{"id":49,"date":"2006-12-19T10:53:43","date_gmt":"2006-12-19T09:53:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/2006\/12\/19\/something-special-for-marketing-execs-useful-for-the-rest-of-us-too\/"},"modified":"2006-12-19T10:53:43","modified_gmt":"2006-12-19T09:53:43","slug":"something-special-for-marketing-execs-useful-for-the-rest-of-us-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/something-special-for-marketing-execs-useful-for-the-rest-of-us-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Something special for marketing execs….. useful for the rest of us too!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let me begin by suggesting you ask yourself this simple question \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and be honest \u00e2\u20ac\u201c have you ever found yourself altering the formatting of your document before you’ve finished writing it? No? Nothing even like that? Then you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t suffer from what I’m going to term Communication Impotence (or CI).<\/p>\n

Marketing people are creative people. By definition you have to be. Everything has to look new if it’s to make an impact on the target audience. You have to be creative. On the other hand you have to be technical. It’s no good having the greatest ideas in the world if you can’t realise it, or present it to potential clients because of technophobia or incompetence. Ironically, the very breadth of skills make marketing people potentially prey to getting the work of the two sides of the brain confused and suffering an attack of CI.<\/p>\n

Despite the breadth of demands on marketing people \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and the commensurate breadth of abilities – we’re all also just human and even a Chief Exec’s brain works in just the same way as everyone else’s! Briefley, the right hand part of the brain is known to control creativity while the left hand part of the brain is known to be responsible for logic, problem-solving and so on. To do what needs to be done for clients, a marketeer needs to be what psychologists call a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153whole brain thinker\u00e2\u20ac\u009d meaning that you are able to utilise both sides of the brain and thereby be successful at tasks which are orientated around the full waterfront of human capabilities- both artistic and technical.<\/p>\n

And there-in lies the problem of CI …<\/p>\n

…and it’s potentially a big problem.<\/p>\n

It’s a problem because in a recent survey by the B group \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a thriving marketing company in the north of England \u00e2\u20ac\u201c found that over 41% of its mailing-list admitted to having avoided communicating with people when they should have – and of using technology to avoid some personal interaction. Examples included things like using an Email when a phone call would have been more appropriate and making a phone call at a time when the recipient would be likely to not be at their phone.<\/p>\n

In our experience, that’s not at all uncommon. People feel impotent as communicators and, like people suffering from traditional forms of impotence, they reach for props and crutches to help them survive: if not, how do you explain the amount of different forms of Viagra offered by spam emails every day!\u00c2\u00a0 :)
\nAs marketing isn’t about simply telling people<\/a> things (it’s about them hearing things!) this has got<\/em> to be a damaging trend. If staff are avoiding talking to clients and potential clients, how much work are you missing out on? Perhaps more significantly, if campaigns are designed without understanding this new phenomenon (don’t forget your audience will be suffering from it at least as much as your staff) how many opportunities for novel approaches to the market are being missed?<\/p>\n

At the heart of the problem is this: once you start to use the logic-orientated left hand side of your brain, you effectively turn off your ability to use the idea-generating, fun-loving, creative right side of your brain. That means that if you’re using inappropriate technology to do your communicating, you’re thinking in the wrong way to deal with people.<\/p>\n

Prey pity the poor presenter who is so scared of the audience they hide behind more and more impersonal presentation skills (don’t confuse this with someone is technically competent at Powerpoint! :) ) and end up with the notorious \u00e2\u20ac\u0153death by Powerpoint\u00e2\u20ac\u009d presentations. And if they can’t communicate with an audience that they’re standing in front of, with all the feedback and interaction potential they get by doing that, what chance have they got of communicating (well!) with an audience that they can’t get close enough to smell?<\/p>\n

So what’s to be done? Well the first thing is to just think about it. You might not decide it’s an issue you need to worry about. Great…. but you probably wouldn’t have read this far if that’s you!<\/p>\n

The second step is to decide whether you want to put some policy or guidelines in place to help people think about things before they send that email etc. If you’ve got guidelines for staff about use of company phones you might like to put a simple sentence in there \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or in your email guidelines: it might be a pleasant change for them compared to entreaties to think about whether the phone call is absolutely necessary! Perhaps this isn’t how you or your company work \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it’s only a valid approach for companies of a certain size and style, but \u00e2\u20ac\u0153email-free Tuesday\u00e2\u20ac\u009d does have a number of appealing features….<\/p>\n

You might like to encourage your staff in creative thinking and\/or give them some training in positive communication skills. That, of course, is easier said than done. We’ve listed a few very simple tips below; we’re happy to chat about the details (by phone or email!)<\/p>\n

Do some physical communication exercises on a mini-teambuilding day. If people have more confidence in their ability to communicate they’re less likely to bottle out of having a go. All it might need are a couple of the very simple things we all did in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153drama\u00e2\u20ac\u009d classes at school.<\/p>\n

Play. This is a hugely underestimated way of improving communication skills \u00e2\u20ac\u201c once people buy into the activity they concentrate less on the way they’re doing it; if the games are well designed they will \u00e2\u20ac\u0153map back\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to their jobs pretty easily and well.<\/p>\n

Explore the environment people are working in. Colours and design are hugely influential in influencing people’s urges to communicate (or not!).<\/p>\n

Practice \u00e2\u20ac\u0153active listening\u00e2\u20ac\u009d techniques with an eye to getting better able to read what people are interested in and how the communicate: this leads to more confidence in actually communicating with them.<\/p>\n

Set a good example \u00e2\u20ac\u201c try an audit for a few days of each phone call, email or letter you send and review what you’ve got at the end of the week. It doesn’t need to be sophisticated or time consuming, just honest.<\/p>\n

Okay, so these are all simplistic but that doesn’t mean they’re not effective! If all else fails, call in the cavalry and get some professional help!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let me begin by suggesting you ask yourself this simple question \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and be honest \u00e2\u20ac\u201c have you ever found yourself altering the formatting of your document before you’ve finished writing it? No? Nothing even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-key-posts","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}