Continuing our three-part series on Communication – Episode #36 of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast focuses on the new product launch — what do you do when you’re ready to launch your new initiative, system, project, or product inside of a company?
In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jennifer Otremba discuss launching new initiatives and the importance of communications planning. Topics discussed include communications planning, creative collateral, building a communications plan, and related topics.
| Jen Otremba: | Communication.
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| Bryan Strawser: | I like to communicate.
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| Jen Otremba: | I do too. I think it’s important. This is actually part three in a three-part series of communication discussions, if you will, that we’ve started. We started talking a little bit about kind of an overview of communication with regards to crisis and things like that. Then we went into some of the challenges, holding statements, and things like that. Now we want to talk about the launch. At some point in time, you’re going to want to launch some kind of new product or a new team.
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| Bryan Strawser: | A new application.
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| Jen Otremba: | A new application or something along those lines. You’re going to need to know how to kind of launch that, how to get that out there to people.
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| Bryan Strawser: | We talked in part one about the fact that we’ve heard from many leaders in security crisis management business continuity that they think their team are doing all of these really cool things, but nobody knows about them. The launch is really an opportunity to make sure that whatever the big splash is that you’re going to make, that people are going to see it. You need this one chance to kind of message this thing the way that you really want it to be. This is your opportunity to do that, and to really think about in advance of that launch what are the different ways that you can that message out?
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| Jen Otremba: | Very much like anything else. How do you want that to be perceived? How do you want to get it out? How do you want people to know about it? That type of thing. Without any [inaudible 00:01:48] doing that, like you said, people don’t know that you have these great things going on unless you’re properly communicating them. In this podcast episode I guess we want to talk a little bit about planning that launch and then socializing it, and then the launch itself.
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| Bryan Strawser: | I think first you have to start with realizing that you have a launch. I think that often leaders look at all the different things their team is doing and you see this new initiative coming in and you’re like, “It’s not going to be really be that big of a deal, so why pull up a big campaign about it?” But then you also have things that are so huge that it becomes obvious that you want to communicate that.
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| I think realizing that really any change that you’re driving can be a launch to a certain extent, and how do you really take advantage of that? But I think it really starts with understanding you’ve got something new that you’re bringing into the environment. The new strategy, the new team, the new command center or whatever. Or something boring, new access control software. Yeah.
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| Jen Otremba: | No matter what, in all of those cases it’s going to affect people, right?
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| Bryan Strawser: | That’s right.
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| Jen Otremba: | Whether it’s affecting your internal team or your external team. It’s going to have an effect somehow on people, and usually we’re creatures of habit and we don’t like change. This can soften that messaging a little bit.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Once you’ve decided that you understand that you’re going to have a launch, I think what we really want you to do before you do anything else is sit down.
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| Jen Otremba: | Like we’re doing now.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Like we’re doing right now and plan. Before you send a single message, plan. A blank piece of paper. Think like we talked about in the first episode of this series, it’s an editorial calendar, but you’re outlining what it is that you want to message, and what are the different vehicles available to you in order to drive that message. I think we’ve talked before that there are some commonly used things. There are digital content.
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| You might have display screens or a corporate intranet where you can post things. There’s posters, there’s articles, newsletters, maybe you have internal blogs. Maybe there’s email newsletters and announcements that you can take advantage of. I think I mentioned posters. You can think about posters in a different way. You can do stickers on columns, you can do Badge Buddies that go on an access control badge, and then you can start thinking about Swag.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yap. People love swag.
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| Bryan Strawser: | If it’s a big campaign Swag can just be a pretty awesome source.
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| Jen Otremba: | People love that. I think also bringing in speakers that are experts in certain areas can definitely help with a launch or get that communication across. It gets people excited kind of like the Swag. We’ve seen everything from very minor things to a full blown concert to launch or announce something which can be kind of neat too, but it doesn’t always have to be that extensive.
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| Bryan Strawser: | I think an important part of just thinking about this in the planning phase is you want to start this far enough out where you’ve got some time to kind of build, you want to build some buzz about what’s going on. I think Swag is a good way to do that. But thinking about what’s the right tagline or logo, or kind of creative element that helps you push this forward can become an important part of kind building up to that big moment if it’s the kind of campaign that really needs that kind of a build.
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| Jen Otremba: | I like the idea of going through and kind of thinking through all of the absolute possible things you can do whether they’re realistic or not. And then once you have a budget or some kind of other restrictions, time restrictions and things like that, then you can pick through that list of things that you think would be great and fit it in into those other restrictions. First, I usually make the massive, “Here’s all of the possibilities,” and then I fit it into whatever that restraint may be.
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| Bryan Strawser: | I think another avenue to consider, I think we talked about this in episode one. You might have an internal Twitter or Slack, or some variation of that. Yammer is a commonly used internal chat capability. But, there might be something out there that should also be a part of your campaign. That kind of internal social media is a good way to build buzz, because you can use some of the more guerilla marketing tactics that you see happen in your life. Or you can have different people that are advocates for your project throughout the organization, or advocates for your launch that’s coming that can use hashtags and kind of build drops of messaging. It all looks kind of organic, but in reality you’ve planned elements of this out.
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| Jen Otremba: | And it can be very effective too. It gets a lot of people involved.
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| Bryan Strawser: | So, leading up to your launch you start to build that buzz, and you start to have some of these kind of initial communication elements that are going out. You brought up some events. Concerts. No, that’s kind of a big splash, but-
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| Jen Otremba: | It is. I mean, that’s obviously extreme.
