Torque Emergent Marketing: A Culture of Engagement
Developing successful marketing programs with strong and standout creative components is a thoughtful and sensitive process. It calls for careful listening, organizing key elements and often a bold creative leap, both for us as partners, and for our clients. The process can be intimidating. If it goes off track it can stall, take longer than expected or run into any number of challenges from the client culture, budget constraints, legal limitations or simply personality styles, ultimately falling short of the potential to elevate the property in the market.
Almost every one of our best clients, and most successful projects, have required some level of courage, determination and perseverance to see to fruition. Some seemed like they might fail, or become severely limited in their potential.
Torque Emergent Marketing is born from what we’ve learned in working with our clients for many years. It gives the marketing a birthing process, the genesis of a strong program, and also the lasting education and growth about how marketing and teams work. It’s the sweat and fight for something great, taken on together between our creative team and our client teams.
One common way agency projects get stuck or go off the rails is when some stakeholders are left out, or not brought in early enough. Stakeholders are anyone affected by—or expected to work with—any of the marketing programs. So we designed Emergent Marketing planning and management to be inclusive, not just for smooth execution, but to enroll our clients in the process, to engage them and to inspire them to bring their passions and aspirations.
In the course of this, everyone becomes a better communicator, marketer and problem-solver. Beyond managing the market elements, our clients develop a deeper awareness of the company or property vision and story, and how it brings unique value to their specific customers & clients. By going beyond building amenities and specifications and focusing on customers, the property stories can take on a relevance and vibrance that stands out uniquely in the competitive marketplace.
Emergent Marketing is a growing process that imparts new skills
Emergent Marketing starts with an idea that no one person has all the best answers, but that teams together will always come up with more diverse insights and ideas, and also make better decisions. This is true because different stakeholders understand the project from different perspectives. Projects are complex, multifaceted and dynamic. They demand an understanding of the intended users; tenants and workers as well as the surrounding community that creates parts of the user experience and also is affected by the people who will come to live, work and spend parts of their lives in and nearby the building.
Emergence is also the result of participants becoming better critical marketing thinkers, empathisers, leaders and indeed stronger both personally and professionally.
Emergence is a learning, interactive, growing and evolving experience. We start with set and setting to germinate the goodness. Here’s how it works:
Begin with an Ideal State Workshop
We gather stakeholders together to examine and map out the current state of the business or property. This also identifies further background fact finding and research to be studied. Then shifting gears, we lead the team to describe—from their various perspectives—the ideal state of the property, both near-term and long-term, using measurable as well as more subjective terms. Lastly this leads to identifying pathways, which are the actions and efforts that can bring the venture to the envisioned future state. Some of these initiatives are business opportunities, and some are jobs for branding, marketing and sales. We also probe the team for communication preferences, inspirations for visual design, message, voice and tone of the marketing. We want it to fit their culture and feel natural as well as aspirational.
Attune to Culture
The strategy will in part reflect the culture of the organization, since the best opportunities are innate to the abilities and insights of each individual on the team. Culture and practices will inform message and marketing activities, and also link to the norms and values of the organization.
Document and reference
We capture our findings, distill them into core concepts and top priorities using the Torque Ideal State Roadmap, which is a tool for tracking the visions and goals. We review and update the client’s Ideal State Roadmap at regular intervals, to help guide the marketing process and to show alignment between the tactics and creative content and the initial strategy and resulting outcomes as the work progresses.
Activate and guide
Marketing is not a “set and forget” practice. Tracking the marketing program and evaluating feedback from broker sales provides information that can help adjust and refine the program. We gather with our client teams to update the Ideal State Roadmap documentation, to see what’s changed and where new opportunities might be discovered.
We look at what’s working, what’s not working and what new insights have come up. We don’t have to solve the issues ourselves; sometimes the insights can be useful for other teams and areas of the business.
Support people
Having new ideas can be risky or lonely. We watch and listen for outliers on the client team who are thinking outside the box of the usual ways of doing business. We give them time and pay attention to their ideas so we can recognize and support them. This not only surfaces new ideas, but it also creates trust.
Update and improve on the Ideal State
We regularly meet with our clients to talk separately from the day to day projects, and to take stock of the big picture, the Ideal State that may have expanded, become more clear, or otherwise evolved as we all learn for the work.
To sum it up, an engaged and emergent team can:
Understand and respond to market and customer need and interest
Make agile adjustments in response to change and new learning
Lever technology in innovative ways
Distill and focus on priorities
Filter the noise, to find what matters most
Be courageous taking risks and speaking out for what they believe in