In the race for success, understanding the role of communications and how to spend budgets most effectively will become key. At the moment, many Internet start-ups focus only on building awareness. This is certainly a vital first stage: if no-one knows you are there, or cannot remember your site address correctly, it will be very difficult to succeed. However, long term success will rely on people returning; and for this you need to go beyond awareness and to start building rapport.
As we have already acknowledged, time pressures are great – but even if you only have ten minutes to think about what you are doing, you need to spend that time thinking about where you want to be in the long term, and not just next week. If you know where you are going, it is much easier to develop communications which not only work today, but are also building towards tomorrow's success. More cost-effective, and an accelerator to business growth.
The biggest trap to fall into is what seems to have become the 'generic net ad' – a wild and wacky visual (designed to upset a significant proportion of the population), weird graphics (borrowed from men's mags or Wired), a funny monosyllabic name, and there you go. Well indeed there you may go, but for how long? Nothing wrong in a snappy name, of course, but better if it also says something more substantive about you and what you have to offer. These are today's mistakes, best avoided – doubtless new ones will come along tomorrow.
The planning cycle is a simple set of questions, which may be difficult to answer – but keep going and your communications plan will be much the richer for it. And keep asking yourself these questions once your brand is up and running; it will help ensure that your ongoing business development is informed by sound strategic thinking.
The need to keep questioning and evaluating what you are doing becomes even more important in the net world, as things are evolving very quickly. Much may change: what looks like a good answer today, may not be so next year. The questions, however, will stay the same. They are known, collectively, as 'The Planning Cycle' and – since their development in the late 1960s – have provided an invaluable strategic framework across the communications industry and beyond.
What assets do you currently have? Are you an established brand or company, looking to the net to develop your existing business? Or are you a completely new brand? In either case, look at what you already have, not only in terms of tangible assets on your business plan, but also your intangible assets. For those established brands which already trade across several geographical boundaries, this audit can be particularly extensive. This audit is likely to comprise elements such as:
If you're an established brand, you're likely to pay a lot of attention to your above-the-line advertising (partly because it is so expensive), but in doing so you may overlook many other elements of your communication mix. If at all possible, look at everything you send to your customers. What do your invoices look like? Do they reflect the brand personality and positioning? Virgin is a brand which is not only distinctive, but projects itself with impressive coherence: whereas most airlines' on-board shopping magazines look very similar and bear titles such as In-flight Shopping, Virgin's is labelled Retail Therapy and flagged 'go on, you know you need it'. A perfect understanding of the customer's in-flight boredom, and of Virgin's capacity to overcome this state of mind.
What has happened to put you in this position? What lessons can you learn from the past? This stage will be very different if you are an established brand moving online – think very carefully about what you have done so far:
Where do you want to go? How will you know when you have achieved your goals? And how will that feel? Decide what you really want and also how you will know when this has happened. This is important for the bad days as well as the good days. On the bad days, it is reassuring to be able to explain to yourself why you are working 16 hours a day with little immediate sight of profit and lots of people watching. And on a good day, you need to be able to spot that it is a good day. Too often it is easier to define what you don't want, rather than be clear about what you do want. This means you will be very good at knowing when life is a bitch, but may miss the days when your cup is actually more than half-full.
Having clear goals and targets is also very important for the organisation itself; often each of the founding partners has slightly different goals. It is vital, therefore, to understand these individual goals, to decide how each person will judge their own success, and for everyone to agree the overall balance of objectives. Communications within the company can be as important as those targeted at customers. This is particularly true when there is a strong service element to the brand (as there always is for an Internet company). The old models of authority in industrial society have disappeared: you can't tell colleagues what to do; you have to inspire them to want to be part of what you are doing.
One of the most telling quotes describing 'Generation X' attitudes to employment is: 'why go on strike when you can destroy the company through surly service?' It may be very difficult to know how good your service is. It relies on trust: trust between you and the others within the company, and trust between the company and its customers, demonstrated in how you treat them. Companies need to think carefully about their sales and return policies. Many of the complaints about home shopping relate to a delivery (or often, a non-delivery). Demanding proof from your customer may make sense for the logistics department, but it also reflects a fatal lack of trust in your customers.
Trust is a quality which is vitally important in the networked world, but unfortunately one that is in increasingly short supply. Trust has become more personal, more specific and more volatile. People expect to be kept informed: consumers are no longer prepared to sit and be a passive audience; they want to be involved, and one of the most powerful aspects of the net is its ability to give these people a voice.
If you are going to achieve your goals, you have to maintain the flexibility to learn from what you are doing. Keep true to the overall strategy, but be prepared to change specific tactics if things are not going the way you would like them to. Do not keep changing the strategy itself; it confuses people and wastes money.
This question may seem like a luxury ('If things are going well, why worry? Let's just keep doing what we've already been doing'). In fact, keeping a constant check on how you are performing is vital. The important element of this stage is to decide what information you will need to assess your success. There can be a tendency to do the same as everyone has always done – carry out a regular survey and ask the questions which are already asked by your competitors. But if the Internet is a new medium, creating a new model and a new way of working, why would you want to stick with the same old approach to evaluation? Make the evaluation process part of your business; involve your customers in your success. Don't just send out the usual questionnaires; instead, run discussion groups and forums, asking people what they would like you to be doing next – and listen to what they have to say. You don't have to follow their advice, but you do have to acknowledge their ideas and thank them.
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