Finance and Business

Public Relations

The art of securing a favourable attitude to the aims and activity of an organization, its management, and the goods or service it provide.

Public relations is a much misunderstood term, largely because its tools are not standardized and its principles far from clearly defined, but perhaps more due to the fact that, by its very nature its activities must be more subtly expressed if they are to be successful.

Many business men believe that public relations (PR for short) is simply designed to obtain unpaid-for notices in the press and other mass-communications media. And it is unfortunately true that many PR agents perpeture this misconception by quoting “coloumn inches of press mention” to a client as a means of proving to him that they are earning the fee he is paying them! However, to be fair one must make it clear that there are few objective yard-sticks available for measuring the effectiveness of PR -the same difficulty that arises with advertising.

It is perhaps easier to comprehend PR in the marketing sphere if one makes a comparison with an individual person`s relationships, the interactions of an individual`s personality with those of people he meets or who know him by reputation, are made up of a great many instances of that person`s behaviour, builds up a pattern of responses that his acquaintances react favourabky to, then he will be liked and accepted. If does not present a sympathetic image, then they may feel less secure in their relations with him and there may be friction.

In other words, they know him, form a picture of him, through the pattern that they construct out his actions and statements. He projects his personality through the things he says and does.

Great Sales Force Coaching

Since coaching sales reps can be stressful and difficult, let’s take a close loot at what for a great coach, and what constitutes excellent coaching. Successful field coaching of reps requires that sales managers recognize three preconditions.

• First, the manager must set aside time for coaching. Some expert believe that in typical sales management position, 75% of the manager’s time should be spent in the field coaching reps.
• Second, to be truly effective, most coaching must be done individually with reps, in sessions that last from thirty-five to forty-five minutes and take place immediately prior to or following rep activities minutes and take place immediately prior to or following rep activities with customers. This make the coaching more relevant and timely.

Coaching that is delayed or out of sync with applicable situation is not nearly so effective. Although certain amount of coaching of sales reps in a group setting is possible, most coaching of reps should be tailored to the individual to reflect the operating realities of different reps, customer sets, and distributors in a territory.

Third, the benefits of coaching are not truly realized until trust has been established between sales manager and rep. coaching involves confronting problems. Unless trust is present, the rep being coached may not feel the manager has earned the right to be as firm and direct as the situation requires. The manager’s authority is not sufficient in itself to ensure that genuine coaching session will occur.

The sales manager shouldn’t dominate a coaching session. Yet this frequently occurs in the absence of trust. Because trust involves shared values and experiences, developing a relationship takes time. Sales managers must recognize the time-consuming nature of trust building.
A great coach performs several key roles for sales reps :
The instructor-teacher role. Sales managers should help reps integrate what they learned in the classroom about products or selling skills with what their experience is teaching the “in the street.” A sales manager can provide quality instruction to reps, on the spot, before o after sales calls about :
- How to probe for genuine customer needs.
- How to categorize customers by sales potential, in ways that make the rep smarter  in qualifying business prospects or more able to typify the key buying influences in an account. Customer categorization help reps stay organized. They can more readily use their accumulated knowledge of what works for customers.
- How to study and categorize competitors. Sales managers who teach reps to better understand competitors are providing them with information useful in setting sales goals in the midst of changing competition in the local territory. Reps covering key urban territories are often subject to more aggressive and numerous competitive maneuvers than are reps in larger, rural territories.
- How to optimally lay out routing plans for customer call cycles, depeding on various accounts’ sales volumes and territory. The manager can guide reps in defining “A.” “B” or “C” target accounts, then help the rep determine feasible call schedules.
- Sales managers can provide quality instruction on what the rep can do to achieve desirable outcomes. Managers can be dispassionate about which approaches work best and/or how these can be finetuned. This improves a sales rep’s adaptive selling skills. Often a manager accompanying a rep can see ways for the rep to improve his of her handling of customer objections of to improve closing techniques. Teaching reps self-assessment skills is a vital part of a coach’s role.

Assembling Teams of Reps and Keeping Them Sharp

Sales managers engage in eight central tasks in their search to develop a “world class” sales organization. These tasks have remained constant for many years. They can ne though of as a combination of people-management and process-management skills.

Managers beign by recruiting, screening, and hiring reps. Task 2 involves training reps and readying them for sales asignments. Task 3 requires the manager to deploy the rep to cover markets, accounts, and geographic territority. The remaining five managerial tasks relate to the field: supervision, measurement of rep results, performance feedback and evaluation, compensation and rep incentives, and promotion of reps into managerial jobs or higher-level sales responsibilities.

