Greggs’ Recipe for Campaign Success

This week’s U-turn on the pasty tax demonstrates what can be achieved by a well thought out campaign. Since proposals to place 20% VAT on all food sold hot were first announced in March, Greggs has run a pitch perfect communications offensive.

By taking advantage of the zeitgeist – the perception that it was an unfair budget from an out of touch government – the bakers turned a potential business disaster into a corporate success. Reams of media coverage increased awareness, and a grass roots campaign engaged and energised its customer base. But perhaps most impressively, rather than just slamming the proposals, it developed a clear set of policy alternatives to give the Government an exit from an unpopular proposal.     

What lessons can we learn from this?

1.     Communications campaigns can change minds. When handled correctly, communications should do much more than convey an opinion or message. At their most effective they should change people’s perceptions and influence their behaviour. When operating in a difficult environment, this is essential for an organisation to change the landscape they work within.

2.     Integrated campaigns often work best. If you want to achieve a particular policy outcome then use a range of channels. Greggs adopted a sophisticated communications strategy that effectively blended strong media work, the seeding of a powerful grassroots movement and direct engagement with key influencers. The result was Greggs’ message was able to reach policy makers more effectively.

3.     External support provides vital perspective and expertise. In the case of Greggs, this support came from a wide base of MPs, trade associates, members of the public and The Sun newspaper. Greggs followed the golden rule that an argument is often more powerful when made by supporters. More importantly, this is amplified when supporters represent a number of key audiences for those you are looking to influence.

4.     An issue or crisis can be turned to your advantage. During a crisis, an organisation will often find itself thrust into the media spotlight. If handled poorly, this can severely damage its reputation. But if messaging effectively resonates with key stakeholders, it can provide a unique opportunity to reach a much wider audience than usually available. By matching their corporate objectives with public concerns, Greggs was able to position itself as a ‘consumer champion’, building a strong support base and influencing policy makers.

5.     Public affairs campaigns can often have public relations benefits. The platform that a public affairs campaign provides can be valuable in achieving a wider range of objectives by raising awareness of your brand and building respect among stakeholders.  No doubt Greggs wanted to change a political decision, but it has enjoyed a range of wider benefits that would have come about U-Turn or not.

The result of Greggs following this recipe for success? (sorry!) Greggs scored an unlikely victory, effectively influenced Government policy, and made sure a brand that was previously better known in Wakefield is now recognised in Whitehall. 

John Hood

Consultant

john@linstockcommunications.com

 

Crisis? What crisis?

For organisations, politicians, celebrities and just about everyone in the public eye, difficult stuff happens all the time. Building any sort of public profile involves dealing with things you might not like, but it’s unavoidable. However, from time to time, some of those problems go beyond the day-to-day and threaten to do serious damage to your reputation.

The dreaded communications crisis usually involves one or more of the following:

• Something that challenges the very existence of the party involved – toymaker recalls batch of toxic dolls, for example.
• Something that challenges the values of the party involved; negligence, perhaps.
• Something that runs across multiple news cycles.
• Something that occurs at a really awkward time. No time is a good time for a crisis, but some are undoubtedly worse than others.

If a storm is brewing, there’s no time to get flustered. Here are some quick guidelines that might help you out in a fix.

Be honest. Aside from the ethical concerns, it is never in anyone’s long term interests to tell lies. So if a journalist asks “Were mistakes made by your organisation?” and mistakes were made, answer yes – however uncomfortable it may be.

Focus on your audiences, not on the channels. In the midst of a crisis it can be tempting to bend with the latest article, blog, TV news clip or tweet. But it’s your audiences that matter! And the messaging you choose to use to address their specific concerns will differ; an existing customer will need to hear something different from a shareholder, or a supplier, or a regulator to be reassured that you are in control and can still be trusted.

Think long term. At the outset of any crisis project, get to grips with the long-term objectives and don’t let events in the short-term distract you from those goals. A message might make things easier today (e.g. “It was a mistake to hire staff from that recruiter – rest assured, we’ll never be doing that again.”) but it could come back to haunt you in the future.

Be prepared. If a potential crisis is looming then it could break at any moment. As soon as possible, pull together a project bible of facts, figures, lines to take and responses to difficult questions. 

Forewarned is forearmed. Make sure you know what is already being said about you across traditional media, online sites, blogs and microblogging sites. Negative speculation, accusations and threats can occur anywhere. If a disgruntled ex-employee or a dissatisfied customer has an axe to grind, they might take to a blog, or write a letter to a newspaper editor. The other advantage of monitoring these is that if inaccuracies occur, spotting them early can mean they are corrected at source before they become widely accepted fact.

