Your senior execs are plugging your company on Wall Street as a "blue-chip-corporation-turned-New-Economy-player," but your sales force is hinging pitches on old-school concepts
like "longevity" and "experience."
Complicating matters, your customer service reps are operating at the speed of bureaucracy, taking weeks to reply to email complaints. You've fired off countless notes to your
CEO and COO about the dangers of this branding schizophrenia, but to no avail. Can't get them to digest the severity of this strategic messaging lapse? Try showing 'em
what you mean - with video footage.
We're not talking hidden cameras in an Orwellian sense. Think of it more as the boardroom equivalent of all those after-school specials designed to give kids a more sobering
dose of issues like STDs and drugs. Attaching real faces, voices and body language to chronic problems often makes the issues sink in.
This was the philosophy that prompted the communications team at Williams - a diversified energy and telecom company headquartered in Tulsa, Okla. - to hit the road with digital
cameras last spring and shoot interviews with some of the company's 24,000-member workforce.
The resulting documentary buttressed an extensive print survey Williams had just conducted to gauge employees' opinions about whether the company was living up to the core
values and beliefs it espoused - among them, "integrity," "efficiency," "tolerance for risk" and openness to change. The survey results and video footage would be presented at a
retreat attended by more than 150 corporate officers.
"We found that it's difficult to get [executives] to give due consideration to pages of pie charts and graphs," says Kerry Malone, director of corporate communications. "With
the video, we hoped to get a similar response to the survey, but to bring that [employee feedback] to life by putting faces, people and personalities with the data."
Hmm. Must be something in the pipelines at energy companies. In a similar move, Atlanta-based Southern Co. last year hired Pine Rock Productions, a DC shop, to infiltrate its
headquarters and document its employee attitudes - notably in the wake of utility deregulation.
"We went into the company and got people to tell the truth on film about what they thought about the corporate environment," PineRock President Ed Romanoff told attendees at a
recent IABC presentation in Washington. The employee criticisms that turned up on video helped Southern fine-tune a strategy for ditching its "fatherly, top-down" image in favor
of a more contemporary model.
Filming In Situ
Of course, employees aren't the only stakeholder group worthy of video footage. Not when there's so much to learn from the inflexion, body language and other subtle cues that
come to life on film. Which is why some communicators are beginning to dip their toes into the heretofore marketing-driven field of ethnography - also known more colloquially as
"observational research" - whereby branding teams observe target audiences in their natural habitats to gain a richer understanding of their attitudes and biases.
Last fall, as Porter Novelli prepared to launch a campaign on behalf of U.S. and Colombian flower growers promoting fresh-cut flowers as a home accessory (PRN, Jan. 29),
the agency videotaped a "day in the life" of a prototypical flower buyer, tracking her jaunts to the grocery store, the gym, a coffee shop and home to spend time with her kids.
"The result was we got a rich profile with our consumer talking about how flowers fit into her overall lifestyle and we used that to enrich our [messaging strategy]," says
Michael Ramah, director of strategic planning and research at Porter Novelli.
Ramah expects this genre of anthropological research to become more commonplace in PR circles as integrated communications strategies become the norm.
"PR has been a little late to the game, considering it was originally about publicists weighing the poundage of clippings. " he says. "If you don't really understand the
consumer - whether you're talking about fluffy stuff or serious stuff - you're not going to accomplish anything."
All of which sounds great in theory, although the verdict is out as to how long it might take video research projects to become common PR practice. "It's interesting to me how
un-visual most PR people still are," says Bruce Jeffries-Fox, executive VP with the communications measurement firm Insight Farm in Livingston, N.J. "And in PR, we're just
starting out on the road to research. At this point, we're lucky if we can get people to measure the outcomes of their programs, let alone put that much money into studying an
issue [proactively] and how it affects people."
Bucks, Lies & Videotape
Let it also be noted that video ain't exactly cheap. A full-scale camera crew will run you somewhere in the $1,500 to $2,500 per diem range. Although if you're shooting
stakeholder behavior for research purposes only, you may want to forego broadcast-quality footage.
"If that's the case, you're better off hiring someone who shoots consumer-grade events, like a wedding videographer," advises Deborah Genovesi, director of West Coast operations
for DWJ Television, which specializes in high-end broadcast productions. Small-scale videographers usually charge about $100 per hour.
"Then again, if you think you'll ever want to use the same research footage for a VNR or corporate video, you'll need broadcast quality, so you need to think that out in
advance," Genovesi says. "You don't want to be penny-wise and pound-foolish."
In Williams' case, Malone eschewed outside vendors altogether, instead training her own in-house staff to conduct interviews using camera equipment the company already owned.
"We didn't want a slick, produced feel because we were afraid in that case people's answers would be more stilted, as in 'This is what senior management would think I should
say.'" she says.
In the end, the video and survey highlighted notable differences in the core values Williams executives held in highest esteem, vs. the values their employees rated as most
important. The film, Malone says, helped contextualize those differences.
"There's so much bottled up in a survey, when what we're really talking about is what people believe and feel. A piece of paper just wouldn't say it all."
(DWJ Television: Deborah Genovesi, 310/827-8567; Insight Farm: Bruce Jeffries-Fox, 800/631-1160; Williams: Kerry Malone, 918/573-2110; Porter Novelli: Michael Ramah, 202/973-
5844; PineRock: Ed Romanoff, 202/638-2131.)
I'm Not Ready For My Close-up, Mr. DeVille
Is it hard to convince employees to share their true feelings on camera? You'd better believe it. Kellie Murphy, a senior producer with Williams at the time of the shoot
(she's now with Image Associates in Raleigh, N.C.) recalls the dynamic: "We were basically saying, 'Hi. I'm from corporate headquarters. I'm going to turn on this camera now. I
know your name and position, and what you say is going to be shown to your bosses at the highest level. So what do you think of the company?'"
Herein was a situation in which communications staffers with strong reporting and interviewing skills were at a premium. "We spent a lot of time assuring people we wouldn't
make them look stupid or get them fired," says Kerry Malone, director of corporate communications at Williams.
In the case of Southern Co., employees were appreciative of the fact that the company cared enough about their opinions to ask for them, says Ed Romanoff, president of Pine Rock
Productions, the outside firm that went in to shoot staff testimonials. But this didn't make employees any less nervous. Pine Rock ultimately got around employee shyness by
digitizing out the faces of interviewees to protect their identities.