MI5 and PR for small companies

Charlie Laidlaw is a director of David Gray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott. He is also a former intelligence officer with the Security Service (MI5).

A long time ago in a place not far distant from central London, I was being lectured about the nature of treason.  What, I was asked, did the traitor see in the mirror each morning as he shaved?  Traitor or patriot?

It was an ambiguous lesson, without fixed context, given credence only by the fact that we both worked for the Security Service.  The context I only discovered later, and by then he’d already made his decision.

Now, a lifetime later, the business of intelligence has, for me, become the business of communications – from gathering information and keeping it secret to distilling information and making it public.

On the surface, there are few obvious similarities between those two very different worlds.

After all, the task of the Security Service involves shining discreet torches into dark places at the edge of reason and learning enough about the dragons that lurk there to keep them safely locked away

The business of marketing and public relations, by contrast, involves shining media spotlights to get companies and their products and systems  noticed.  It certainly doesn’t involve lights being hidden under bushels.

There is, however, one enormous similarity between the two.  Let me explain. 

Once upon a time it used to be that people needed products to survive.  Now, it’s the other way around.  Products need people to survive.  In a business context, and in a market economy, companies need customers to survive.

In a cluttered market, whether the product is baked beans, carpeting or a window system, every product needs a buyer – and most products and companies have competitors.  You have competitors, I have competitors – and we’re always working to invent a better widget.

What makes us successful, or not, is the glue that binds product to customer.  That glue is marketing – the diffuse process by which we attract enquiries and convert those enquiries into sales.

Within that conversion process, the central element in any successful marketing strategy is information.  We need to provide potential customers with the essential information to buy our product rather than someone else’s.

So far, so self-evident.  Yet that’s precisely the central element that a great many firms fail to recognise in devising marketing or promotional campaigns.  The information that customers need to make that buying decision is confused by poor messaging or corporate techno-babble.

Indeed, some firms’ corporate communications are so full of technical information to be impenetrable.  Time after time, I see corporate literature or websites that convey huge amounts of information that the firm thinks it wants to communicate - but not the essential information that the potential customer will want to hear.

Marketing is about much more than a glossy brochure or fancy web presence.  It’s more than pricing policy, distribution channels or glitzy advertising.  It’s certainly much more than spending oodles of dosh on fancy corporate identities.

It’s about recognising information as a valuable commodity and using that information to manage the human imagination, whether in traditional media or on new channels such as LinkedIn or Twitter.

Sounds fanciful?  Well, maybe.  Essentially, however, we buy a product because we’re pretty sure it’ll work.  We may know that the product has been around for a while, therefore it’s reliable.  We may believe that the firm producing it also reliable and therefore to be trusted.

It’s why large firms spend equally large sums of money on promotion and PR.  What they’re essentially buying, by communicating information about themselves, is customer trust.  By making their brand visible they’re buying market credibility.

It’s a marketing dilemma that many smaller firms simply don’t address.  To achieve visibility, so the argument goes, will cost us an arm and a leg and therefore we can’t afford the pounds of flesh, particularly when times are tough.  Except, of course, good promotion doesn’t need to cost the earth.

There is no reason why smaller firms can’t also play the promotional game – especially those firms in niche sectors who can legitimately claim particular expertise in specialist markets.  It merely involves distilling key facts and figures and promoting corporate and product information online and offline in ways that potential customers will find digestible.

Back in the Security Service bar, I wondered why Mike Bettany was speculating aloud about the nature of treason.  Soon afterwards, he was arrested for attempted espionage, trying to peddle the State’s secrets to the Soviet’s men in leather coats.  He was sent down for a very long time.

Mike, it seemed, also knew the value of information and how to sell it, for whatever expedient reason or moral justification.  For the Russians, that information may have been extremely valuable.  For Mike, poor sod, the price had a more personal cost.

As I said, it’s about information and its value.  The marketing and intelligence worlds aren’t that far apart.

We are specialists in national and international PR strategy and delivery.  You can contact us at +44 (0) 1620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com or connect with us on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Wally Olins: an appreciation of brand value

Charlie Laidlaw is a director of David Gray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott.

It’s hard to overestimate the impact that Wally Olins CBE, who died recently, has had on the marketing landscape, almost single-handedly inventing the concept of brand management and embedding the idea of brand equity into the minds of marketers and business leaders.