Or, you could just bury your head and hope it all blows over?

Tom Yazdi

Consultant

tom@linstockcommunications.com 

What’s social about social mobility?

The issue of social mobility often acts like a Siren call to politicians - immeasurably tempting, but once approached, usually destructive. It was therefore no surprise that Nick Clegg chose to tackle this theme when he announced this week that the Government would adopt 17 new ‘trackers’ to better measure social mobility. Equally, it was of little surprise that his comments were so widely criticised in the media. Responses ranged from queries over the validity of his arguments to questions on the importance of social mobility itself. But one question that was not asked was, how social is social mobility?

The trackers outlined by Clegg point towards attainments such as educational achievement and employment. Clearly these are important statistical measurements, but they deal in absolutes. Should social mobility mean more this? David Cameron has made much of the need to move away from more traditional, rigid measurements of the nation’s well-being, such as GDP.  He even asked the ONS to look at new measures to gauge national well-being. But Nick Clegg’s new trackers seem to reverse this process, using more classical methods of measuring societal progress. Is this right, or should social mobility also look at happiness and other more imprecise concepts?

The trackers are also very much focused on the individual’s success. This is understandable, but should an individual’s contribution to society also be measured as a sign of social mobility? Politicians talk of long-term inter-generational unemployment and those disconnected from society, but there is no parallel talk of how an active participation in society can point towards greater opportunity and social mobility.

There are two points to be made on this. Firstly, whatever measurements you use to determine success or failure, they must be familiar to those they are presented to. The simple reality is, well-being indexes and happiness gauges are often seen as gimmicky or plain incomprehensible to the general public. On the other hand, employment levels and the number of A-C grades are much easier for people to understand and digest. In this sense, Nick Clegg’s social mobility trackers acknowledge a basic truth of communications – accessibility is vital.

Secondly, however you communicate, and on whatever issue, make sure your messaging is consistent. There is a clear disconnect between Clegg’s cold hard facts and the more subjective concerns of Cameron’s well-being index.

It’s not hard to see why the Liberal Democrats have chosen to campaign on social mobility. A recent ComRes poll found the majority of the voters it has haemorrhaged over the past few months have shifted towards Labour. To win these back, Clegg et al clearly believe that a focus on ‘left-of-centre’ concerns (as social mobility is often viewed) is of paramount importance.  

But social mobility has become a byword for fairness and a ‘just society’, with a strong emotive pull for large swathes of the electorate. If politicians like Nick Clegg tackle this subject, they must consider how their communications can better resonate with the public. Many political careers have ended as a result of a populist topic without a populist message.  

John Hood

Consultant

john@linstockcommunications.com 

 

From Yell and back? Hibu searches for meaning

‘It’s just a word’. ‘It tells a story’. ‘It doesn’t mean anything’. ‘It needed to be short and easy to pronounce’. ‘It’s meaningless’. These are just a few of the ways that senior figures from Yell have described their new name ‘Hibu’.

The company’s rebrand comes as its share price dropped 21% following results revealing a pre-tax loss of £1.42bn. Unfortunately, without a change in communications strategy, I’m not sure the name change will be the solution that Yell needs.

A brand is more than just a name or a logo. A brand should tell us something about the organisation behind the name. A brand is an organisation’s identity. Just as you can tell a lot about a person by their appearance and the things they say, you should be able to get an idea of what an organisation’s values and vision are from their branding.

But a brand only works when everybody – management, staff, partners and customers – can get behind it. From the comments being made, it doesn’t sound as if the senior management team really understand the new brand. And if they don’t understand it, it’s going to be difficult for others to get enthused.

Yell needs to communicate internally before it communicates externally. It needs to help its staff, partners and stakeholders understand what the new name is about and what it stands for. It needs to explain how the re-brand is making the most of the Group’s past, but is also pointing towards its future. Investors and customers will only believe in the new brand if the company itself believes in it.

Some have defended the choice of Hibu by saying that before it became famous, “Yahoo!” didn’t mean anything either. This isn’t quite true. A quick Google search tells us that the name is short for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”, reflecting both the way the database is arranged (hierarchical) and its use as a source of truth and wisdom (oracle). In addition, Yahoo!’s creators liked the definition of a yahoo: “rude, unsophisticated and uncouth”.

