Marketing finds a niche in driving cultural change
Internal marketing used to be such a simple thing: an occasional product training day, a product launch at the annual sales conference, and a few memos to staff. Today’s internal marketer faces a sterner, and much more crucial, task – driving and even changing organisational culture to ensure a business both survives and thrives.
The Australian Marketing Institute’s May webinar, ‘Internal marketing’, presented two case studies of internal marketing success, one which saved an Australian icon from oblivion and another that brought discipline and focus to a fragmented, uncoordinated recruitment operation.
The AMI webinar series is conducted through the online technology of Premier Global Services, which sponsors these professional development events. Members can participate in webinars from their home or work computer from any location in the world via the Internet and a standard telephone voice line.
The first presenter was Maree Howard, head of HR, product manufacturing, AMP Financial Services (AFS), who told of how the company had recovered from a near-death experience that began in 2002. Its biggest business had breached its minimum regulatory solvency level, precipating a public crisis that quickly cost the jobs of the CEO, most of the senior management, the chairman, most of the board, and 500 employees.
“It was really quite a bewildering time for the employees,” Howard said. “AMP was still basking in the glow from the Olympics and they still thought everything was great. All the messages that had been given to them by senior management was that we were a company with a grand vision for global expansion.
“The organisation had to change very quickly and the existing culture that we had just wasn’t going to help the process. The new senior management team was passionate about tackling really deep-seated cultural issues.”
Howard said AMP quickly had to become a nimble and commercial organisation. This started with job and cost cutting, and then moved into remaking the culture. “We got through this period largely thanks to our senior leaders displaying absolute passion and commitment and integrity for our company, and they took the rest of us with them for the ride,” Howard said.
AMP realised that its culture was not as performance focused as it needed to be, and that there were several strong internal beliefs that would inhibit the necessary changes. These were:
| Inhibiting belief |
|
Reframed belief |
| Big is safe |
|
High performance is our only security |
Low cost means
low quality |
|
Examples of where this is not so, such as Toyota |
Low performance
is tolerated |
|
There are adverse consequences for low performance and higher performance gets higher rewards |
Risk and control
are boring |
|
Risk management is about business survival
and high performance |
| I need to be involved in everything |
|
I trust those with the accountability |
Howard said that the key message was “only high performance will give us security”. “That was a very confronting message for our employees,” she said. “What it was really talking about was that nobody owes us a living and that our heritage counts for very little on its own.
“It also gave us a very measurable goal for our employees. It allowed us to continually send a message to our staff that we need to raise the bar and that staying as we are, it’s just not an option. We were trying to align our high performers and challenge our low performers, to say ‘Is this still really the right place for you because this organisation is changing’.”
AMP chose a ‘back to basics’ approach to communicate its cultural change. It eschewed the glossy brochures, coffee cups and abseiling-type options and instead relied on the passion and personal integrity of its senior leaders to transmit the messages, consistently and repeatedly.
The message became ‘The AFS story’. “We used story telling as our platform for delivering our message,” Howard said. “It’s quite a personal message, and we made our leaders use their own personal credibility and put their own reputations on the line for the way they delivered the story.
“Our leaders talk about what makes them get up and come to work each morning. Why they are staying with AMP. What do they see the future actually holding. The beauty of it was that it allowed the message to be personalised in a way from that leader and not as some glossy corporate message that was delivered without adequate content.”
Reinforcing the new messages
The AFS Story was launched at “town hall sessions”, where the managing director talked about his belief in and passion for AMP and what could be achieved. Leaders in each part of the business supported and emphasised the core messages, making all employees think about how they could align with the new AMP.
To reinforce the new cultural messages, AMP moved quickly to make changes to its structure, which was highly symbolic within AMP. “We moved our business to bring accountability closer to the individual, and not just held at a senior level,” Howard said. “We tried to engage everybody into the new vision for the business.”
AMP also reset the levers of its performance management systems. Misaligned benefits and handouts that sent the wrong messages were eliminated to get people thinking the new way. “We wanted to send the message that high performers in AMP will receive higher awards,” Howard said. “We clearly focused on how people achieve the goals within their business line and their business strategy.”
Howard said that one of the important lessons AMP learnt was that for messages to produce sustainable change, they had to be repeated continuously. “We repeat them on a number of levels and using a number of mediums,” she said, from the managing director through to the local team leader.
AMP has now moved its ‘burning platform’ from survival mode into ‘burning ambition’. “So the goals are clearly aspirational; we are still on the journey,” she said. “We have moved from ‘high performance is our only security’ to ‘high performance is our best shot at winning’. We are trying to move people’s mindsets around wanting to be part of a winning team, that AMP can actually be a winning team. Who is it that we aspire to be? What is it that AMP could be for Australia in the future?”
AMP conducted testing during the cultural change process to check that it was working, using direct staff polling via telephone contact. As the changes were realigning the staff to business results, financial indicators were also used a measure of success.
“What our results tell us is that it does feel like quite a different place,” Howard said. “We have moved on very much from 2002. People are choosing to stay with AMP in a very hot employment market, and we’re finding that as people leave the business it’s not because of the way that we have moved the culture, it’s for other reasons.”
