I wanted to share with you a great article from a recent ABC Construction Executive entitled “The Jobsite of the Future” by James M. Benham (@smartbidnet) at SmartBidNet. I’ve been amazed by issue after issue of construction publications like ENR and Construction Executive that showcase iPads, Geotagging, and other powerful technologies that continue to expand on GPS and BIM. (One of my favorites is using an iPad with BIM to show where a staircase goes and then taking a picture to show job progress.)
Photo from obamapacman.com
James goes into detail about the future on construction and technology usage including Imaging, Robots, Greenery, and Mobile Devices. Gone are the days that contractors can fear technology, they must embrace it, not only to keep up with their clients, but to build better and more efficiently. Mobile devices have made a truck a mobile office and project documents are always at your fingertips and everyone has skin in the game.
Next time you pick up a construction or A/E/C magazine, you may mistake it for Wired or another tech pub.
MMC is truly an employee owned company from the bottom up.
All month we’ve been discussing Brand Ambassadors and I purposely held off posting on this final week of March in order to see a presentation at SMPS SERC (Southeastern Regional Conference) entitled “Creating Brand Ambassadors”– and I’m glad I did. Robin Broder & Erica Jones at MMC Contractors did an incredible job detailing how they built out a brand ambassador program by empowering every employee at MMC Contractors.
Most of the things we’ve been talking about this month have been about the more attainable, low-hanging fruit like consistent signage and hard hats and not driving erratic. But, Robin & Erica got their principals on board and dove in deep. They challenged the long-term thinking that customers are happy with on-time and on-budget – and found that this is what they expect, not what keeps them happy. So, they educated their team on what does makes customers happy – personal attention and communication. They even got their customers involved by inviting them to employee trainings and telling the foreman, supervisors, and executive team first hand what they expect and how to keep them happy. Happy customers make for a happy bottom line.
The marketing duo at MMC also understood the importance of happy employees being more engaged and having what we call “brand buy-in” where they actually care about the company. They changed the culture of the company by training employees to surpass their customers expectations and earn a testimonial. This shifted the responsibility of business development from a few key individuals to the entire company. What did they learn? Business development isn’t just one or two people taking clients out to lunch and networking after hours, it truly is the attention and communication that you and ALL your employees give to your customers on a day-to-day basis.
Think about where you shop – Target’s ads may get your attention and might get you into the store, but if you have numerous poor customer service experiences, you don’t shop there anymore. As a consumer, you have options and the best way to retain a customer is to provide a better experience than your competitors. How do companies compete when they have poor customer experience – they lower their price. People pay more for quality, more for service, and more to make things easier.
The best companies, regardless of their market and competition, have moved past low bid and on to a new understanding of the real value of their expertise, time, and experience.
I was on the campus of Loyola University New Orleans last week for a dear friend’s wedding and they must have known I was coming — cranes in the sky (this happened at Disney World on our company brand retreat last year too).
Not really, Loyola is celebrating their centennial in a few weeks and I’m sure the crane is putting the final touches on a few things. Always some construction on a campus – good things!
A company in Las Vegas called Dig This has made Brand Constructor heaven – an adult sandbox complete with heavy machinery. You can play in the dirt with excavator and dozers – how cool is that?
We’ve been talking about brand ambassadors this month and defined a brand ambassador as everyone in your company including vendors & sub-contractors because they all impact your customer’s experience with your brand. One of the best ways to control the brand voice coming from your brand ambassadors is to have good company morale.
A happy employee generally talks highly of their company, co-workers, work, and customers. We have all seen those disgruntled workers that trash the company that puts food on their family’s table. These people obviously do not have “brand buy-in” and only see their work as a means to a paycheck and not a long-term career with that company. Look at your typical employee at Walmart versus Target. In general (although, I must say it has been getting much better lately), Walmart employees do not want to be there and it shows. Their lack of enthusiasm from the non-greeter to the check out process to the sloppy shelves, all show that morale is down and it effects the buying experience. On the flipside, Target’s employees smile, care about you as a customer and how their store looks which makes me think they are happier. Your shopping habits are probably different in each store. When I’m in Target, my wife & I browse different sections and buy things we want and even impulse buys seems logical. In Walmart, we buy what we need and the only potential impulse buys are things that are ridiculously cheap. Which would you rather sell to your customer – valuable or cheap add-ons?
This is one of the biggest setbacks for the construction industry. The low bid process has driven everyone to expect average as the norm instead of valuing the experience, expertise, and long-term costs. This is changing though with value priced bidding, sustainability in the forefront and customers being able to pick from 30-50 companies for any given project. Customers are looking for companies they WANT to work with instead of HAVE to work with for the next few years. Your team’s morale is a big part of desire to work with your company. In the project interviews, you can easily see which project managers are excited about their work and which ones are punching a clock.
Morale, whether good or bad, is contagious. Happy people make other people happy and help you hire other people that want to work with you while its a slippery slope when a few bad apples become your company’s brand voice. Think back to the Walmart vs Target example. Where do you think the better applicants are applying for jobs? The last Walmart employee that actually stood out to me in a positive manner is now working at Target.
What do you do to increase company morale beyond pay?
While reviewing a few discussions in my LinkedIn groups, one in the Construction Marketing Association’s discussions caught my eye. The discussion was entitled “The construction industry is behind the curve in terms of keeping up to date with modern marketing techniques.” All of the comments basically agreed with one member saying, “We are traditionalist, we rely on the good`ole boy network.” Unfortunately this is all too true in many cases.
Here is my response:
Most definitely, the construction industry is way behind the times with marketing. This is due to decades of low bid jobs, a surplus of projects where companies didn’t really need to compete, and the blue collar nature of construction workers turned executives.
I do see this changing drastically with the recession causing companies to truly compete for the first time ever in some cases as well as the movement to best value bids. Also, construction is getting more technical with contractors being a part of the BIM process and iPads being used on construction sites.
I see this evolution of marketing in construction with the advent of the Construction Marketing Association and more & more construction companies represented in SMPS (an association for marketing professionals in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction industry). Locally, I’ve seen construction companies hiring their first ever marketing directors & coordinators. Although the recession will eventually end, I do not see the construction industry dropping the marketing movement because they will still need to compete and many of the companies doing well in this recession have a solid strategic vision and a solid marketing effort, both with great marketers behind them.
What are your thoughts about marketing in construction?
This month, we’ve been talking about Brand Ambassadors (read past posts “Ambassador of the Brand” and last week’s “Building Better Brand Ambassadors“). While last week we talked about empowering your team to think of themselves as Brand Ambassadors, you’re probably still wondering how to train them. Training takes some planning and then consistent education.
Start with what your brand means – what sets your brand apart, what is your brand vision, and what is your brand personality. If you can’t answer some of these questions, that’s probably why there is a disconnect between management and workers. These need to be established, written down and shared.
Once you define your brand, its time to share the message. Have a company-wide meeting or a series of team meetings to share the brand definition and what it means to be a part of your company. Review the importance of their support in the long-term success of the company. Empower them letting them know that their actions give either a positive or negative impact on your customers and prospects. (A mantra we have at the zoo where I volunteer is: you are either training or untraining an animal with every interaction with an animal. If you do something sloppy when no one is looking, the animals learns this as correct.)
After the company is knighted with their new responsibilities as brand ambassadors, you need to continue to educate, remind, and encourage them. Also, you need to add your brand values, vision, and other aspects to your company manual for all new hires to see. Even better, have HR review what is expected of all potential employees (and subs). If they’re not on board from the beginning, it will never happen and you probably won’t want that person working for you anyway because they will never have brand buy in.
Does your company currently do a brand ambassador training? What are some things that you do to initiate and/or continue that training?
Some social media fun to kick start the week. Here are some great vintage/retro social media ads made by Moma Propaganda, a Brazilian Ad agency. Learn more about the story behind them at Top Design Mag.
How do you make everyone in your company a better brand ambassador. It’s actually not as hard as you think, just tell them. Make sure everyone in your company from the front office to your executives to the field know they are you brand and everything they do reflects on your brand. Empower your team to “step up to the plate” and embrace being a brand ambassador. We talk about the people that put the company first and it will take a catastrophic event to make them leave your company as some one with “brand buy in”. They feel a sense of ownership to the brand even if they do not own the company. This is a great thing – harness it, encourage it, and spread it.
A few thoughts/stories to help you hammer the idea that everyone is a brand ambassador:
Earlier today, Mike Totsch, CPSM spoke at my local SMPS chapter’s annual workshop and one thing struck home on this topic. At his company, Tec Inc., they call their receptionist the director of first impressions. Generally, at any company the first person anyone meets in the receptionist. This person can be 3 things: forgettable, likable, or horrid. The first is okay, the second is good (lovable would be ideal), but the third one can be dramatic. Would you hire someone with a mean, even just curt, demeanor? Probably not. That person can kill years of work that a business developer or principal have spent cultivating a relationship with a stern “hello”.
At the same workshop, I lead a roundtable discussion on implementing your brand company wide. In each round, we discussed how far the brand reaches from the construction site to the office including the trucks moving in between. Would you hire a construction that had a poorly constructed sign that was always crooked? Would you hire the guy that just cut you off in traffic and gave you the one finger salute while driving a company vehicle? These are small details that put doubts in the mind of your customers and prospects.
The last story speaks to the impact of one individual on a global brand. When I earned the Eagle Scout rank in Boy Scouts, I was told I was a “marked man”. For everything I do well or poorly will be identified with my achievement. If I kill someone today, tomorrow’s paper will read, “Eagle Scout murders man.” This would instantly be national news and dramatically change people’s opinion of Boy Scouts everywhere. That one headline would diminish the last 100 years of Scouting where Eagle Scouts have become President of the United States, astronauts, generals, and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
Remember, your company does not sell itself to another company. Business is about you selling all of your individuals to a selection committee made up of individuals. Each of those individuals have their own experience with your brand and your competitors brands. How do they experience your brand? How do your brand ambassadors make this experience better or worse?
