The Trend: I think demand for transparency is trending. It’s probably been driven in part by the political climate of the last several months. But I think the demand for transparency was occurring before that time, just a bit more slowly. Kim Scott, a CEO coach and former faculty member at Apple University, has written a book that espouses transparency in management, although she calls it radical candor, which also is the name of her book. I love that term. In my world, consumers are demanding that we as an industry are direct and open. And it’s not just in communications. The alignment between communications and marketing is critical to achieving collective marketplace impact on behalf of our members, which is our job at CTAM (Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing). There has to be transparency in messaging across both functions to be believed and accepted by consumers. The risks and pitfalls associated with not being transparent now are larger than they were in the past. We have to be able to tell the truth and back it up.
The Reaction: We are seeing need for transparency at CTAM in our work on an Industry Positioning Initiative with cable company and television network members. It’s a long-term repositioning, brand and reputation-improvement effort. The aim is to develop a careful, thoughtful and concerted effort to change the perception of cable. We understand cable’s reputation will not change overnight, so we took the approach that, at first, it’s not going to be about what we say, but about what we do.
Our first step was to conduct a full year of research with consumers. We needed to go deep to learn if there was anything we could do to move the needle on reputation. If so, what would it be? We asked consumers about their perception of how the industry and their providers value them as customers, the strength of their experiences with cable and where they think we are headed in terms of innovation. We inquired about many of the things we want consumers to believe about cable, because we’re innovating and improving their experiences today—and will tomorrow—but they don’t know it.
Out of that we created what we call “experience opportunities.” These are areas where consumers have told us that, if we deliver, they would change their minds about their cable companies. Then it’s the job of the CTAM member collective to bring these experience improvements to fruition, then market and communicate about them clearly and consistently. If the industry collaborates to do this well, the research shows we can move the needle on perceptions 20 to 30 points.
What it boils down to is finding ways to give consumers what they tell us they want—which our members have discovered isn’t as difficult a problem as they might have anticipated. These all are manageable; they are all things they’re either doing or are on their way to doing. But it has forced us to be honest about it. To go back inside the companies and say, for example, that what consumers really want are simple, intuitive experiences. Then ask, how can we deliver on that? How can we make that real? And then it’s easy to be transparent in your marketing and communications—and build a trust cycle.
Cable customers are seeing changes already, depending on the provider, but there will be more to come during the next two to three years. We have a roadmap and know where we want to end up, which is with a deeper emotional connection with the customer.
Right now our member companies are looking at their product roadmaps and customer care plans and assessing how they can make improvements and changes. Communicators are diving in and deciding how to talk about these experiences as a way to change our reputation.
To bring it back to transparency, we realized when we began this effort one year ago that we had to attack it differently than we would have five years ago. We know we have to make the experience promises real and true, because they will be scrutinized by customers at a much different level today than they might have been in the past. Every advance we communicate we must prove. We have to deliver and we have to tell the truth. Radical candor.
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