With more volative crowded markets, smarters customers are demanding solutions, and with more consolidated sophisticated reseller companies, reps have changed. In the face of such changes, the old sales management task model must be updated. While reps are still recruited and hired, more of them are now college graduates, and more of them are women. Thus, selection of reps is more varied, with higher-level skills being sought.

Training is no longer as operative a descripter of managerial actions as is rep development. As one astute manager once remarked, “your train animals, you develop people.” Reps must be developed as specialists and as team players, since so much of selling is now a team effort. Deployment of reps to territories or accounts is today more complex, since some accounts ae handled by telesales personnel, some by national account reps, and others by rep teams composed of market, product, or applications specialists all working in concert. The sales manager learns to be a network manager, astute at team building and deployment as well as individual account or territory assignments.

Organizing the Marketing Function

Some managements fall into a trap by trying to adopt the organization plan of another company. It is perfectly natural to look at company A, observse that it has been succesful, and conclude, therefore, that its form of organization, applied to our company, will make us succesful. Such a conclusion usually is incorrect.

Even when the products and markets were similar, the personnel, management attitudes, history, size, and the company`s image in the market place were different. And some cases the products, markets, channels of distribution, and needs of customers were different.

This is not to say that one management cannot learn and get ideas from the organization plans of other companies. Of course it can and should. In the cases cited earlier, each company has retained some aspects of the plan it tried to copy. But to try to adapt another company`s organization plan to one`s own company without first thinking through what it needed for success will almost surely result in lost time, money, effort, and  people. One of the greatest contributions experienced management consultants can make is in the area of organization planning.

Some companies have made serious mistakes even with this type of help, but qualified management consultants have worked with many types of organization, and they know the steps of analysis that must be gone through to device a sound organizational structure.

Business management is sometimes accused of following fads. Once a new management technique is adopted by a few companies and receives some acclaim, many others rush to join in, often without sufficient thought as to whether, or how, it applied to them. This has been true with decentralized management and with divisionalization. It is certainly true  of the marketing concept. Market orientation is so sound in its basic concept that most managements have accepted the idea. However, many have tried to adopt it by making changes in their organizations without firt examining the needs of their markets, the strenghts and weaknesses if their company, and the type of personnel available for staffing positions calling for new skills and responsibilities.

Internal Relationships of Manager

The relationship of marketing manager is report to the president or, if he is marketing manager for a division, to the division manager. It should be clear by now that the type of marketing manager we are discussing must report to the chief decision maker, whether his tittle be chairman, president, or general manager. At no lower level can be possibly have the authority and status needed to carry out his job, nor at  a lower level can he look for the coordination with other functional areas of the business that must be provided by the chief executive.

We have shown the marketing manager supervising the general sales manager, advertising manager, marketing research manager, product manager and marketing service manager. The position supervised vary, of course, with the type of company and the organization required to serve best the needs of the company`s costumers. A listing of internal relationships helps to point out the other executives in the company with whom the marketing manager must deal in order to carry out his job.

A statement of external relationships indicates the scope of outside contacts the marketing manager must maintain and also serves to place limitations on the extend of such contacts. It is hard to envisage how the marketing manager could be effective in his job over the long run without first-hand contact with others outside the company. Not only must be maintain some feel for what is going on in the market through personal customer and industry contacts, but also he must keep himself up to date on the latest developments in the field of marketing management.

All business today is so much under the influence of goverment regulations that the marketing manager must keep well-informed on the laws and administrative practices affecting marketing of his company`s products and services. Furthermore, through personal effort and through cooperation with industry associations, he must do his part to prevent laws and regulation that place unwise and unwarranted restrictions on the free marketing system.

to be continue to: Internal and External Relationships of Manager

The Advertising Budget and Platform

The advertising budget should be worked out so as to provide for a relatively heavy impact in at least the first year, and preferably over the first two years. The aims of a campaign are:

• Inform the potential consumers of the product`s existence;
• Convey its special identity, its brand name, recognition features, such as distinctive name, shape, and color of pack;
• Obtain acceptance for its unique selling proposition -in this case the “X factor”, and the particular properties and features- in short to give the product a distinct identity (to `personalize` it) with consumers can associate their own ideas in a sympathetic way. It`s for this reason that the advertising for some products deliberately creates an actual figure to “represent” the product  for example the many other animated cartoon figures that `speak` for the product on television, are featured in the printed advertising, and appear on the pack or label of the product itself, thereby assisting in obtaining product-recognition and a sympathetic response at the point-of-sale. Incidentally, the figure or symbol on the pack helps to continue the selling message by repeated impact on the consumer and his family and friends, inside the home, or wherever the product is used;
• Obtain the maximum acceptance for the advertising platform (the advertiser selling theme) as the basis for all merchandising, selling, and for the building of brand loyalty.

