FreshNetworks Blog

Last night I was at an event organised by Results International called Winning in Changing Times. One of the speakers was Christopher Satterthwaite, Chief Executive of Chime Communications. He gave an excellent talk about how brands and organisations need to change the way they engage with customers. Key points included:

• From Deference to Reference. We’ve left the age of Deference (where consumers yield to the judgement of a marketing message) and moved into an age of Reference (where we can and do check claims against feedback from others who have already purchased or experienced a service).
• He showed a great slide that demonstrated the importance of “What you DO” over “What you SAY”. I think it was called “Moving Annual Targets” (MAT). For each month he’d picked out the brand/person most talked about in the press. E.g. NorthernRock for Sept’07, Alistair Darling for Nov’07, BA/BAA for Jan’08 and Bradford and Bingley for June’08. Each of these had hit the headlines because of something they had done which directed a lot of (often negative) attention their way. you can see the diagram showing this below.
• This led onto a point about Reputation. Reputation comes from what you say, what you do and what others say about you. This has always been true and continues to be true. The change is the importance ascribed to each of those three drivers. The order of importance has now been reversed: what others say about you is paramount, then what you do etc.

It was great to hear about how this large communications group has developed it’s thinking in response to the way consumers now consume brand and political messages.