His belief in the importance of corporate brand for companies, charities, NGOs – and from countries to individuals - was pioneering, back in an age when advertising was all about product marketing.  Olins, who co-founded the international agency Wolff Olins, wasn’t interested in what went into a packet or tin; he was interested in the company behind it.

The Financial Times has described him as “the world’s leading practitioner of branding and identity,” creating a new discipline separate from other facets of marketing communications, such as PR and advertising.  He believed that, while companies created brands, the consumer had ultimate power – not only looking for utility in what they bought, but a connective meaning with the brand.

Back in the 1960s, many of his ideas were seen as wacky.  Now, the consultancy firm Millward Brown estimates that the top 100 brands worldwide were worth $2.6 trillion in 2013, up 7% on the year before.  Some of those brands, such as Google and Microsoft, haven’t been around for very long.  Others, such as Coca-Cola, have been with us for over a century.

Olins recognised that good branding needed to precede marketing.  To him, branding was more than a fancy logo, website or snappy slogan; effective branding should capture the essence and values of a company – a “pull” strategy that consumers could relate to.  Tactical marketing generates sales; strategic branding generates loyalty.

Over the years Olins advised not only companies but countries.  Perhaps most memorably, he advised British Telecom to change to BT, and encapsulated the brand of a new mobile phone start up in a colour – Orange.

 There are various inexact methodologies for measuring brand value – looking at a brand’s market share and how it is perceived (or “mind share”).  Using that yardstick, it’s possible that a brand might have a higher mind share than market share – perhaps because consumers, while liking the product, can’t afford it. 

In other words, brand value (or brand equity) can’t be easily measured.  Simplistically, Heinz charges more for its baked beans than a supermarket’s own brand.  But, leaving aside any differences in product, many consumers vote with their wallets and buy Heinz – branding has made the company synonymous with the product.

This in turn raises interesting questions on the value of intangibles: between a company’s book valuation and the longer-term intangible value of its brands.  For many companies today, greater corporate value resides in its brands than its balance sheet and bricks and mortar.

As consumers, we now have multiple choices – from competing companies selling the same kind of product, to buying them online or in an old-fashioned shop.   Our purchasing decisions are, of course, influenced by a number of factors, not least price – but so too by our perceptual view of the company selling that product to us.

No wonder then that successful marketers and business leaders now pay close attention to brand and reputation management, recognising that corporate value is as much to do with positive consumer perceptions as it is about profit margins and market share.

The branding landscape is constantly changing, complicated also by evolving trends and, not least by how we manage our purchasing habits between needs and wants – between those things essential to us and those things that we’d like to have, but don’t need.

In a retail context, the best examples are low-cost entrants such as Aldi, Lidl or Poundland.  They have built brand value on the simple fact that we’ll pay more for things that we want, but insist on low prices for the things we need.  On the back of that simple psychology, they are building strong and valuable brands – while others, such as Woolworth’s, saw their brand equity fade to nothing.

The term “brand” comes from the Old Norse “brandr” meaning to burn – used, among other things, as a way of identifying cattle.  The oldest brand is reputed to be an Indian herbal paste, Chyawanprash, in continuous use since about 1000 BC.

So, in appreciating the intellectual rigour of Wally Olins, it’s nice to know that he was only rediscovering best business practice from long ago.

You can contact us at +44 (0) 1620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com or connect with us on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words*

Charlie Laidlaw is a director of David Gray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott.

It’s something that we all learn at school and, at one level, it’s a pretty easy skill.  After all, to misquote Somerset Maugham, all the words we need are in the dictionary – it’s just a matter of arranging them in the right order.

Of course it’s a bit more complicated than that, but it’s a skill that more of us now need as the internet and social media continue to drive a voracious information landscape demanding much greater participation.

However, whether it’s writing a brochure, website, blog, article or sales email, getting the right words in the right order can be a daunting task.

Here are some quotes from literary figures past and present that illuminate the writer’s craft.

“It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.”  (CJ Cherryh)

The absolute basic rule of writing anything is to write it.  Too often, we worry endlessly over a sentence or paragraph, before going onto the next sentence or paragraph, and then worrying about them.

Much better to write everything down first, and only then go back and edit.  That way, you’ve laid out all your thoughts and better able to see how they might fit together.