The “advertising platform”, or theme, needs particular emphasis, since it is the point of reference, so to speak, for all the activities concerned with the marketing operation, culminating in selling the product to the customers and, of course, aiming at repeat sales in the future. The advertising platform sets the tone for all the variations in the advertising and merchandising that will be carried out; it establishes the product`s personality, which, one fixed or formulated, is difficult to alter later on.

The advertising platform for a certain make of car is a compound of -unassailable quality, high social class, top rank business success, and luxury. The advertising platform for a certain brand of women cosmetics is -beauty compound it is- complete versatility of service. In every instance the advertising platform -in fact, also the basic selling theme- is compound of three aims:

• to embrace all the variations of attitudes (or the majority of them) to be found in the costumer group aimed at’
• to convey a tempting idea that attracts purchase;
• to “sell” a theme  in that product field and preferably completely different from them.

Marketing Policy Aspects

Before discussing in detail some of the marketing policy aspects of the use of advertising, let us turn now to consider the principles of advertising and the factors to be taken into account in using it. Advertising can range from the insertion of a notice in the local newspaper anouncing the opening of a few fish-and-chip shop, to a nation-wde campaign of press, radion, television and screen advertising, costing many hundred thousands of pounds and involving highly complex skills of planning, creation, production, and liaison between a great number of specialists.

The small firm often  deals with its own advertising problems, probably partly for reasons of supposed economy and partly because its management includes someone with an aptitude in this direction. How successful these `do-it-your-self` advertising methods are it would be impossible to examine in general terms here. Some are not doubt successful, where the propieter, or one of the directors, is inspired and has understanding of the media (usually the press, posters, and possibly the local cinema) and their production techniques, to use them effectively.

Other are no doubt less successful (and therefore wasteful) because of the member of management handling them either lacks these skills or cannot use them effectively and run his business at the same time -or a combination of both these reasons. It will be more instructive to discuss the use of advertising in terms of the larger-sized manufacturing company that make use of and advertising agency.

More Closely to Advertising

Yet, fully armed as the forces of persuasion would seem to be, there are influences that apparently work against their full success! One of these is the fact, obvious when it is mentioned, that there are many product fields where a number of more or less directly comparable products are figthing for a share market, each of them using exactly the same armoury of persuasion-weapons as the others, for example the cigarette field and the toiletries field, where the competition is especially fierce.

In spite of the comparative sophistication of the methods of consumer research now available, it is still largely guess-work to say why brand failures happen. There are many theories, for instance, about the reason for the failure of a certain cigarette brand whose name was already well-know in the quality of tobacco and smoker`s accessories field -but no one can honestly say what the true cause was. Again, failure of a certain brand of “instant beverage” was complete in the spite of heavy advertising.

Brand failures in the theories field are also numerous in spite of the apparently lavish use of all the most sophisticated advertising methods. It has been estimated that 15 out 16 new products are failures, in the sense of capturing enough of the market to make them a profitable enterprise.

Advertising Policy

To all pervading can this “scattering” be that it is no longer even combined to the consumer`s home. The development of micro-circuitry and transistor electronics has meant that radio broadcasting and even television broadcasting can now accompany the consumer while traveling in private or public transport, on the holiday-beach, in the open countryside, in the hotel bedroom, in his bathroom- wherever he goes, in fact (except, for the present at least, when he goes to sleep)!

But in addition to the ability of mass communications methods to pervade every area of a person`s activity, the techniques employed have gained in sophistication from the advances that have been achieved in the understanding of group and individual psychology. The theory of “stereotypes” that is the the tendency of people to construct for themselves patterns of attitudes and responses to the external world as a ready guide for their behaviour -has been developed and systemized to the extend that it is longer necessary to rely on mere intuition to find and advertising platform (or theme) that will  be received sympathetically by the section of the public a manufacturer is aiming at as the market for his products.

Thus it is now quite possible to use some of the techniques of clinical psychology to investigate the deeper layers of consumer-attitudes in order to frame product-policy and an advertising policy that will fit more accurately into a people`s steteotype patterns. Glasser said that we have entered a period when these methods of understanding the hidden springs of human responses will increasingly enable the advertising practitioner to aim his persuasive message at the unconscious thinking of the prospective costumer, influencing his attitudes unwares.

This is not surprising to me, in this context, that many advertising agencies employ highly qualified psychologists to advise on the framing of advertising campaigns, the copy platform (the theme), the words, type-face and layout of copy (the text of the advertisement), and the character of the visual material associated with in in the advertisement -whether this be in print, on the air, or on film, or indeed any medium.

* Continous post from Advertising Marketing one.