Corporate leaders of any level or industry are going through an era of transformation, which will endure and evolve in the next 10 years. It’s a collective period of ‘soul searching’ for their brands and organizations as all business models shift and reshape. 

 

Business and external/internal communication issues agendas, most importantly, change under the influence of the below important catalysts, which affect the communication agencies, their service offering and future growth. In fact, it is my belief that communications industry needs a step change in its offering and competence because of the below catalysts:

 

1. Change communications and employee engagement are a priority for companies. Factors like culture change, organizational fatigue, search of practical innovation are prioritized as the top organizational challenges. It’s a field where agencies have limited ways to add value and sometimes limited expertise, no matter what positioning they claim to have. But it impacts their service relationship, and decreases their managed budgets.  On the other hand, in-house communicators feel least confident about overcoming such organizational disruption with limited staff skill, with limited agency help and a negative morale external environment.

 

2. Technology is free for everything, every time, everywhere. It changes in practical ways the traditional engagement models, as well as it disrupts the customer experience touchpoints (from retail physical presence up to app-oriented services), and in consequence redirects to new paths the corporate and brand communication issues and themes. The new presales cycle, the customer service, the transaction systems, the reference systems, the location based services, the real-time price comparisons, the majority of service owners ...all ‘go tech’. While this is the reality, tech savvy agency experts haven’t ‘invested’ in strategy understanding, in communication techniques and in content relevance...like mastering the tool without excelling on the ‘what’s in it for me’. The more traditional agency networks are almost tech illiterate and that impacts negatively their customer advice and strategy planning. Gaps everywhere; can they be bridged?

 

3. End-users/consumers are suspicious and hard to convince nowadays. Recession effects, inequalities, and the new ethical issues, as well as the perceived price-quality equation make them ‘tough to talk to’. Meanwhile, they are empowered, finding information sources everywhere, using the openness of social media, and demoting content creation which used to be the strong asset of agencies in the top-down-mass model. This is a gap area between consumer behavior and the actions of brands and corporate leaders, which agencies do little about. Can simply a good Facebook page bridge this gap? Is it only the responsibility of a PR agency? Are the bloggers new media owners, and Twitter the new pressure group...and who’s planning offering, service, messaging for them as an ongoing dialogue?

 

4. Trust is the Holy Grail for companies and it’s not reflected in the messaging creation. In the agency rush of corporate, brand, marketing communications differentiation positioning (ie. ‘I’m digital, you’re not’), almost all agencies, in my humble view, neglect to create in a way that ‘fights-back’ the lack of audience trust to their customer companies. They seem to trap themselves in the search for better content, interfaces, messages without really adding value ...to the ‘trust deficit’. Who has the competence to write Twitter content which creates real chats and leads to roundtables? Who is ready to investigate deep consumer insights and instead of developing a campaign...change the brand system...agency-client together?

 

5. Variety breeds clutter, and clutter brings disorder. The variety of corporate and brand communication thematic issues, the web channels explosion (power of social web), and the proliferation of management teams from the audiences, push agencies to impress every day with a different conceptual proposal / page / content / competition. This anxiety practice disburses available customer budgets, thus leads clients to select many specialized agencies without strategic integration and coherence.

 

6. Technology is the ‘new black’ for markets and the communications industry. New ways, new approaches need a change mindset to draft a social release, to create a YouTube script and help all those combine at the end, having the ‘forest view’ from the start. Numerous changes that either clients learn and improvise themselves, or areas where agencies need to invest more in trainings and real competence development.  

Everything you think you know isn’t all you need to do. Use new perspectives to see and prepare for the future, because it’s not far anymore. Communications is about relationships, and relationships are about people. So find them in the chaos of tech disruptions. Talk to them sincerely. 

 

Help your customers change and prepare your organization in a sustainable mode to be bigger than comms segmented silos (PR, UX, Social, Community managers, web surveys, web analytics). The new transformation messaging is bigger than your agency positioning, bigger than an organization. Possibly the new way is integrated, expert teams to add value.

 

 

Tasos Pagakis’ inspired dream is to add value in everything he does. He identifies talent, innovative ways, entrepreneurial mindset and collaboration as our tools in the future. Experienced in Corporate and Brand reputation building since 1988; having pitched for hundreds of businesses, shaped creative standards and created strategic plans for more than 370 globally accredited companies in 57 market categories, he has won international creative and effectiveness awards. Currently works as Head of Communications for Ericsson Southeastern Europe.