The American novelist John Irving once remarked that “more than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting.”

It really doesn’t matter whether your initial draft is good, bad or ugly.  The important thing is that it’s complete and can now be rewritten, edited and rewritten again.  In other words, have the courage to write badly.

Or as Ernest Hemingway more graphically put it: “The first draft of anything is shit.”

“A writer without a reader doesn’t exist.”  (Harlan Coben)

Once you’ve written your initial draft have a good, long think about who will be reading your blog, article or email.  A potential customer?  If so, what do they need to know about your product or service?  What benefits can you offer them?

You might be (justifiably) proud of your new gizmo and the technologies embedded in it.  Your potential customer probably couldn’t care less: they only want to know what it does and why they should buy it.

“A writer’s job is to tell the truth.”  (Andy Rooney)

It sounds obvious, but there’s no point in writing marketing materials that are dishonest.  However, less obvious are the marketing messages than don’t sound authentic.

If your new mousetrap is better than the rest, explain why it’s better.  Statements like, “we’ve just invented the best mousetrap in the history of the world” just won’t be believed.

Look again at what you’ve written.  Can each claim be substantiated?  If not, delete.  The advent of the internet and social media means that there is no hiding place…and dubious claims could come back to haunt you.

 “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”  (Stephen King)

When you first start out writing, that blank screen or white piece of paper can be off-putting, stopping you from starting. 

However, do take Sir Terry Pratchett’s advice: “There’s no such thing as writer’s block.  That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.”

The best way to learn is to read what other companies are saying in their articles or blogs.  Okay, they might be writing rubbish but, by reading the best of them, you’ll get a better idea of what good writing looks like.

After that, it’s about practice.  For example, why not initiate a blog strategy and aim to have something posted every month?

“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” (Thomas Mann)

Very few people, professional writers included, find writing easy.

But what’s important is to express yourself honestly, with a message strategy that resonates with your target audiences.

Get that right and most other things should follow.  And remember, you don’t have to be a great writer to write great material.

After all, Robert Benchley said:  “It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”

That same success could be true for your company and its products.  Honesty and authenticity are more important than great content.

However, best also remember Robert Heinlein.  “Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”

Only joking.

*Mark Twain

Drones, connected things and ethics

Charlie Laidlaw is a director of David Gray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott.

Google has just announced that it is buying a company that manufactures high-altitude solar drones capable of flying for years and designed to beam down wireless signals.

The idea is that the drones will help to connect people in poorer parts of the world and provide a stimulus for economic growth.

It’s where science fiction meets science fact, with enormous implications for all of us, not least in the ways that new data streams are collected, analyzed and stored.

In a way, it’s a marketing dream: a connected and inter-connected world in which big data streams just get bigger, allowing for marketing messages to become ever more precise.

A United Nations report released at the end of last year suggests that some 40% of the world’s population is now online, with mobile broadband the key driver of the global information and communication technology (ICT) market.  In 1995, it was less than 1%.

The International Telecommunication Union report also estimated that by the end of last year, there would be some 6.8 billion mobile-cellular subscriptions – almost as many as there are people on the planet.

IHS Inc in the USA estimates that there will be more than eight billion internet-connected video devices by 2017 – 1.1 devices for every global citizen, and virtually double the figure in 2013.

Cisco believes that the number of connected devices will reach 50 billion by 2020, with much of the growth coming towards the end of the decade.  That’s several times the world’s population.

The reason for the projected upswing isn’t just down to solar drones finally connecting the First and Third Worlds, but the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT).

At the moment, we’re mostly connected to the internet via computer or smartphone.  But the Internet of Things takes connectivity further, allowing us to control our world in new and interactive ways.

Forget about Doctor Dolittle talking to the animals.  Pretty soon we’ll be talking to our refrigerator, oven and central heating system, telling them when to come on and what to order from the online supermarket.

In many ways, those technologies already exist so it’s just a case of embedding connectivity into new generations of gadgets.  The size of the market is immense, as a number of economic impact reports make clear:

Cisco estimates that between 2013 and 2022, $14.4 trillion of value (net profit) will be “up for grabs” for enterprises globally.  “We estimate the potential economic impact of the Internet of Things to be $2.7 trillion to $6.2 trillion per year by 2015.”

