Happy New Year!

I was asked by an editor to give some thought to what makes for good marketing and business in the face of another year of hardship in the building and construction industry. So below are my 5 Tell-Tale Signs of what, in my humble opinion and my experience of two severe industry recessions, mark out the winners from the losers.

You can also read our 'Seven Day Plan' (top tips for a week's worth of things companies can do to improve their marketing and communications) in today's TTJ magazine - see page 22.

What would you add to this list? Please do drop me a comment below.

1.  Winners invest in relationships
… and they invest in the people who forge these relationships. They listen closely to the sales team and front line staff, and are passionate about little things that make a big difference.  They find time for real conversations. 

2.  Winners wear their customers’ socks
They keep looking outwards, eyes firmly on the horizon.  They actually know more about their customers’ businesses than they know about their competitors (never the other way around). They prioritise market research and market intelligence, have a powerful contacts database or CRM system, and they could make spookily well-informed guesses about the issues that will be discussed at their customers’ next Board meetings.  They sell solutions, not materials with a mark-up.

3.  Winners don’t let the stress show
In recessions, customers need a lot of reassurance.  Winners always stay true to their corporate values and keep communicating.  They remain easy to do business with. They are seen to treat people well.  They pay on time. They bring their best suppliers much closer to the business so that people are more willing to go that extra mile for them.  Word soon gets out that this is a confident company that you want on your side in rocky times.

4.  Winners keep their heads above the parapet
A big part of building confidence is about maintaining visibility – particularly through cost-effective tools like PR, awards, networking events, online communications and social media.  They don’t spend loads but are highly targeted and focused and they integrate all these marketing activities very tightly together so they squeeze out every ounce of value.

5.  Winners just get on with it
Recessions don’t last forever – this time next year the market will be entirely different, and to be honest the most successful clients we are working with today have been vigorously lobbying, meeting journalists, manoeuvring into position and shaping that market since last January. They are much more likely to say “we never waste a good crisis” than “let’s put that on hold until we see what happens after the election”.

A recent phone call to my office prompted me to do some digging for Footings.

The style of the call might be familiar to you if you work for a trade association or membership organisation of any sort, and particularly if you're part of the construction industry. We get these calls about once a month:

"Hi, how are you?! [Gushing enthusiasm from stranger on phone].

"I've been talking to your colleague Jim and he really wanted me to give you a call. We publish a very high quality journal that goes to all the key decision makers in the construction industry and my editor really wants to run a big feature on your Association. What issues are of most concern to you at the moment? Zero carbon agenda? Building Regulations? Health and safety must be a big one.... [Blah, blah]

"Well, we can offer you a full page/two pages/six pages of free editorial.... No cost to your Association, but great coverage in a glossy quarterly that's read by 40,000 senior decision makers - all the top specifiers, housebuilders, RSLs, housing associations, local authorities, major contractors, special sub-contractors, architects, QSs, surveyors, structural, mechanical and civil engineers, government agencies, public utilities, materials manufacturers...." [Blah, blah]

If you're anything like me, major alarm bells are ringing by now.

• I've never heard of this publication before (it has one of those generic titles like UK Construction World, Building National, Property Now etc).
• I've never heard of the publisher either.
• It's claiming a circulation well in excess of what we'd expect, covering pretty much the WHOLE industry and all its diverse disciplines.
• It's not got an ABC certificate of course.
• Oh, and guess what, they want to promote the fact that you're "collaborating" with them on this "exciting feature" to all the Association's members in order to invite them to advertise. They may even want a list of your members in exchange for this "great opportunity".

Welcome to the trade mag version of vanity publishing, and its close cousin 'support advertising' features.

Fed up with these calls and curious about what was going on with this particular rogue publication (which has recently changed its title again), last week I had a really helpful chat with a bone fide publisher who knew the set-up. He explained that these tactics tend to cluster around three types of features:

1. Project features about a particular building project, where the developer writes some blurb about the project and all the companies, contractors and suppliers involved on the project are invited to place advertising saying how pleased they are to be associated with Building X and its developer.
2. Event features about a major exhibition like Interbuild, Ecobuild or a conference, where the event organiser writes the blurb and all the exhibitors are approached to advertise in support.
3. Trade association/membership organisation features, where the Association writes some blurb and all the members are encouraged to advertise in support.

