Why communication has everything to do with business strategy

Being in communication and advertising these days is both a thrilling and a frustrating experience. Let me start with the frustrating part. Our job has become frustrating because the tools with which we used to work are turning more and more useless. We used to work with mass media, commercial breaks and reaching broad audiences through piggybacking on one of the media that is reaching those groups. Today we simply can't do that anymore: Media consumption is shifting dramatically, there are thousands of media channels that all serve a fraction of the potential reach and the more power people have to choose valuable content, the more impatient they get with interrupting content (such as the ads we used to make for them).

Now, for the thrilling part of our job. To put it simply: we are now working with identity in stead of image. We are starting to work with clients that want to invest in their audience, instead of advertising to them. Brands that want to do the right thing, that want to add direct value to people's lives and that want to be talked about.

I think there's a gigantic difference between communication tactics and communication strategy. Communication tactics is all about making sure the brand or the product pops up at all the hubs on the internet where pro-active consumers go and compare products. This could lead to SEO, webcare teams, viral marketing, community marketing, etc...

The real challenge however, is on the level of communication strategy. Or even better: on the level of business strategy. We can come up with as many tactics as we want, if the offer sucks, than the tactics won't work. There's always one customer with a negative experience and a voice, who will gently kill our tactical audience approach. And this individual will have as much share of voice in the conversation as we have.

That's why it is such an exciting time for us as an agency. We can both work on getting the message out, as well as improving the "things people talk about". I've been doing focus groups with a lot of my client's clients lately. You can't imagine how much we learn by simply listening to them. We learn what excites them, we learn about the small details that piss them off, we learn the words by which they describe the brand and the arguments they use for recommending the brand. And the cool thing is... Customer advocacy is all in the smallest of details. It's about the fact that you serve good cookies at events, it's about calling back within a day, it's about being able to improvise and to be creative, it's about having good coffee instead of black smelly water,... All these small tangible things are experienced as the evidence of what you - as a brand - stand for. That's what people remember. Not the brand mission statement.

Conclusion: We as an agency work more and more in two directions: inside-out and outside-in. Inside-out is tactical marketing communication, answering the question: how can we get the remarkableness of the brand out in the conversational network. The outside-in question is becoming equally important. The outside-in question is: how can we improve the product and the service in such a way that it becomes worth talking about.

And that's how communication impacts business strategy.