Gartner says that “the Internet of Things will include 26 billion units installed by 2020.  IoT products and service suppliers will generate incremental revenue exceeding $300 billion, mostly in services, in 2020.  It will result in $1.9 trillion in global economic value-add through sales and diverse end markets.”

In many ways the Internet of Things is already with us.  For example, internet advertising already makes use of bits of personal data to send us personalised messages.  As data mining and profiling becomes more accurate, combined with the geo-locational functionality of our smartphones, the ethical dilemmas begin to pile up.

A report on the ethics of the IoT by Delft University of Technology says that “when boundaries between public and private spaces get blurred, and are invisible, users would feel a sense of unease: they do not know what information they actually share with whom.

“Many of the developments that are about to come will reshape parts of our society and change the way we interact and make use of technology. In that context, a debate on the future values of living is necessary.”

A paper published by The Internet of Things Council goes further.  “While in many ways we may imagine the advent of the Internet of Things not only as the first major evolutionary step in the existence of the internet, we also may conceive of it as a step in the evolution of our species.”

Another paper for the Council makes clear that IoT “applications can be a great plus for users, helping them save energy, enhance comfort, get better healthcare and increased independence. In short it could mean happier, healthier lives. But those sensors also collect huge amounts of data, which brings ethical challenges—particularly when it comes to privacy and identity.”

How the Internet of Things develops is an ethical issue for all of us, whether personally or as businesses: we may make use of the technologies to effect business or personal benefits, but how do you prevent your fridge talking to your insurance company?

Ethical dilemmas aside, the potential for manufacturers and the marketing industry is staggeringly large.  The Internet of Things may seem like an abstract concept.  It is, however, a near-reality, even if it takes a drone to deliver it.

 We are specialists in national and international PR strategy and delivery.  You can contact us at +44 (0) 1620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com or connect with us on LinkedIn, Facebook or Google+.

Creating an integrated PR plan

Charlie Laidlaw is a director of David Gray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott.

There’s nothing worse than random marketing, with confused (and confusing) messages being squirted out without any thought to the recipient, your potential customer.

The best marketing and PR strategies are carefully crafted to communicate a small number of core messages, and to then reinforce those messages by repetition.

The fact is that, once upon a time, it used to be that people needed products to survive – a loaf of bread, some vegetables, a bit of meat.

Now, it’s the other way around.  Products need people to survive.  In a business context, and in a market economy, companies need customers to survive – in other words, marketing and sales.

So far, so obvious.  Less obvious is that the marketing and PR landscape has changed out of all recognition, with the internet and social media adding a multitude of new promotional dimensions.   The need for integrated PR strategies has never been greater.

Here are some thoughts on building a successful PR strategy.

Objectives

The longest journeys start with the first step.  However, you also don’t set out on a journey without knowing where you want to go.  That’s the first rule of marketing and PR: defining what you want to achieve, on a quarterly basis – whether that’s to develop the brand, position the company with its buying markets, drive traffic to your website or generate enquiries.  Clear objectives give you something to aim for, measure success, and better determine what could be done better.

Strategy

Strategy is the glue that binds everything together.  It defines an overall approach, rather than the nuts and bolts.  Clear objectives provide the finishing line; strategy is broadly how you intend to reach it.  A good strategy will articulate brand and corporate personality, ethics and values – in other words a cohesive framework within which marketing tactics easily fit.

Messages

The central element in any successful marketing strategy is information.  We need to provide potential customers with the essential facts to buy our product rather than someone else’s.

Yet that’s precisely the central element that a great many firms fail to recognise in devising marketing or promotional campaigns.  The information that customers need to make that buying decision is confused by poor messaging or corporate techno-babble.

Indeed, some firms’ corporate communications are so full of technical information to be impenetrable.  Time after time, I see corporate literature or websites that convey huge amounts of information that the firm thinks it should communicate - but not the essential information that the potential customer wants to hear.

Strategy + Messages = Content

In the buyer-led world, content is king.  You need to attract the right customers and lead them through each stage of the sales cycle.  Creating that great content and placing it where buyers are looking doesn’t happen by accident.  It takes a good content strategy, research and expertise – and making sure you show up on search engines.

