Illustrative wellbeing and other outcomes

On average a person sees 5000 marketing messages a day.

That’s an incredibly competitive environment for us to be putting out our housing related messages that might be considered ‘boring but important’. Linda Nasr, Lecturer in Marketing led with this fact in her ‘Getting the message across’ at MBS’s Prometheus programme and it makes you think.

As a housing organization we’re never going to be able to compete with the glossy commercials, celebrity endorsements or sensational tabloid stories so how do we communicate our key messages?

Customers at our newsletter focus group the following week seemed to understand our quandary. Our newsletter is one of the most expensive pieces of ongoing communications we do and we have to make it work for us. One participant in the focus group said in his time as a tenant he’d not opened our newsletter once.

‘Content is king’ seems to be the phrase on everyone’s lips at the moment so that seemed like a good place for the focus group to be starting. An initial desire for up to the minute crime news soon gave way to requests for better storytelling and uplifting and inspirational stories. Nasr covered this in her lecture describing the type of message as ‘illustrative wellbeing outcomes’,  a little more academic than ‘good news stories’ but the same idea nonetheless.

Nasr and our focus group agreed on another idea, what she entitled ‘customer co-creation’, essentially building relationships on common ground. Our focus group were adamant that our performance figures were not something they wanted to see, and that makes sense. How many of us know how many calls our private sector landlord answers in two minutes? Or the number of complaints our property management company received about that bin store?

‘Customer co-creation’ will help us keep our messaging relevant. So ‘98% of calls answered in 2 minutes’ might be ‘We’ve now got more staff so we can answer your call quicker at busy periods.’

We’d like to take ‘co-creation’ a little more literally and get customers involved in producing content for newsletters too. Perhaps then people might start opening the wrapper.