There is a myth that only the marketing department controls the brand outside your business’s four walls. Even if you are the programmer who never talks to a single client, your marketing is how the program works, feels and functions. If you are the front desk worker, your presence is marketing how you reach out to people both in person and over the phone. If you’re the boss, every policy you make markets how you feel about your employees and your company.
Knowing that marketing isn’t just one aspect handled by one small group within a company makes you examine how you can get greater returns on your marketing efforts. If you hire the best coder in the world yet the design and troubleshooting are highly lacking, how does that reflect on the company?
What about the HR person who is told to hire someone for the lowest cost? Someone can be excellent on paper, yet move the company in the wrong direction with her marketing. It’s no fault of the HR person if he was told to find the best person for the lowest cost.
If you have a customer support person who hammers out calls but lacks in personality or compassion, how does that make the customer feel? Look at zappos.com. They built an entire company around talking with people on a personal level.
When you want to focus your efforts on marketing, don’t forget to look at the other people in the company doing the marketing. Cheers.
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Tags: Business, Customers, Marketing, People, Products, Services
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A company would be wise to establish certain guidelines to it's employees when they represent the company. If they establish across the board guidelines, they can head off certain embarrassing future problems. Just recently where I live, an employee of a company started a company Facebook Fan page. The CEO nor the employee's supervisor was aware of it. When it was discovered, a small panic ensued. It forced the company to develop a social media policy for the company. This was a good idea anyway. Just shows you that all employees are an extension of your marketing department.
Great write up Josh! It's all about teamwork and networking!
Communication is key, as long as people are on the same page you'll be heading the same direction, just might happen on some different roads than you are used to.
I take the opposite approach. I hate policy and think it addresses the 1% of people that need it while punishing the 99% that don't. I think hiring the right personnel solves more problems than endlessly creating new policies because of a mistake. I am willing to bet they could approach that 1 person and explain their expatiations and it would be a done deal. Everyone else would get whats going on and that would be the end of it. Plus then you don't have to spend the time writing up a manual on different things. Obviously if they keep messing up, you deal with that person not the ones that are not a part of it.Unless the employee was attempting to be malicious towards the company I think little damage would have been done. Address them and move on.
What a really important point! Your employees help build your reputation and really can shape how your company is viewed.