By aligning your published content with your potential customers’ needs, you will naturally attract inbound traffic that you can convert.  It merely involves distilling key facts and figures and promoting corporate and product information online and offline in ways that potential customers will find digestible.

Integration

Social media and the internet have allowed for a new kind of information flow, one in which we can all participate – from creating a regular blog to posting on Facebook, publishing video content on YouTube or sharing images on Instagram – not to mention Twitter, Google+ and rest of the social media universe.

It’s a new kind of information democracy in which we are all publishers.  It has allowed us to replace old outbound “push” marketing with inbound marketing to pull people towards our companies.

That takes great content that is appropriate to your customers and a well-crafted PR strategy to ensure consistency of tone and content across platforms.  The absolute need for integration has never been greater.

Do you have an integrated PR strategy?

We are specialists in national and international PR strategy and delivery.  You can contact us at +44 (0) 1620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com or connect with us on LinkedIn, Facebook or Google+.

Image courtesy of Frank Tschokert

Machiavelli and a PR dimension

Charlie Laidlaw is a director of David Gray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott.

The issue of PR and its influence on the media is never far away, the underlying concern being that PR either distorts the truth or blatantly hides it.

It’s a continuing debate about ethics, and the extent to which public relations should be completely open and transparent.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ethics as “moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity.”

Moral principles are themselves about defining good and evil, right and wrong, but the real question is – to what extent is PR the servant of absolute truth, or the servant of those who pay for the service?

The Roman orator Cicero made the point that public relations mainly operates to benefit those who commission it.  (A great blog on Cicero and PR from Paul Seaman can be found here).

More recently, Joe Haines, Harold Wilson’s press guru, remarked that PR people have to be economical with the truth and sometimes “have to dispense with it altogether.”

In the UK, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) has a code of ethics that sets out comprehensive principles and guidelines, grounding the PR profession into a framework that clearly delineates right from wrong.  The International PR Association extends ethics internationally.

But moral frameworks only take us so far.  For example, how does a PR deal with a client’s poor financial results?  Is it unethical to focus on exceptional restructuring costs or international market conditions to try and divert attention away from underlying problems?

The uncomfortable fact is that there is a thin line between truth and falsehood, and an even thinner one between truth and half-truth.  That vacuum is filled with omission and spin – the subtle art of saying nothing or deliberate obfuscation.  It’s what clients want (sometimes), PRs (often) deliver, and the media (always) expects.

Perhaps the worst example of a downright lie happened in 1990, when a volunteer nurse in Kuwait claimed that she’d seen Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators, at a time when President Bush was being urged to take military action against Saddam Hussein who had invaded the oil-rich country.

It was reminiscent of the U-boat sinking of the RMS Lusitania in World War One, which helped to propel the USA into the conflict.

Except that the nurse’s testimony was a fabrication.  She was, in fact, a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family.  America took military action, and Saddam was expelled from Kuwait.

Her testimony was, of course, unethical; so too the activity of PRs who promulgated it.  However, the really tricky Machiavellian question is: did the means justify the end?  Was the West right to take military action?  Were all the deaths worth it?  Was kicking out one dictator to restore another dictator a good thing?

From a Kuwaiti perspective, yes.  From a Western perspective, no.  Truth might be the first casualty of war, but a lie is never a good justification for war.

In the scales of ethical balance, it’s worth noting that there are now many more PRs than journalists.  Chuck in constantly-evolving websites, blogs, forums and social media and ethical questions proliferate.  As Mark Twain remarked: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

In other words, in a news landscape where the media are following target individuals, companies and organisations on Facebook or Twitter, there are no longer any clear boundaries to where PR begins or ends or, therefore, codes of ethics that apply to everyone.

However, I remain sanguine about the role that PR plays in our society, and of the professionalism of the media to see through flim-flam and the fog of spin.  In a democratic society, we have the right to voice our opinions, sometimes bend the truth – but, hopefully, never, never lie.

The conduct of PR in liberal democracies might not be perfect, but compare that to some other regimes around the world, where PR and propaganda have entirely replaced an independent press and media.

According to one estimate, 1.6 billion people – over 20% of the world’s population – have no say in how they’re governed, and can face extreme consequences if they try to kick the system.

Take Syria.  The Syria Times is currently running with a “story” that suggests that “the recent US Israeli escalation against Syria after the failure of their successive sinister attempts…explains the real objectives of the US Zionist project in the region.”  Really?

