Gone are the days when brand and communications professionals operated in separate silos. Brand has expanded beyond advertising to include more traditional communications, such as activities, and communications has matured to be more data-informed and multichannel than ever before, employing a paid, earned, social, owned (PESO) approach.
Ironically, the integrated marketing communications role, popularized in the 1990s, is now making a return with new terminology such as “agile marketing.” What’s old is new again. But how did we get here?
Let’s first look at communications.
A decade ago, the communications functions in most organizations largely focused on serving as a press office. Earned media was the name of the game. Executives counted clips and circulation as a measure of media relations success. Newspapers, magazines and other print outlets abounded. My, how things changed after technology became a key enabler to dialogic communications, creating, for the first time, a real two-way communications channel between organizations and their audiences.
As new tech tools democratized access to the internet and publishing, we saw blogs come into fashion, hitting their stride more than a decade ago. New media took over quickly, corresponding with the steady decline of traditional media. In the U.S. alone, newsroom positions declined 25% from 2008 to 2018. Circulation continues to drop, and media outlets continue to fold.
This forced the reporters who remained to do more with less, with a greater emphasis on digital reporting on the web and in videos. I’ve been to more than 11 Consumer Electronic Shows, and I distinctly remember after 2010 when reporters started toting their camera gear and interviewing our spokespeople on video — it made us change the way we designed our space to maximize their coverage.
During this time, companies began bypassing earned media and creating their own blogs. When we started Lenovo Blogs around 2006, we focused on bringing the people in the business with the most relevant insights to share directly with our customers and fans, and it was mainly a public relations (PR) tool. As blogs eventually lost out to more immediate response, aggregator social media feeds like Facebook and Twitter, we evolved our toolbelt. We still keep our blog for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, but our storytelling has pivoted into more of an editorial content hub designed around human-centered feature stories, interviews, and articles and videos created by communications teams.
Then came influencers, which, for us, started on the brand side as a paid type of approach and relationship. But today, in communications, we consider influencers a key ingredient in campaigns to reach audiences, particularly as the definition of influencer has evolved and split into categories like celebrities, macro-influencers and micro-influencers.
Still, awareness and enhancing and protecting reputation are the key goals to move people further down the marketing funnel.
Now let’s look at brand.
At the same time, brand has been on a journey of its own, evolving beyond paid media through advertising to discover some of the tools PR professionals have used for years. This includes the power of customer stories and references — using these to move beyond selling products to selling the brand and the organization. The same technological and economic shifts that affected PR changed the way brand teams approached their audiences.
Crowded markets also meant that brand creative needed to focus beyond the speeds and feeds of products and more on the human side of feature benefits and emotional appeal. This softening is evidenced in documentary-style videos rather than product tours. It also led to placing social teams in brand, making them responsible for creating an affinity to the brand by creating communities of fans and sharing nonpromotional content.
At the same time, the concept of branded content was happening. Educational or entertaining content “sponsored by,” “brought to you by” or “presented by” replaced content that overtly sold you a product.
Branded content can drive earned media, showing a PESO model could work in brand and communications. In Lenovo’s branded content series, we placed social-first content on owned channels and partnerships with paid properties to drive earned coverage.
Where are we going? Synergies are moving forward.
These changing aspects of the two functions bring even more opportunity to align, break down silos and create more effective communications and campaigns. Brand uses reputation data to justify business investment in marketing, and communications uses brand value to demonstrate return on investment for reputation-driving programs.
As an agile working model becomes more commonplace, when it makes sense, merging brand and communications teams into one team could further broaden the scope and impact of each team. We’re beginning to bring people from other parts of the organization into our agile communications teams, specifically around content, to get 1+1=3.
Storytelling programs could be consolidated across a company so marketers are making the most of the content in their areas and across the company. As marketers delve into the Wild West of podcasts, akin to the cycle of blogs, there’s an opportunity for coordination in strategy, white space identification and content creation mapped to audience personas that reach across the business.
Another area I see blending teams across communications and brand is for social and issues-based campaigns. Brand can benefit from communications’ ability to root support for a cause into the business, giving the campaign authenticity, while communications can benefit from the greater rigor brand has in driving consideration down the marketing funnel. This marriage of disciplines supports the recent “Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report” (download required), which concludes that consumers need to experience content across multiple channels before trusting it, and they want to know what a brand is about, not just about the products the brand makes.
The tools and technology are easy. Changing mindsets, organizing teams and operating holistically are tougher but worthwhile goals to enhance brand reputation and drive consideration.