You get the picture.

As a publishing model, it can occasionally work well for all parties, he told me. Sometimes.

BUT there are major dangers:

• If the sales team can't sell enough advertising around the feature, it won't get published at all, so you've wasted your time.
• There is usually very little information about who receives these publications, and readership numbers are not the same as actual copies distributed (assume a standard multiplier of x 4).
• The quality of the content can be shockingly bad.
• The ad sales techniques can get very pushy, which is also bad news if the Association then receives complaints from its members. They may feel obligated or bullied into advertising in a magazine where they would or should not spend their money.
• And there are (allegedly) cases where a publisher has simply taken the advertising revenue, published enough copies of the magazine to give one to each of the advertisers, and pocketed the rest of the cash. Illegal, immoral and pretty much invisible fraud.

I'm afraid our sector has its fair share of these sorts of publishers. If you call me, I'll give you the names of our prime suspects.

So here's the bottom line: No up-to-date ABC certificate, no editorial and certainly no list of our clients' members. Sorry.

About 10 years ago, at the height of the success of the big city PR agencies (one of whom I worked for at the time), almost every proposal document promised the potential new client the opportunity to gain a glistening new reputation and acres of media coverage for its ‘thought leadership’ on one issue or another. I can’t tell you how many new business pitches that won for us.

Thought leadership was all about being the undisputed clever clogs in your niche market. As commentators at the Henley Management College put it: "with intellectual capital at a premium, being recognised for the highest levels of knowledge and expertise is the holy grail of many professions."

Even since, whenever I came across something really exciting and new that I thought could reframe the way the media or industry looks on something, I still tended to use the phrase to explore with clients about what might be possible.

But my enthusiasm for standard 'thought leadership PR’ is definitely waning.

First, it’s awfully easy to over-promise. Don't get me wrong: we're fortunate to have no shortage of clients with original ideas and expertise by the bucket-load. But genuine thought leadership – genuine leadership, in fact – is not something easily created through the use of PR.

My suspicions were reinforced by an FT article I spotted late last year:

“The phrase ought to be banned, and anyone caught using it locked away and left to reflect on the stupidity of their actions. Not everyone can be a leader. It follows that not everyone can be a thought leader either. But that does not stop many professional services firms from claiming that they (alone) offer thought leadership on certain issues…”

And that may also explain why increasingly I think the standard thought leadership PR approach may actually not work very well.

The traditional view among many PR folk is that a thought leadership campaign requires:

• A thought (ideally a new one that can be branded)
• Clarity of communications (and lots of it, ie. big budgets)
• And authenticity (it’s got to ring true with the key stakeholders)

It is trumpeted using every tool in the PR toolkit with the aim of transforming an organisation's reputation, ensuring its expertise is well known and so attracting commercial reward and recognition galore.

Standard thought leadership PR is also usually focused on the personal - implemented through boosting the profile of one or two company spokespeople (preferably chairmen or CEOs) who take to the podium and claim credit for the Big Idea. Much of the media love this too, as it provides an entertaining source of strong personalities with strong views (or “any old fool in possession of an ego and a blog”, as Lucy Kellaway would say).

For some people this approach also links well with the ideas in Malcolm Gladwell's book 'The Tipping Point', and his 'Law of the Few' - the idea that a small group of influencers can spark a much bigger change or social phenomenon. In short, perceived thought leadership and high level influence leading to fundamental change in the business or social environment.

But the reality is that a lot of effort goes into thought leadership PR that actually achieves not very much at all - certainly not the sort of change that we would all like to claim. I suspect there are a lot of companies out there that are rather disappointed by the long-term impact of their so-called 'thought leadership' campaigns.

Obviously you cannot claim to be thought leaders simply by virtue of being the first, biggest or longest-established firm in your sector. (In my experience, the most original thought often comes from the sharp sightedness of the new kids on the block, or from the initial creative and often confrontational juxtaposition of teams that might not otherwise work together.)