Admittedly, most people have no idea what Yahoo! stands for, nor do they care what it means. But its creators and early users understood the name as part of the brand identity, believed in the strategy and communicated this to the world. Now, Yahoo! is a household name.

A new name alone will not raise Yell’s share price. But if the company improves its communications strategy and effectively promotes the new brand and what it stands for, we may still be yelling ‘Hibu’ in a decade.

Jo Nussbaum

Consultant

jo@linstockcommunications.com

Mark: married, minted and misleading…?

For a company dogged by criticism over its approach to customer privacy, Facebook, and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have done a remarkably good job of keeping their own affairs private. Last weekend it was announced that Mr Zuckerberg had got married, not through a bland corporate press release, a glossy magazine shoot or a heartfelt doorstep press conference, but through a simple ‘married Priscilla Chan’ update on his own Facebook page. The announcement, at least as far the outside world was concerned, came entirely out of the blue. Normally, even the best laid and most secretive of celebrity wedding plans are scuppered by a loose-tongued ‘friend’…(it seems Mark Zuckerberg’s friends are rather closer to him than most of those acquired through his social networking site.)

Since then, snippets of information have been provided, along with a small number of photos. More importantly, alongside the numerous ‘likes’ of his update were a series of blogs and comments pointing out the irony of such a secretive announcement.

From a communications perspective, Zuckerberg’s update seems a savvy, if slightly pithy, PR stunt. By dropping his marriage bombshell on Facebook, Zuckerberg instantly started a conversation on the subject on the very same platform. That is not to suggest this was his only motive of course, but it’s handy side-effect.

The problem for Zuckerberg is that by communicating in this way he blurs the lines between public and private realms. He is simultaneously saying he wants to update the public about his private life (and therefore validating their right to know), while making it clear that he expects to be able to do this when he chooses and on his own terms. It’s a difficult message to tell your customers ‘I care about your privacy, but I care more about mine.’

Zuckerberg is no longer a guy who set up a successful company, or even a reluctant spokesperson for this company. He’s a brand. As accidental as the signature hoody may be, Zuckerberg is now a physical embodiment of his company. When he steadfastly refuses to wear a suit, it’s an indication of the ethos of Facebook. When he speaks, he speaks for Facebook.

While a CEO of a major company can use Facebook to provide a more human face and voice to an organisation, this is not so easy for Zuckerberg. His organisation already has a human face. So far, Zuckerberg has effectively used his own Facebook profile as a powerful marketing tool for his business, without having to personalise it to the point of invading his own privacy. But walking this tightrope is likely to get more and more difficult.

Social media has become a medium through which we provide increasingly personal information to wider and wider audiences. But the public is also becoming increasingly switched on to how such platforms work. At some point, there is a danger this spills over into a wider refusal to provide information on Facebook. After all, if Facebook’s own CEO is happy to restrict such information under a cloak of secrecy, why shouldn’t other users?

Should Mark Zuckerberg worry? Perhaps. At the moment he has around 19 billion reasons to feel like he’s getting it more right than wrong.

Note: We at Linstock Towers are rightly impressed by Facebook’s meteoric rise, and long may it continue. (he can read this, right?).

John Hood
Consultant
john@linstockcommunications.com

Reputation Matters: Why Internal Communications is Critical to External Perceptions

New research confirms what we’ve been thinking for a long time – employee perceptions increasingly shape an organisation’s external reputation.

Edelman’s latest Trust Barometer highlights a significant shift away from confidence in CEOs and Government officials in favour of regular employees and ‘people like me’.

While this may reflect a knee-jerk reaction to our ongoing economic and political difficulties, it is also evidence of wider social and technological changes that are here to stay – namely a breakdown in deference to traditional authority figures and the democratisation of the media with the rise of Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.

When 30,000 people across the world were asked about the credibility of company information received from different groups, CEOs suffered a sharp drop from 50% in 2011 to 38% in 2012. On the flipside, regular employees enjoyed a jump from 34% to 50%.

Perhaps most interestingly, the credibility of ‘people like me’ soared from 43% to 65%. This is a trend much beloved by behavioural economists who believe that people are more likely to be influenced by people similar to themselves.

But what does this all mean for communications professionals?

Firstly, communications campaigns must include internal audiences. At a minimum, the team needs to be informed about what’s happening. But, ideally, employees will be part of the dialogue shaping the business strategy and its related communications campaigns.

Secondly, communications must reflect reality. There’s no point spending thousands on external advertising, PR and associated marketing spend if a handful of disaffected or ill-informed team members can undermine the message with a few key strokes pointing out issues and inconsistencies.

