Kenyan PR blogger resurrects

Blogging is not one of the easiest routines, nobody was honest enough to tell me that when I decided to blog. I have had to find out after nine years of blogging. Honestly I still find it hard to blog consistently, probably because I chose not to go for the hard news kind of blogs.

After discussing this with a number of bloggers I admire in our local space. Kachwanya and Reyhab you hear me!!! I decided to come up with a strategy that will address the issue of consistency and deadlines for my blog.

The strategy is simple, really simple, for the next many months, I will be attached to Business Today, a leading online business publication in East Africa. Basically, every week I will be sharing learning’s about communication, brands, Public Relations, Public Relations and Public Relations. Let’s just say I will be blogging about integrated communication.

Again welcome to long lost Young PR Kenya,

Good employee relations key in business growth

Even with the sustained heartbeat, one can easily tell that the once yummy girl – Uchumi Supermarket – is struggling to live, probably crafting her will, whose pages will be shared among the many suppliers she owes.

She has been bleeding for a number of years now, and to say that she is now pale is an understatement. That girl is not only withdrawn but has lately been forcing a vague smile, a clear sign that all the plastic surgeries in form of restructuring and the numerous financial injections did not work.

As we prepare for a fundraiser or a burial ceremony for Kenya’s only publicly traded retailer, many questions are being asked. Was Jonathan Ciano a mortician? Or was he a neurosurgeon who delayed his exit from the theatre, only to carry the cross for the nurses who forgot to dispense the follow-up doses.

Either the PR practitioners locally known as snake charmers had a role to play in this. What did they do to engage and manage the internal stakeholders of this giant retailer?

World over, the components of a strong company – in any industry – can be focused down to four critical areas. Good management, good products/services, good customer service and good employees. As a business owner, the first two are relatively easy to control. But how do you assure that your employees treat your customers in such a way that they stay happy and repeat customers?

Unhappy employee = unhappy customer

Customers can tell in an instant whether they are dealing with a happy or unhappy employee. Unhappy employees often take out their frustration and unhappiness on the customers. This happens when we you have to pack your stuff at the tills, break your nails as you rummage through your handbag for the elusive coins as well as when  a 45-minute shopping walk around the supermarket yields twenty percent of your requirements.

A happy employee will do all he or she can do make a customer happy. They will get the trolley across the road to where you have parked; they will save you the hustle of explaining why milk should not be packed alongside mosquito coils. They do all this because they want to retain their job and they have an interest in seeing the company flourish. 

Regardless of how much you pay your employees, good companies understand the value of good employees, especially in such a competitive industry. Therefore, each company does everything it can to make its employees happy

So how does the average company keep its talent happy and productive?

A good place to start is to understand that public relations applies to your employees, as it does to your customers. The company that understands that it’s most valued asset is hardworking, productive employees, will create and implement an internal PR programme to keep its employees in great form.

Aside from the obvious – competitive salaries, benefits and bonuses – employees want to know that their work matters, that they are appreciated and that they will be rewarded for their effort.

That is why many companies have instituted reward programs that are administered on a team rather than an individual. It is often risky to pick out a few employees and reward them. This creates animosity and completion which is counterproductive. If a company division or team is productive, all members should be rewarded in some form or another.

The most effective internal brand engagement programme for employees costs less and is easier to implement. This simply involves the boss or manager sitting down with an employee and telling them that they are doing a good job and it is being appreciated. Especially for younger workers who are trying to establish careers, this works wonders. The fact that their boss has taken time to tell them they are doing a great job and the company appreciates them is often worth more than a cost of living raise.

Certainly backing up praise with money is better and expected, but taking the extra time to give each employee some personal attention is something too many companies neglect, thinking that wallet size is everything

That fat cheque is a definite yes, but so is identifying personal achievements and contributions to the company. Whether it is tangible rewards such as a raise, personal attention, company outings or whatever, every company that values its business will value its employees and go the extra mile to assure each employee knows it.

This article was first published in Business Today 

Segment your audience for effective communication

“Make sure you reach all the different customers that we are targeting with this ‘revolutionary’ product”, ranted the voluptuous Brand Manager. Again! I wondered. Who was going to work through not just a long weekend but one that was climaxing with Madaraka Day holiday.

Anyway, here was another brief to the PR team, which needed tailored messages for different stakeholders that would ultimately ensure the brand achieve its target goals. We all agree that gone are those days of mass communication when all one needed was to shout loudest to be heard by the masses.

Nowadays, different audience segments have different behavour traits that can only be addressed by specific messages via well-selected platforms. Think about those millennials who drink, eat and sleep online but still prefer to listen to rhumba, a music genre associated with the old and not so savvy.

The process is referred to as Audience Segmentation where a communicator divides an audience into smaller groups with similar characteristics. Audience Segmentation is based on the assumption that different clusters of audience have different characteristics that influence the extent to which they pay attention to, understand and act on different messages.

