Rules of the Marketing Communications Executive

The Marketing Communications Executive is not just a role but an ever-evolving designation based on the dynamics of internal and external environments.

Understanding the target audience, what to communicate, how to communicate, who communicates, the best choice of media and media vehicles, within a reasonable budget and ensuring high value returns on every communication campaign is paramount.

This book excellently elucidates 150 rules to the Marketing Communications Executive which did not intend to strictly recommend a fixed route for every practitioner but to create landmarks, fertile grounds, hazards and boundaries that defines the role of today’s Marketing Communications Executive.

The decision to use an agency or inhouse for campaigns has its nuances and this book presents insights in either option.

The hours of work to achieve a 30 second visual advertisement which appeals to the target audience and gives tangible outcomes to the brand to even winning awards can be daunting.

Right from my telecom days where virtually all above the line budget went to an agency to my banking role as Head of Marketing and Communications. 

The disparity is huge as the earlier relied much on agency work whereas the latter did much more inhouse

 Value is created through communications and as each campaign in an opportunity for immense growth, understanding cutting edge environment to influence your campaign mindset is key to campaign success.

Marketing communication practice encourages being deliberate and intentional about the positioning the organisation want to portray as emphasised in rule 41 of this book, as owning a position before the market assigns you one.

The brand custodian or champion in each instance has a clear end product, expected reaction, uptake and results in mind right from the briefing stage. 

Marketing Communicators after spending days to brainstorm and elicit ideas from customers, competitors and staff formulate a good agency brief.

As the architect of the great communication campaign, the right mindset of being creative enough is to influence audiences in a coordinated fashion, to ensure audiences act positively from a perceptive state to a desired behavior.

Either inhouse or outsourced, campaigns require good briefs to distil end to end expectations and avoid ambiguity.

Understanding the target audience is critical to the success of the communication campaign and executives invest in understanding markets, consumers and their decision behaviours’.

Painstakingly learning how consumers actually decide and not how you assume they do is the bedrock of all successful campaigns I have managed over the years.

A particular campaign which focused on the south of Ghana rather went viral in the north which was a surprise to the marketing team.

Upon further investigations, culture and society, psychological drivers, segmenting with precision and using real insights as compared to data is essential as this book elaborates.

Consciously prioritising your audience ruthlessly has been critical to success of all my marketing campaigns as I did not seek to be relevant to everyone but my target audience.

There were instances my post campaign feedback used unrelated targets and the results were misconstrued.

The strategic initiating audience and the results measuring audience must be in direct relevance.

There is however, the need to save certain critical segments for later campaigns as segments who you ignore today, may be the market you lose tomorrow as in rule 29.

Establishing an organization’s identity, communicating the identity consistently and favorably positioning the brand in the minds of customers is key to building a formidable brand reputation.

As professional Marketing Communication Executives, achieving a coherent brand around a particular identity is great.

The verbal identity is as essential as the visual and in practice, audio-visual has always established great impact on audiences, improving brand recall and action. 

The identity must be distinct and consistently communicated to resonate with the target audience.

As the brand present a system of meaning in the consumer’s mind, utilising an integrated marketing communications approach works magic.

Marketing Communication Executives’ experiences shortfalls in creatives, especially inhouse generated.

This compels some organizations to poach good creatives from agencies to speed up the variety and context of creatives.

Generating great ideas is the hallmark of external agencies and a good brief can result in great campaigns if managed with the right budget and focus.

This book rules relating to creative development and content systems is epic covering in details the generation, evaluation and execution of campaign ideas and the reality of sustaining content across the gaps between campaigns.

Current media strategy and channel architecture are highly influenced by consumer behavior, new media, time, flexibility, expertise and budget.

The only “P” in the marketing mix with some level of control by Marketing Communication Executives is promotion, and executive are required to exert their expertise from initiation to completion and evaluation. Having the end game in mind has been the focus to good communicators and there is the need to map the customer journey before assigning channels as seen in Rule 95.  

Rule 76 is profound, as every platform has its own language; translate, don’t transplant.

Digital platforms present faster routes in reaching audiences and it can also destroy reputations of brands at same pace, therefore must be deliberately managed with bits of coordinated information across all digital channels as compared to traditional channels. 

Budgets for marketing are increasingly shrinking across industries and agencies are rampantly folding up as more organisations seeks immediate value to investments in marketing communication campaigns. Return on every marketing communications budget spent must be succinctly proven to management before and after each campaign.

Rule 114 explicitly discusses how return on marketing investment (ROMI) is the language of legitimacy for all organisations, irrespective of the industry.

Marketing Communications Executives must learn to speak it well to secure requisite budgets to support campaigns and defend all proposals.

The 150 rules for Marketing Communication Executives, is a must have for practitioners, students and everyone seeking to communicate effectively, navigate the nuances of agency relationships, crisis management, professional briefs, developing great content which appeals to target audiences, and ensuring end to end campaign effectiveness both inhouse and outsourced.

A must have.

The reviewer is a  Chartered Marketer, practitioner and past Chair of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Ghana Branch (024 467 6485).