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| Bryan Strawser: | You can come up with some events. Maybe you do an open house around the project, or you do a Q&A. Some of this comes down to what is the project that you’re really launching. It’s interesting sometimes to have, “Hey, you’re launching this new application, this new product within your company,” than, “Gosh, everybody else wants to know how this thing got built and what were the elements of it and what did you learn?” Have that launch and learn. Do the brown-bag lunch, whatever the right term is that your company-
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| Jen Otremba: | Teach-outs.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Your teach-outs. Teach-outs were a thing.
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| Jen Otremba: | I think also it’s a good time to take partnerships. We’ve talked about that a lot is to partner with other areas of the company. That may be everything from you may need a communications folks to take a look at your content, to approve your content, depending on your organization and what that looks like. But also you may want council to look at it. There may be some other partnerships you might want to take into consideration as you’re putting together your content.
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| Bryan Strawser: | If what you’re launching is some type of center or facility, there’s really obvious things you can do around having a grand opening event, doing an open house, inviting people for tours. You can do a cookout.
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| Jen Otremba: | People love food.
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| Bryan Strawser: | I was involved in opening an operation center in India. That was one of the projects in my responsibility when I was working for a company. The grand opening was a big deal, not just because culturally. It was very important to the team in India that this be perceived as a big deal, because we were entrusting them with this capability that they hadn’t had. But the project was championed by that. The president for that entity, this was personally important to him, and this whole idea of dedication and the ceremony and a ribbon cutting is just very important. And so playing that grand opening event and ribbon cutting in the hallway, and the unveiling of a plaque that was on the wall about the dedication. Culturally, those were huge deals in India that were very important to the team and to the leaders there, and were a really important part of our planning.
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| Jen Otremba: | An important part of the discussion too is understanding what the culture is at not just the organization, but maybe it’s the internal culture for different organizations. You might have a big company but within that company this team over here works a certain way, and this team over here works a certain way. Just kind of understanding that may play a role in how this is launched as well. An infosec team is going to definitely work differently than a marketing design team.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Totally.
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| Jen Otremba: | Culturally, it’s going to be very different I think. I would also say that when you’re thinking about these launches and your organization is based in more than one country, don’t forget to think about the different methods in which you need to communicate. If you’re doing launch events, how do you schedule them so that your teams can participate, or at a minimum they’re recorded so that they’re able to watch them. It’s really easy to have your global teams feel left out over the important moment in your organization’s history because they’re not there. The same applies for other teams in the same country too, but I think it’s particularly difficult for folks that are based elsewhere.
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| Bryan Strawser: | I agree. Or even hourly employees that may not be able to step away to go to some of the events. I want to think about how you can bring them into the excitement as well. That’s sort of the content and the vehicles. Socializing events. I think that it’s a good idea to have some sort of ahead of time as you’re planning through this. Things like teasers of something big is coming can really help to drive that participation when the event is actually launched. Socializing it not just with other employees and people in your organization and leadership, but kind of getting that out there with emails or calendar invites. Even the teaser posters can be helpful.
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| Jen Otremba: | We talked a little bit about the need to socialize some aspects of this. I think socializing the communications plan is pretty difficult, because depending on how your company works, there’s pretty a lot of folks that had to be involved in that conversation. If you have a communications team then certainly there should be a part of this [inaudible 00:11:24], or likely to have some great ideas if you didn’t think about it in terms of the communications plan overall.
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| But certainly you also want to involve leaders who are going to want to be involved in some aspect of this, and how can you best leverage them? Whether that’s a pull quote that goes into some of your material, a post from them or a blog post from them on your internal kind of social media or websites. And then of course their general buy off in leadership up front, so that they’re a part of the process and buy in to what your overall plan is.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right. Or even having leadership available for the launch itself, so having them introduce it even can often be helpful.
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| Jen Otremba: | Prepare for them to ask you to write their speech for them, but that’s the way it works.
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| Bryan Strawser: | That’s true. Exactly. They’re going to want to know exactly what you want them to say. Usually, they’re more than willing to participate, but they need some bullet points. You’re going to want to give them something.
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| Jen Otremba: | Correct.
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| Bryan Strawser: | And then we come down to the launch itself. So, we’ve done all of this work-
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| Jen Otremba: | Now it’s execution time.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Now it’s execution time. I think one thing to remember for the launch itself is usually things don’t go as planned, or there are some aspects of it that don’t go as planned. There’s the planning for the unplanned I guess which always comes [crosstalk 00:12:48]
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| Jen Otremba: | Prepare for the unexpected.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Or just be prepared so that you can react to things like that. Because you come up with multiple vehicles, so if one vehicle doesn’t work it shouldn’t be as big of a deal, right? You’ve all these other means of pushing this information out. I think additionally I would be prepared for massive amounts of questions. Anytime you launch something new it’s usually going to create a lot of buzz and a lot of questions as to how it’s going to affect me, which is mostly what people care about is the me.
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| Jen Otremba: | I think certainly.
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| Bryan Strawser: | How does this matter to me?
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| Jen Otremba: | I think you’re right. It gives you a whole episode just about change management and the big need that we see to communicate better when we’re talking about driving change in an organization. Maybe that’s part of your launch certainly. If changing something is part of your launch, you’re going to want to make sure that the context for that is explained and the differences are clearly explained, and you get down to the brass tacks at what does this really mean for me?
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| But as you think about that final launch event or communication, really making sure that you’re communicating the context as to why and what is happening. Think about this from the perspective of your most junior employee who has the least amount of strategic context of what’s going on in most cases, because they’re new or not as experienced. But I think really explaining that and making sure that your messaging is clear enough that people from the most senior to the most junior can really understand what you’re putting in front of them for your launch.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Especially if it’s a big, big change.
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| Jen Otremba: | Especially for a big change. Those are some thoughts we had on how to effectively kind of wrap up your communications plan going into the big launch. We hope that your launches are successful.
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