Thirdly, new developments can be turned to an organisations’ advantage. Employee engagement programmes can turn team members into company or brand advocates. Likewise, if you really want to influence how different groups think and act, you need to consider carefully who is best placed to deliver the message and how they do so.

What’s clear is that PR and related communications programmes must include employees as a target audience. Done well, it can have a major positive impact on reputation. Done badly or not at all and lots of hard work can be undone in minutes.

Simon Maule,
Director
simon@linstockcommunications.com

Free education, but what cost?

 

Last year, Sebastian Thrun, the head of Google’s top research laboratory, made a graduate course he was teaching at Stanford University available online, free. Not much of a story here surely, except that Stanford would normally charge an undergraduate £33,200 a year in tuition fees for such a course. Ordinarily such a privilege would only be available to a handful of students; it is now open to anyone with an internet connection. So far, 160,000 people from 190 countries have signed up.

In anyone’s book, that’s a pretty impressive feat. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently committed £37 million to produce free online teaching. This has gone beyond simple online lectures to include online tutorial sessions and homework assignments. As usual, Ivy League institutions are leading the world in the exploration of new ways of teaching and learning.

In the UK, remote access learning has had a more modest trajectory, but here too more and more learning resources are being delivered online. Clearly, remote access learning has huge potential. It can cut costs for both the provider and user, allow more flexible learning, and enable learners to receive the very best in academic teaching across the globe. Not everyone is convinced, and a number of well-founded concerns have been raised, not least the question of how universities will charge fees if the world’s best teachers are online. But are there other important aspects of the nature of learning that are being overlooked?

There are a reasons that universities exist as bricks and mortar as well as digital entities. The first is historic, but the second is the continuing value that students and employers place on the ‘student experience’. Admittedly, employer interest in this ‘experience’ is probably a little more prosaic, but it is still extremely important for graduates to understand employer concerns as they look to enter an increasingly competitive graduate jobs market. The Association of Graduate Recruiters has regularly found that employers believe graduates lack "soft skills", such as team working and communications. However, can such skills be better learnt in the drafty lecture hall or in the vast expanse of the digital world. Surely to improve inter-personal skills, we need genuine inter-personal interaction?

What we learn is only ever half the battle. How we communicate this is equally important. For this, the university degree it its current format is likely to exist for some time. However, once the technology genie is out of the bottle, it rarely goes back in, and it seems certain that free online learning will be further explored by pioneering institutions. The challenge will be to develop courses that effectively combine the learning of technical information with ways to develop the communications skills of future generations of learners. 

John Hood

Consultant

john@linstockcommunications.com

Putting a price on jobs

So it costs the tax payer £200,000 to create a job in the north according to today’s NAO report. Fair dos if that post is Bob Diamond’s, but it’s probably not. The Regional Growth Fund is coming in for a lot of flack as a consequence. Conservative elements of the coalition will seek to blame the Lib Dems who championed the rebalancing in the first place, while wincing at comparisons with the RDAs. At £28,000 a go, they were £5,000 per job cheaper than the RGF (or so we are told).

Two quick reflections on this, one on policy and a second on how it’s been communicated.

The RGF has worthy ambitions but in seeking to provide a quick fix it has fallen into the same traps as the RDAs. They were also expected to report on the number of jobs created each year and reluctantly forced to spread their funding across a host of tactical initiatives rather than a handful of strategic interventions. There are reasons why the economy develops in an unbalanced way and private investors are unwilling to invest in certain areas; poor transport links, a lack of skills, the cost of remediating old industrial land perhaps. But rather than address these problems at the fundamental level and improve the environment for business, the RGF (and lots of RDA funding) focused on grants to individual enterprises that can only temporarily counterbalance the structural problems. It’s a solution that ticks political boxes (lots of things happen in lots of different areas) but is it really sustainable?

Then there’s the communications problem. Expectation management. £1.4 billion is not a lot of money. It’s just 0.2% of UK public spending. Even if it’s used to leverage huge investment from elsewhere there is only a limited amount that can be achieved. But with little else in the regional policy armoury, and no money to spend, we were told to expect a lot from a relatively modest programme. The problem was compounded when the job creation targets were set at the outset – a lesson that could have been learnt from the difficulties faced by the RDAs. In the desire to measure something, and account for public money, the programme has been a hostage to fortune. Jobs are at the mercy of a host of factors, not just RGF. Better from a policy and communications perspective to tell people about a small number of tangible high impact investments that will improve the business environment. People understand it and at least delivery sits largely in your own hands.