We can identify audience segments, but it is not always practicable to reach them due to our limited resources. The ideal audience size is one person. However, it is not practicable to do this – too costly and time consuming. Even with the customised SMSes; sometimes I am addressed as Petronila or Pricilla yet I belong to  the under four lettered name generation that had Peter, John, Mark, Tom, Ben, Ken, Saul and Paul.

The slicing and dicing of a list of people can be quite demanding, so the challenge is to find the balance between the smallest number of messages and channels required to distribute information, while at the same time form audience-segments that are as similar as possible. In essence, this is a balance between reach and specificity.

The greater the reach of a campaign, the greater the number of individuals who can be influenced, yet increased reach results in a mixed audience. Messages designed to reach a broad cross-section are likely to be less effective in bringing about higher-order (e.g. behavioral) changes than lower-order (e.g. attitudinal) changes because they are less tailored to the needs of individuals.

The problem is that audience segmentation is typically conducted in an ad hoc way or is put into the ‘too-hard basket’ because it takes time and effort to accomplish. Remember agencies are sometimes too busy. No, I retract, clients are always not ready to incur additional costs for someone to sit down and prepare multiple mailing lists of segmented groups. Often this sort of work is left to the most junior person (diplomatic term for the new intern) who may fumble with the job because they don’t know enough about the target audience or just don’t care because such a task is boring.

Communicators have to determine which channels are likely to be the most effective in reaching the intended audience. This targeting is the strategic use of communication channels to reach the audience segments, and is based on the principle that certain groups or segments of audience utilize certain types of channels and that cost-effectiveness can be maximised if the placement of campaign messages in particular channels corresponds with the use of the channels by the intended audience.

Once audiences have been exposed to campaign messages they have to be persuaded to make the ensuing behaviour changes.  Remember how Coca-Cola successfully made you to chase name tags in your local supermarket? Hence, in addition to campaign messaging and targeting, communicators need to construct messages to cater to individuals’ needs, interests, abilities and motivations.

The ongoing NIC Bank Asset Financing campaign is keen to address entrepreneurs in various facets is a perfect example; the mama mboga who aspires to run a retail store and the truck driver who aspires to own a fleet of transport trucks.

The PR word for the week is TAILORING, not the tailor made suits that are reserved for pitch meetings. Tailoring is the process of crafting messages to cater for individual characteristics. Audience members must perceive that the issue is relevant to them. Relevance of the message is the extent to which it fulfills the desires and motivations of individuals.

What a good PR brief should not miss

Having been privileged to sit on both sides of the PR divide, one as client and the other as agency, I would like to discuss a topic that we always overlook and yet it ranks top among the relationship wreckers in this noble profession.

There’s a skill to writing a PR brief. If you get it right your agency will deliver first time – no surprises. If you get it wrong (or worse still don’t provide one at all), it costs time, money and on many occasions strained emotions to put it right.

With close to a decade in this practice, my best advice is to always ensure that your brief is relevant, factual and more so engaging. It hurts to sit at the agency to go through a brief that sounds like an obituary of a spinster. Come on, you know very well such obituaries contain obvious information.

Anyway, back to business. When preparing a brief avoid jargon, lingo and acronyms. Include facts (no assumptions or embellishments). Use plain English and include as much detail as possible. It’s easier and quicker for your agency to cut out the superfluous rather than have to fill in some gaps.

Always include a brief of the new product or service. Pricing and sales processes should also be mentioned. Will there need to be any initial research, or do you already have some research findings that will help? ‘It’s important you cite this in your brief to allow the agency to explore further if need be. While at it, describe your target audience. Based on research explain what type of consumer they are. What do they read? What do they listen to? Where do they hangout?

You exist in some space, so talk about competitor products and services. What marketing activity are they doing and are they doing it better? As client, you know who is doing better than you; feel free to tell your agency as it is. Remember you are asking them to get you a remedy to an existing problem or an upcoming one.  We all know 90 percent of the clients briefs are as a result of some business issue. Why are you doing this activity? What objectives are you trying to achieve (raise awareness, increase sales, get someone to do something? What will success look like?

Third, always state the deliverables that you expect from the agency. You see, the agency is made up of creative energy bunnies. They sometimes over think! I mean they are likely to provide multiple solutions for you. To ensure that you reserve these creative juices for the next brief, always ensure you state your expectations as well as the timelines. An excellent strategy delivered well after the deadline is literally dead as a dodo.

You know the tiger brief versus the cat budget? For sure, it’s much easier for an agency to respond to a brief if they know how much you would like to spend. Ballpark is fine, but unless you give an idea you may find you’re presented with an idea that’s totally unreachable. There are some simple equations you can use to work out how much you should invest, but saying there is ‘no budget’ either means you expect it for free, or the sky’s the limit! Wouldn’t that be great?

Finally, remember to include any Ts & Cs and legal requirements. We are living in an era where consumers, through lobby groups, are aware and keen on their rights including the fine print that for a long time they were not reading. There’s nothing worse than paying for a piece of work that just doesn’t do the trick. Agencies want to meet the brief… so if you get the brief right there should never be a wasted coin.. Furthermore, those emotional spats between you and your agency will be cut by half.

Brief them correctly and they will dwell on it accordingly.