Or North Korea’s Rodong Sinmum newspaper which this month carried an article extolling the publication of supreme leader Kim Jong Un’s work, “Let Us Brilliantly Accomplish the Revolutionary Cause of Juche, Holding Kim Jong Il in High Esteem as the Eternal General Secretary of Our Party.”

Snappy title, and I won’t bore you with the newspaper’s fawning coverage that makes reading a telephone directory seem interesting.  Suffice to say, I would rather live in a free country than in the shadowland that is Pyongyang.

Maybe PRs and the media should try to get on a bit better, or recognise that creative tension and differing agendas are pivotal to press freedom and public accountability.  I could, of course, be quite wrong but, for moral and ethical reasons, would never say so publicly.

We are specialists in national and international PR strategy and delivery.  You can contact us at +44 (0) 1620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com or connect with us on LinkedIn, Facebook or Google+.

Modern messaging and killing the messenger

Charlie Laidlaw is a director of David Gray PR and a partner in Laidlaw Westmacott.

King Boabdil, the 15th century king of Grenada, didn’t much like the news that a city had fallen to his enemies. So he had the messenger killed.

It wasn’t the first time that the bearer of bad news had got the blame, or the last. The origins of the phrase, killing the messenger, goes back to Sophocles and Plutarch.

Nowadays, we’re a bit more civilised and make clear distinctions between the message and the messenger, although we’d all prefer to be the bringer of glad tidings.

But getting the message right remains the single most important part of PR and marketing strategy, communicating what your company stands for and what its products and services do.

Getting it right can be a deceptively simple exercise, but in an age of social media and instant communications everything is about perception, good or bad.

The basic rules, however, are simple enough.

Define the benefits that your company or product delivers, and develop a number of key messages that underline your business strategy.

It’s about brand vocabulary and developing a corporate proposition that is uniquely yours, and which also helps with SEO strategy – getting those words and phrases seeded onto the internet

is much, much more than a marketing bolt-on. The business guru Tom Peters has said that, “In a competitive environment, only those who have a strong unified message, who create and sell quality and value, will survive.

”Developing those words and phrases involves delving into the heart and soul of your company, not just the nuts and bolts of your product or service: what do you want customers to feel about you?

In that sense, a clear message strategy is also a psychological strategy: it’s about using whatever means to get inside your customer’s head, and better understanding the touch points that generate sales.

(Hardly surprising that the “father of PR” Edward Bernays was also closely related to the ”father of psychiatry” Sigmund Freud. No coincidence, surely).

However, some aspects of messaging are becoming more complex. For example, consumers now respond more quickly to brand messages when they appear on their phones – rather than desktops or other mobile devices.

The reason is that we see our phone as uniquely ours, and that messages that appear on it have a stronger psycho-cognitive emotional appeal. Putting that into English, messages on our phones are more personal and, therefore, to be trusted.

Lesson one: if you haven’t optimised your website for mobile, go to it.

Largely, messaging is about plain old common sense – with a large dollop of research and brutal honesty. We may think we know what customers think about us, or our products, but do we?

Lesson two: don’t assume.

Then it’s about communicating those messages in ways that engage with customers, using whatever platforms are most appropriate – from newsletters to traditional media, from social media to…well, the list goes on and on.

Lastly, it’s all about context; ensuring your message is heard on an appropriate platform at a time when your potential customers are likely to be receptive.

In conclusion, a true story.

A busker starts playing his violin in a Washington DC metro station at the height of the morning rush hour, and in the course of 40 minutes makes just over $30 – not a bad return.

Of the 1,097 people who passed by, only seven stopped to listen. Most were late for work or thinking about the day ahead. A busker with a violin they could do without. When he finished playing, there was no applause.

Except that it was stunt dreamed up by the Washington Post. The busker was Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical musicians in the world, and he was playing a 1713 Stradivarius worth $3.5 million.

Many of those who passed by would have paid huge sums to hear him play, but in a familiar context at a familiar time of day. In a busy morning metro station, he was therefore someone to be ignored.

Which does, I suppose, underline aspects of messaging strategy. We might have the best message in the world, in support of the best products or services, but if we communicate those messages in the wrong way, at the wrong time, who will be listening?

Hopefully, not King Boabdil.