Jon Bennett
Director
jon@linstockcommunications.com

We’re in this together…so where are we going?

Jack Welch isn’t without his critics, but he’s eminently quotable.  “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion,” he says.  And while the ‘big vision’ thing can lead to cynicism (how many big visions actually get followed through?) it’s an important part of tying people into a project.

Linstock often works for large partnerships.  If we can’t get the partners bought into some core objectives at the outset, and if we can’t show there’s something in it for everyone, then the project will fail.  Within each partner organisation a host of individuals then need to be enthused.  They need to know that the hard work ahead is worth it because they can see some tangible improvement in the future.  No-one wants a whole lot of hassle and graft if they don’t understand what the result will look like.

This ‘buy in’ process is something the Coalition is grappling with at the moment.  Today’s Queen’s Speech was an opportunity to take it on, but the consensus seems to be it is an opportunity missed.  Broadly speaking the electorate seems to accept that we need to tighten our belts, though there is plenty of debate about how much.  But there isn’t much sense of how things will be better when the debts are paid.  This isn’t about a return to growth – which is more of a process than a goal in itself.  It’s about a tangible sense of the lives we can lead and the prospects of children and young people.  What type of society will we be a part of?  

Staying in for months on end while you pay off a credit card is hard.  But it’s a whole lot easier if you focus on the extra cash you’ll have each month when the slate is cleared.  The electorate understands that these are ‘difficult times’ and there is ‘hard work ahead’.  We hear the phrases often enough.  But what will be the upside when the hard work is done?  There is a major project taking place without its millions of partners understanding their common goal.    

The Queen’s Speech is being positioned as a set of measures to support the family, but with child benefit changes about to kick in this could be a difficult sell.  It’s tough for a Government beset by problems to articulate a vision at the best of times, let alone when the vision is different in each camp of the Coalition.  The danger is that in the absence of a common goal people look for a common enemy.  

Jon Bennett

Director

jon@linstockcommunications.com
 

The social media reticence of university vice-chancellors

Patrick McGhee’s appointment as the new chair of Million+ provided a modest smattering of media coverage at the beginning of this month. While the Times Higher Education focused on Mr McGhee’s rather sober task of widening participation at universities and his ‘humble’ beginnings, it was left to the Guardian to provide a more left-field angle yesterday when it highlighted his prolific use of Twitter.

A vice-chancellor tweeting? Who’d have thought it? Well, actually, as the Guardian rightly points out, it is a relatively novel concept among the leaders of our universities. But is this a cause for concern, should we worry that our vice-chancellors seem so uninterested in drafting pithy 140 character messages? For many, this question will no doubt be the cue for rolled-eyes and mumblings about social media being ‘over-hyped.’ Certainly, some have oversold social media as a communications panacea and prematurely rejected more traditional communications techniques. Moreover, there is the very real danger that using social media opens organisations and individuals to a level of scrutiny and criticism that can be extremely damaging, if handled incorrectly. But, despite this, or perhaps because of this, social media remains an often unrealised channel to communicate with target audiences. No doubt students are already moving onto new social media platforms, but for those looking to engage with an increasingly consumer-like student demanding answers on all manner of things, Twitter remains a solid option to engage with them.

Not all communications between universities and their students/prospective students need to, or should, come directly from the vice chancellor. But in an increasingly volatile market where universities are having to make tough and sometimes unpopular decisions, it is often vice-chancellors who find the buck stops with them. Numerous universities have adopted social media to effectively engage with students, but true cultural change needs to come from the top. More vice chancellors should follow the lead of Patrick McGhee and demonstrate a willingness to embrace social media if they want to better understand the students they seek to attract.

The Guardian’s coverage of Patrick McGhee’s Twitter usage also points to a further modern phenomenon – the development of the use of news outlets becoming news in itself. OK, Twitter is not strictly a ‘news outlet’, but it does serve a loose function as an aggregator and spreader of opinion. The relative newness and associated excitement associated with Twitter and other forms of social media will surely dissipate with time, and with this it is likely that ‘Prominent public figure uses Twitter’ stories will also begin to fade. But in the meantime, spokespeople of high-profile organisations need to be aware that simply using these platforms can be a story in itself. This is particularly true of organisations where eagle-eyed members of the public are keen to scrutinise the motives behind even the most innocent use of social media.

John Hood
Consultant
john@linstockcommunications.com