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Business First Article Putting the 'Me' back into media

It is my firm belief that building your brand from a strategic point of view can be a significant contributor to the future success, profitability and even exit of your business.

The careful and skilful blend of all the relevant medias including advertising, PR, brochures, packaging, design, web, multimedia, newsletters and many others are essential to a sustainable successful growth of your business but one danger is that we can tend to depend on all of these common garden, vital and well known marketing elements to get the job done but forget that “we” as individuals are also a “media”… the “Me” in Media!

So how do we make sure we cleverly integrate this highly emotive and powerful media into our marketing mix? We are a media; a “means of communication”. Often we do not treat it in this way and we can actually do a lot of damage if we are not careful by significantly under estimating its power.

Your brand is like a sponge, when you squeeze it the values that have been absorbed into it on purpose or by mistake come out and that is what your customer sees when they view or think about your company, product or service.

When we treat the “Me” media as a communication tool then we can begin to use it more effectively and significant increase the power of your marketing communications activity. Say for example you go into an Apple store which has huge positive emotional brand values attracting highly loyal customers from all walks of life, who consider themselves more of a member of an elite community than a customer and get poorly treated by a sales assistant who has had a bad day, that one person as a “Me” media can colour your whole view of a hugely powerful global brand.

On the other hand, if that same person behaves the way they are trained in the customer service philosophy of the company, you leave the store feeling affirmed that your decision to to;choose” Apple was a discerning one and that sets us apart as a bit more discerning than the average consumer!

A good demonstration that will go down in history as an example of how the "Me" media can be hugely powerful with instant results but utterly destructive, is the Ratner story. To the point that it has coined a new terms "you did a Ratner" at the cost of around £500m. A sobering thought.

In order to exploit this area of communication in your business, it is important to share the vision of your company with your team and excite, train, motivate and monitor the way every single person in your organisation communicates to your target audience.

Marketing communications is wrongly seen as a discretionary spend, especially during a downturn, which has been proven to be wrong and businesses that are consistent and careful with their spend gain a lot of advantages during the downturn and also on the way out. To add to that, if we see our people as an essential part of the marketing mix it can significantly increase the value extracted out of your budget, sometimes delivering a multiplying factor.

The 7 steps to putting “Me” into media: