learly stated positioning, a consistent look and feel to the communications materials, and a strong corporate identity are essential elements. Often times, advertising should play a part. Finally, these marketing initiatives have to be tied together with the specific sales objectives, sales organization's goals and, hopefully their compensation program.

Now your question was how would or should this ‘change’ the way a company markets. My impression is that most companies say this isn’t a change; that they do these things every day. I say, yes, you probably do, but in an a la carte way. And often times, without a clear umbrella positioning. So the personality of the brand, its identity, remains associated only with the features of products, not with the benefits of doing business with the company, with maintaining a long term relationship with the company.

What are the gaps as you see them in most communications efforts?
f you ask a customer about a company, chances are their response is based on their most current contact with that company. And if you push them to think further on their series of contacts with that company, the impression that emerges is very fragmented. The look, the feel, the underlying message, how people answer the phone, whether the supplier calls up the customer after the sale, what level of technical support the customer is given, whether the customer is aware of the other products/services that the customer is interest in -- all these play a part.

As I just mentioned, many companies do most of what I’ve just described. Some have made attempts to put the pieces together into a cohesive picture. But if you take all the communications pieces from most companies and place them on a table you would be hard pressed to tell that they all came from the same company. They are not consistent in executing their marketing communications program.

Repetitiveness almost to the point of redundancy of the underlying promise is necessary to build a company’s distinct image. Even more important, what that look and feel is, what the overall positioning is: that has to be right. It creates the attitude, the personality, the image as well as the manifestation of the value proposition of the company.