Nor is it enough to offer an expert opinion on, say, water efficiency or waste management in construction, back it up with a survey among a client group and a White Paper to download from your website, hold an event and claim to be the thought leaders on this aspect of environmental sustainability.

It’s certainly not about coming up with a new piece of jargon, a nice logo or fancy graphic to package ideas differently.

Like the best leaders generally, genuine thought leaders do something beyond showing off their cleverness or marketing wizardry. They change the world by bringing others with them, forming collaborations and partnerships to bring their vision alive and to make it real. 

Corporate reputations are changed through having new ideas, yes, but not by concentrating it all around a couple of corporate celebrities. It is about a generosity of spirit, allowing those ideas to be tested in the real world, sharing the lessons learned and utilising a communications strategy that is much more open and devolved (ie. less centrally controlled by the boss).

My view is therefore growing that it's not just the intellectual capital that matters, but an organisation's overall connectedness.

Let's take a look at one aspect of this...

Remarkable research findings reported in the New Scientist last month show that our emotions and behaviours may be more heavily influenced by others than we previously thought – even by people we have never even met or heard of. To summarise, it suggests that:

"...we are beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends - people three degrees of separation away from us whom we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus."

The effects of 'empathetic mimicry' are thought to explain how happiness or depression can be 'caught' from others not in our immediate social circle. Looking at the ways social norms are spread is also helping scientists to understand how to change the behaviours of whole communities, such as tackling smoking or obesity (maybe even one day triggering a mass epiphany for one planet living?).

One part of the New Scientist article caught my eye in particular, quoting the controversial work of Duncan Watts at Columbia University. It shows that "seeding localised social groups with certain ideas or behaviours can lead to the ideas cascading across entire global networks."

As the article points out:

"This contradicts the notion - promoted by the author Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point and others - that social epidemics depend on a few key influential individuals from whom everyone else takes their cue. It doesn't ring true, argues Watts, because such 'influentials' typically interact with only a few people. The key for the spread of anything, he says... is a critical mass of interconnected individuals who influence one another."

If this is true, the role of Web 2.0 in an organisation's communications activities also becomes incredibly important.

Admittedly, the research has not yet been done into whether actions or feelings can spread via the digital world as powerfully as they do in physical communities. I suspect it would probably be much easier to measure this contagion in a consumer market than in a construction industry group.

But if it is possible to seed new ideas and achieve widespread attitudinal or behavioural change through social media, then it’s time to dust off that company policy on Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools and take a fresh look at what people are allowed and encouraged to do.

It may be that each of your people's individual relationships, social networks and their online conversations on Twitter, through blogs, discussion boards and the like could be a much more effective route for your organisation to achieve genuine thought leader status and tangible results than the old PR approach.

There's a fascinating viewpoint by the FT's columnist Stefan Stern today on the battle by corporations to get our attention and win some 'mind share'.

Everyone is so busy, so surrounded by the sheer noise of too much information, so bombarded by messages and images in the competition to communicate, that in fact it's getting much harder for businesses and brands to be heard.

"Does better marketing hold the answer to this attention deficit problem? Unlikely. More of the same, only a bit cleverer (Twittering corporations, anyone?) is not really going to alter the basic situation..." says Stern.

He has a good point about gimmickry. But this is not just an issue of 'traditional business' v. 'the internet age'. Nor is it relevant only to Business-to-Consumer (B2C) activities.

The problem of getting noticed in the construction sector can be just as tricky. Want to communicate how well you understand clients' needs to design and build low carbon buildings? Join the queue mate.

But actually better marketing can help. By that, I mean better market research and more intelligent communications planning as part of your Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing strategy. Because to get someone's attention requires us first to understand what is meaningful to them. To be heard, first we must listen.

This is the rationale behind the opinion former research work we do. The details of these research projects always pinpoint something new that our clients' target audiences really want or need. Armed with this relevant information delivered in a timely and appropriate way, there is no problem in getting the right peoples' attention.

This is good news, particularly in a recession when we all need to cut out waste: a well-timed whisper in the right ears can achieve more than a shouting match.