Advocacy and public relations have to be interactive and inclusive or they will fail. Unfortunately, the communications are often one-way, like a speech that pauses for applause but not for response, a monologue rather than a debate, a rigid position statement that assumes everyone has the same characteristics.
This approach turns advocacy into advertising, recasts consumer affairs as simply an opportunity to present and boast, and is positioned perfectly for the all-encompassing and increasingly pervasive one-way email to which no reply can be made.
But this is not good enough. Real communications are interactive or they fail. The best marketers first identify and agree a core pitch or message, think through all the possible answers, responses, and reactions, then develop a variety of messages and approaches to cover and satisfy each of many audiences, particular and distinct, while remaining consistent with the core theme.
Such a differential process involves a high degree of care and precision and explains why great marketing proceeds in large part from extreme sensitivity. This is the true origin of so-called ‘woke’ practices – companies at last realised from their studies of consumer behaviour that care and sensitivity is far more profitable than bluster and bludgeon.
A systematic message development process needs to be created within each company, even small ones. The process should deploy variations of the company’s core messages, complementing an accurate issue identification process necessary for effective reputation management and happier customers.
The exercise can be very simple but it needs thought and creativity to develop well-directed, relevant and unique sales pitches through applying filters, such as social, technical, economic, environmental, popular, legal, ethical (STEEPLE), and other perspectives to make them more appealing than a block reiteration of the basic pitch.
The STEEPLE approach attunes the message to different consumers with varying interests and creates the basis for a well-tailored and effective communications programme – incorporating an understanding that your unique selling point is best heard and appreciated when fine-tuned into different versions to suit the varieties within your market.
It also meets the need to listen before you start talking and again after you finish, an under-explored precept of good lobbying and an absolute requirement of all good communications.
Lionel Stanbrook
Get Righting!