
the 1980s. However, the
constant assault on
consultants from
management writers,
business gurus and
self-publicising CEOs
can lead us to be a
little lax in examining
our own faults.
One of the big
questions is not so much
"why do so many change
programmes fail?", as
"why do any?". There’s
so much experience and
expertise, so many
mistakes to learn from,
why haven’t we managed
to make the risk of
failure negligible? What
if we’re missing a
trick? And what if there | |
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| | were powerful,
ready-made tools and
techniques that could
close the gap?
Tim Arnold of Applied
Expertise believes that
is indeed the case. For
him the missing
ingredient is creativity
— the sort of creativity
that advertising
agencies bring to
campaigns to launch new
products and build
brands. Creativity has
the power to involve
people emotionally in
change — but is cruelly
absent from many change
programmes.
“What makes a change
programme successful?”
he asks. “You can point
to a lot of things, but
in reality it’s the
enthusiasm of the people
involved. Marketing has
that ability to engage
people in the creative
sense, but often it’s
sidelined.”
Marketing at its true
level is about defining
the product or service
that meets the
customers’ needs:
“One man’s marketing
is another man’s
business strategy,” says
Arnold. “But how much
influence does marketing
really have in an
organization.”
Arnold’s route into
consultancy from a
marketing background via
the dotcom boom gave him
a different take on the
new channels to | |
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| | wrong with starting with
a formulaic approach,”
says Arnold. “What is
wrong is if you don’t
rebrand it to be
appropriate to the staff
of the business,
positioning it to
embrace the fundamental
reason for why these
things are changing.”
The problem is
symptomatic of a wider
issue with branding and
advertising:
“Brands have become
separated from
companies,” he says.
“There’s a new breed of
agencies with esoteric
names who are appointed
for pure creativity,
rather than their
understanding of the
customer or their
ability to help the CEO
intellectualise his
understanding of the
company.”
The answer is to
reinstate the company
brand as an “umbrella”
from under which a
variety of audiences can
be addressed — one of
which must be the staff
of the company.
This approach leads
to a radically different
approach to selling and
in effect branding a
change programme, which
Arnold terms “dynamic
reshaping”.
“My hardest audience
to convince is
consultants,” he says.
“They say, we did a
programme like that, we | |
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| | called it ‘going for
gold’. You have to
convince them of the
need to create something
which is of the company
and could only be
theirs. Marketing needs
to be involved as much
as an intellectual
organization as a
functional one.”
I think Arnold has
hit on a fundamental
weakness not just in
change but in corporate
branding generally.
Companies will spend
millions hiring
celebrities and film
directors in an often
futile attempt to win a
few customers from the
opposition, but internal
communication, even of a
massive change programme
may be left to internal
resources or a cheap and
cheerful local agency.
“All I’m suggesting
is a fairly simple
concept--just allocating
1 per cent of a £10m
change budget,” says
Arnold.
Consultants enjoy
pointing the finger at
organizations with a
“silo mentality”.
Perhaps it's time we
looked beyond our own
silo at some other
professional disciplines
— marketing,
advertising, PR — and
learned a few valuable
lessons. | |
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| | customers offered by
developments such as
ecommerce and CRM.
“Because I had been
involved in marketing I
defined these new
channels as media,” he
says. However, he found
the new channels were
not being treated with
the same level of
creativity that
companies apply to
traditional media.
“When I became
involved with a business
consultancies change
proposal, looking at the
marketing consequences
of a CRM change, they
had lots of leaflets and
so forth to hand out,
but there was no
emotional involvement in
the change. They never
talked about the
underlying reason for
the change — to beat the
opposition!”
Too often change
programmes are
communicated and branded
in a formulaic manner
that has little or
nothing to do with the
individual aspirations
of the company or the
particular nature of the
change.
“There’s nothing | |
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