Peer-graded Assignment:   Developing a communication strategy from scratch

Challenge & Tool Selection

As a Corporate Communications Consultant for a large retail and services company I was  asked by the in-house consulting department to create a successful public relations  strategy in order to gain more visibility towards (young) professionals. At this point,  employer branding was poor, the department struggled to find qualified employees.  Conventional human resource activities did not bring the desired success. The idea was to  reach potential consultants through sustainable media relations.

First research underlined that this would be a tough project because especially young  people tend to hire at large consulting companies instead of in-house consulting  departments. Another problem was the industry: In Germany retail is not very popular  among graduates. I gained these insights by talking to human resource experts at my  company and to members of the consulting branch. The only way to succeed was by telling  compelling stories that will draw the reader’s attention.

I remembered that around two years ago I helped a young consulting start-up to develop a  communications plan by using a tool called The Storytelling Tree which combines both  creative and strategic components. Originally developed for brand communications I found  out that it also works for strategic corporate communications, especially when you start a  business from scratch. Let’s see if things will work out for an in-house consultancy.

The Storytelling Tree is a simple concept, easy to understand but still encompasses all the  different levels that are crucial for communications success. Let’s imagine a tree with its  four key elements:

  A Trunk

  Branches

  Leaves

  Roots

The tree trunk stands for your company’s values, mission and your promise to customers.  You have to know who you are and what you stand for. Being certain in yourself is the  foundation of all communication. Here’s where authenticity comes into play.

The branches: Once you know who you are and what you stand for, you start developing  stories. Starting from who you are and what you offer you create strings of stories and  messages. What’s essential here is that you don’t just focus on what you want to talk  about, but figure out what your target audience wants to hear. Important: Target audiences  are not necessarily defined by demographics or gender, but – especially online – should be  defined by a common interest.

The leaves: Each branch – each story (or campaign, as you will) – then grows itself out  into different leaves. The leaves represent the various touchpoints with your target interest  group. For some stories that can be the entire array of communications channels from mail  to print to Facebook to TV to face to face. For other stories that might mean only your  internal communications channels or only your website. The touchpoints matter in regards  of the delivery format of your story, but should not dictate the story itself.

Unseen, but the most important part. The roots stand for the internal structures, processes  and culture within your organization. You can try all you want, but if your tree doesn’t have  strong roots that are supporting it in its growth and that grow with it, you’ll fail.

Application

I scheduled a workshop with five participants from the consulting department, each one  with a different background and career level. The only hardware I used was a blank piece  of paper in poster size, an Edding and post-its in four different colours. The participants,  myself included, introduced themselves, afterwards I described the further process.

We started with the trunk and discussed the department’s values in a very relaxed  atmosphere. At the end of this process we defined five principles such as Family comes  first. We honour employees with children and allow them to work wherever they want (e.g.).   We wrote every single principle on a post-it and fixed all of them vertically-arranged on the  blank poster (like the shape of a tree trunk).

After this, we moved forward to the branches: In this phase you develop concrete stories  (the proverb "Think Big!" becomes a decisive factor). To make it easier for the participants,  I asked them: "What kind of story about consultancy would catch your attention?" It came  out that the group had some difficulties in generating stories so I used an alternative  approach to that question. I told the group to pronounce concrete headlines (a simple  strategy I learned back in the days I worked for Yellow Press – this is what YP reporters do  before they start their research). This tactic worked well: The results were nearly 20  headlines that we also wrote on post-its and then positioned like branches around the trunk  on the poster.

Next step: the leaves. This part focusses on the touchpoints with the target interest group.  In the present case I asked the participants if these were graduates or professionals only.  At the end of the conversation we identified additional personas such as internal  employees who are seeking for a new career path or tutors at universities (who often give  career advises to their students). We made a list of online and print media and events, too,  where we could place our stories. We also agreed that we had to create a portrait about  our company’s in-house consultancy on the front page of the corporate website. As before,  we wrote down our thoughts on post-its and positioned them like leaves around the  corresponding branches.

Finally we discussed the roots. This part turned out to be the easiest one because the  whole company just went through a huge cultural change process which aimed to increase  responsibility among the workforce. Employees were now allowed to speak individually for  the company. We defined spokespersons/protagonists for individual topics and defined a  clear quality management process. Finally we draw symbolic roots on the poster and  marked each one separately.

At the beginning of the workshop we had a blank piece of paper. Three hours later our  communications strategy was complete! We generated strategic and entertaining stories.  Let me give you an example:

  Value (trunk): "We succeed together, we fail together"

  Headline (branch): "Ten golden rules that consulting newbies should follow"

  Touchpoint (leave): Business Newspaper for young people

  Protagonist/Speaker (root): Junior Consultant from the team

Conclusion & Insights

The process was vivid and productive. It seemed that people who mostly think very  strategically welcome little escapes into the world of visual thinking. Diagrams and pie  charts are mostly the only graphical elements they are used to. The drawing of a huge  symbolic tree forced them to leave habitual thoughts behind them – a tree is a living object,  diagrams and pie charts are not. To gain more results the next time I would organize the  workshop outside the company’s walls because spatial distance often leads to more  creativity.

With the Storytelling Tree we went through the first two stages of Jeanne Liedtkas Design  Thinking process: What is? and What if? The next steps would do a small-scale test with a  handful of stories and track the results (What wows?) to finally see What works?

Analysing the  problem    Interviews with  individual team  members and  human resources  experts from the  company    Scanning the  media landscape

Brainstorming  ideas / Creating  stories with the  Story Telling Tree  Tool    Prioritizing ideas

Small-scale test  with a handful of  stories with high  priority

Final roll-out of  stories that  succeeded in the  former test phase