Howard said the key message from the AMP journey was to “create a burning platform. That’s always the most powerful driver of change, it just feels quite painful when you are going through it. Create really simple messages. And when you are in a time of crisis, I think the integrity and commitment of the leaders is the key way to deliver it”.
DFR builds local marketing strength – nationwide
The webinar’s second speaker was Tania Crosbie, national marketing manager for Defence Force Recruiting (DFR). DFR is a public-private collaboration between Manpower Services Australia and the Department of Defence. (Crosbie is a Manpower employee.)
DFR won the internal marketing award at the 2004 AMI National Awards for Marketing Excellence and the best government campaign for the local area marketing guide it created for the 250 Army Reserve units across Australia. DFR has continued to develop and improve the marketing guide, including putting it online.
Crosbie has a marketing team of 12, including four military staff across the three services. DFR overall has about 550 people, most of them military and subject to the normal posting cycle. Therefore, 50-60% of DFR staff roll over every two years. “It’s very, very important that we build a very strong culture so we are able to deal with that type of staff turnover and also develop very strong processes and procedures,” Crosbie said.
DFR is responsible for recruiting full-time and part-time (reservist) members for the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The Army Reserve units are the most visible face of the ADF, frequently appearing at local-level events (e.g. shows), and hence are a vital part of the recruitment chain.
“Our problem was: how did we get the Army Reserve to understand and implement marketing across their local area?” Crosbie said. “There were 270 individual units across Australia, essentially operating as individual organisations. Their daily question would be ‘How are we going to recruit today?’ ”
The reserve units had not been getting much in the way of marketing support, a problem compounded by the military posting cycle.
“There was little understanding of brand integrity,” Crosbie said. “There was little understanding about the target market and how generational changes affected it from a recruiting perspective.
“There was a lack of communication between national marketing and the Army Reserve units, which was a major problem. There would be national campaigns released and no one would know how they could leverage off those campaigns, and there was certainly a lack of evaluation,” Crosbie said.
“We didn’t know who was doing what, who was displaying best practice, and there was no sharing of those ideas and no formal evaluation process.”
The search for best practice
In the quest for a solution, Crosbie and her team searched in units and brigades across Australia to find local area marketing specialists. “We knew what we wanted to do, but essentially there are people out there who are actually doing that for us.”
The marketing team identified and reviewed the best practices among units to ensure they were in line with brand integrity and DFR outcomes, with the aim of building standardised procedures and processes for the recruitment of new ADF personnel. The result was the Regional Marketing Guide, which was tested with Tasmanian units in 2003, modified, and rolled out Australia wide during 2004 through launch workshops.
The Regional Marketing Guide is a paper-based manual that contains target marketing information: unit-specific demographic information; planners; activity guides; proven marketing and recruitment activities with step-by-step guidelines, artwork and tools; a full suite of advertising artwork and collateral; and reporting functions and evaluation tools.
“We were not talking about coming up with complex modelling or anything; we were just talking about standardising the simple approaches to local marketing, which include activity guides and how to run an information session, and so on,” Crosbie said.
The key part of the Regional Marketing Guide strategy was that it was not sent out to the units unsupported. A purpose-built call centre contacted every unit across Australia, once a fortnight, every fortnight – in the process discovering an additional 30-40 reserve units!
The call centre has accumulated a huge amount of information about the reserve units and has ended up being a key source of Army Reserve information. The call centre staff check how each unit is going with its marketing and advertising, and keys the units into the ‘how to’ resources available in the Regional Marketing Guide.
The guide is also complemented by a bi-monthly, hard-copy newsletter, as many of the units do not have access to good-quality technology and downloading large PDFs is not possible.
Evaluation results were positive
The marketing team conducted an evaluation of the Regional Marketing Guide strategy. The outcomes showed that:
- At the launch workshops, 98% of participants believed the guide would meet their objectives.
- The guide was adopted by 100% of Army Reserve units.
- A satisfaction survey achieved a 100% rating for the guide as meeting unit requirements.
- The achievement of the DFR’s recruitment target rose from 66% to 90%.
- Relations between DFR and the reserve units improved considerably, as the units could see that DFR was adding to the value of their business.
- Awareness of national DFR marketing campaigns rose from 15% to 80%, as the units had media plans for across Australia and could see the creative that was being sent out nationally.
- There was more efficient allocation of budget and resources for marketing.
- There was more consistent brand execution at local levels.
- Units came to understand the importance of evaluating their campaigns, and to feel that they were actually part of a larger organisation.
Crosbie and her team did not finish their campaign with the paper Regional Marketing Guide. The whole manual, and the processes and procedures it specifies, have now been built into an online resource with a consistent look-and-feel to the original guide.
The online guide has enabled improvements in areas such as advertising processes (units can build their own ads), faster ad booking processes (12 weeks down to seven days), planning, budgeting and evaluation, and online ordering of collateral. Training began in April 2005 on how to use the online facility, and the call centre remains an important part of the overall reinforcement of the guide.
The online version is also being rolled out to the 17 Defence Force Recruiting Centres around Australia, as they are responsible for much of the recruiting for the ADF.
Crosbie said: “This is not the Holy Grail. When we roll this out, this will not mean all of our communication problems are solved. This just means that we have a benchmark to build on and certainly to improve on. I don’t think we are ever going to get to the point where everybody’s 100% happy and everybody’s 100% informed, because you can always do things better and always improve.” |
