56 . Glasgow Business November/December 2012
BIG TALKS Bruce Waddell is Media Director of The BIG Partnership
›› IT’S ALL ABOUT GETTING TO THE RIGHT PERSON
D
uring my long number of years as a newspaper editor I once did a presentation for a
roomful of PR and marketing executives and ended the session by asking them this: How many of you actually know me? Tere were approximately
50 there. Only one person raised his hand. I tried again, reeling off half a
dozen names from the Daily Record’s hierarchy. Not a household name or a well-known byline among them. Again, I almost drew a blank. Te people I had named were the
engine room of the newspaper, desk editors and editorial executives ... essentially the ones who placed the news and the features and who drew the pages and dreamed up the clever headlines. In other words, the decision-makers. My motivation was not to be a
Big Time Charlie, suggesting that everybody rush out and adopt their nearest sub-editor. My point to the group was that if you didn’t know or couldn’t get to the only people that matered, how could you expect to get results for your clients? Wind forward three years and I
am now helping clients build communications strategies, as part of Scotland’s largest PR agency, and I do still try to practice what I once preached. But it seems these days that,
far from wanting to be visible to customers, the preferred trend for many business leaders is to be anonymous. Tis actually might work if the
world had not changed to embrace readily available and lightly regulated social media where people share concerns and subsequently damage reputations in an instant.
FIND OUT MORE... For more information on The BIG partnership, visit
www.bigpartnership.co.uk Bad customer service is bad
business and I’d like to champion a campaign for leaders – and their leadership – to be more visible to consumers. Surely the best PR of all is still to have a positive reputation for dynamism, honesty and trust. In the past 18 months I’ve
switched banks, energy providers, telecoms giants and insurance firms and in no instance did I do it to save money. Instead, each change was based on a simple business question. Am I a valued customer? For several large, uncaring companies the answer was equally simple. No. My experiences with each of
these faceless organisations was truly shocking and all of them involved spending ludicrous hours on the telephone geting passed from pillar to post and back to pillar again. I tried. I’m patient. But each call
veered in a similar direction. I wanted supervisors, I wanted managers, I wanted the next person up the line, I just wanted someone who knew more than the last person did (which wasn’t a lot) and who could actually help me. So I took a decision. Not revenge.
Just business. My business. I have a friend who says life is really simple. You either do something or you don’t. Make the choice. I did. So let me ask a couple of
questions to some of these big companies: Why do you spend so much money on ridiculously repetitive advertising? And are you aware that social
media exists? People actually talk to each other these days in so many different ways. Tat’s the bit you need to get. Tey’ll talk and then they’ll do, just like I did. Remember customers still come
first. Always. Speak to them and you’ll find out why.
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