The Science of Marketing

This week’s Network World highlights a major challenge in modern communications. In his latest Netbuzz column, Paul McNamara describes the bizarre series of events that followed a major security breach at the grocery chain, Hannaford. After the potential compromise of 4.2 million credit and debit cards, Rapid7, one of Hannaford’s security vendors, immediately removed almost all records of its dealings with the grocer from its web site. And to make matters worse, when McNamara called multiple Rapid7 contacts for comment on the mysterious deletions, he heard a different story from each.

While Rapid7 was ultimately exonerated for the breach, the resulting Network World coverage hinted that by removing its link with Hannaford from the  web site and contradicting itself on its rationale, Rapid7 created the impression of guilt. The Rapid7 incident highlights a valuable lesson in media relations, and all marketing communications activities for that matter. Consistency is critical.

In a crisis such as the Hannaford security breach, it is crucial that all company spokespeople deliver the same message. There are numerous other best practices for responsible crisis communications, but we’ll save those for another post. Here, I’d like to highlight the importance of consistency in marketing communications, and suggest a quick fix.

Imagine sitting through a sales presentation for a new software product that appears finely tuned to your needs, only to check the company’s web site later and discover benefits that bear little resemblance to those in the pitch. This scenario can play out in any combination of ways - with a data sheet that flies in the face of a white paper or an advertisement that contradicts a trade show demonstration. When messages are inconsistent from one vehicle to another, a recipe for confusion is born and lost opportunity is sure to follow.

Inconsistency happens when different people create different pieces of collateral, when different items are created at different times and when priorities and messages are constantly in flux. In order to bring stability to marketing communications, it is critical to agree on, document and maintain a basic foundation for messaging, and use it as the starting point for content development. This foundation can be as simple as a one-page outline of high level messaging, and a lexicon of your most important key words and definitions. There’s no need to include every detail in the outline, since proof points constantly evolve. What is important is providing high level messages in context, so the important details intuitively fall beneath.

Once the foundation is in place, the key to building consistency in marketing communications is ensuring that the people on the front line of content development build this tool into their process. This means involving them in the development of the foundation, making it simple and useful, and keeping it up-to-date.

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