Accreditation Portfolio Statement of Objectives, Sample #2
Lockwood Greene Corporate Overview
Michael Deas
February – October 2000
Audio-visual programs, external
The purpose of submitting this entry for qualification as a candidate for accreditation is to demonstrate my skills in multimedia communication for external audiences as well as my ability to suit communications solutions to business and management issues. To this day, this project represents the most comprehensive communication piece, in terms of solutions provided, that our department has ever produced.
Describing the organization and Communication Function
Lockwood Greene is a global industrial engineering and construction company based in Spartanburg, South Carolina/USA. Tracing its roots to 1832, it is the oldest American professional services firm in continuous operation. In those 172 years, the company has become renowned for its design of factories and production facilities for nearly every industry. Serving process, manufacturing, power, and institutional markets with 2,500 employees in 30 offices on four continents, Lockwood Greene has a broad and diverse employee and customer base.
Lockwood Greene’s communication function, both internal and external, is consolidated under the Corporate Marketing group, which consists of eight people. Corporate Marketing, as all corporate functions, is centralized at the company’s Spartanburg headquarters. As Manager of Corporate Communications (the sole employee dedicated to the communication function), I report directly to the VP of Corporate Development, who oversees the department and reports to the CEO. I am responsible for making sure the business of Lockwood Greene is clearly conveyed to both customers and employees, regardless of medium. As such, my role sets the tone, style and story of our corporate messages; the writing effort for each medium (newsletters, brochures, CDs, Internet, intranet, news releases, CEO memos, etc.) is often distributed among several colleagues. I retain sole content ownership of the Marketing Library, our online sales support literature resource.
Besides writing, the other half of my role consists of maintaining relationships, forming teams and encouraging the collaboration efforts of colleagues in other corporate departments, each of our industry organizations, and each of our thirty business units to ensure that communication initiatives are successfully implemented. I also am the communication liaison with our sister firms as well as our parent firm. Both my writing and my project management skills were never so keenly tested as with the production of the Corporate Overview CD.
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Identifying the opportunity and the challenge
With a well-established history of how Lockwood Greene goes to market, the company’s sales force was accustomed to a paper-only process of communicating the message of who we are and what we do. Like most companies in our industry, ours had produced several editions of a color, multi-page corporate overview brochure over the past few decades. This was the “flagship” presentation item, the sine qua non of customer contact, that we were due to reprint in 2000. A major structural change in the organization had just taken place in December of 1999, giving us new ownership, a new CEO, a new logo and an opportunity to present our services in a new light to our industrial customers. These new changes, however, signaled that more change likely lay in our future, and we needed to be flexible in our presentation and approach to customers. The concept of the standard brochure fit square-peggishly in the sometimes round, sometimes amorphous shape of the marketing hole we were trying to fill. Cost considerations were also driving the need to find a less expensive way to appeal to vastly different customers with a consistent corporate message, without stocking multiple versions of paper brochures that sat on shelves until the passage of a few months made them obsolete.
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Developing the solution
My boss, a forward-thinking individual, had been a proponent of electronic communication since I joined the firm in 1996. Under his leadership, I was given the opportunity to developing the company’s first electronic marketing library (all PDF-based, back when Adobe Acrobat® was nascent technology), its first image library (abolishing slide trays), its first web site and its first intranet. As we entered the 21st century, the time seemed ripe for moving our flagship marketing collateral from paper to multimedia, but change for chang’s sake was not a solid business case. I proposed that the corporate overview CD project accomplish the following objectives:
- Update the company image to position Lockwood Greene as a world-class competitor in a business already accustomed to electronic product delivery.
- Shift the customer’s communication engagement from passive and generic to active and personal.
- Change the company culture for sharing and delivering marketing information
- Produce marketing collateral more cost-effectively.
- Get the message of the “new“ Lockwood Greene in front of customers in the most effective way.
- Improve efficiency in delivering customizable sales tools throughout the company.
The project had been a dream of mine to undertake, and, as the saying goes, he who has the burden gets the job. As such, my boss gave me wide latitude to plan, develop, and implement all the project components, which are summarized below:
- Unlike previous overviews, Lockwood Greene’s 2000 Corporate Overview combines a customizable folder, a brief brochure and an interactive CD in one piece. This permits greater flexibility in presenting Lockwood Greene to clients.
- The CD component of the overview brings together the broadest scope of
information about Lockwood Greene ever assembled in one place. With over 488
megabytes of photos, videos and text, the CD is designed to be engaging,
impactful, and easy to use. Some features include the following:
- Seven videos combining music, image and voiceover, describing the company history, its services, its markets and Outcomes by Design®, its service branding strategy
- Approximately 130 projects in 13 industries, most with full-screen photography and several with QuickTime® Virtual Reality views or panoramic tours
- Interactive global and regional office location maps, with full contact information and hyperlinks to web pages on Lockwood Greene offices
- In-depth, printable descriptions of services and project delivery methods
- The Corporate Overview is designed to be both a more effective as well as a more efficient vehicle for communicating the company message. It increases our effectiveness by more fully engaging the recipients in the delivery of knowledge about Lockwood Greene, allowing them to select the information they want to see.
- It also increases our efficiency in a number of ways:
- The unit cost of each CD, jacket and folder runs approximately half the cost of a comparable quantity of 16-page color brochures.
- Since the CD contains the entire Lockwood Greene story, there is no longer any need to print the general company description for the front end of a qualification book, saving the cost of thousands of color-printed pages each year.
- With this as a basis product, several spin-off products for individual industries, business units and even departments (such as HR personnel training) can be developed at a lower cost than would have otherwise been possible.
In setting the budget, we put all our financial eggs in this one basket. Though our collateral printing expenditures normally ran US$200,000 annually, this year the budget was cut in half; we dedicated the entire remaining budget of US$100,000 to produce this one product. Concerning schedule, we naively assumed that with the right agency, we could complete this project in two months. As implementation will later bear out, we were grossly in error in both categories, but happily in the right directions: We budgeted too much money and too little time. Since no one was expecting this product for a particular event, we could better afford the overage in time.
Although we had the image and graphic design resources in-house and had produced both training and client videos before we did not possess the video and multimedia programming capabilities needed to complete a project of this sophistication. Therefore, my first step, after writing the proposal and selling the CEO on the concept, was to identify the right agency for the work. A timely phone call from H. Wray Media of Columbia produced exactly the kind of talent we needed and the right relationships for a project of this nature. Early identification of the right outsource proved to be crucial to success, not only in implementing the project but also in selling it internally—a challenge I had underestimated.
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Selling the plan to the company
Interviews with upper management, internal stakeholders, and focus group customers began 7 February 2000. Conclusions confirmed that customers in our marketplace—decision makers for capital investment in industrial companies—were more ready for CD-ROM-based multimedia than our own salespeople were. Thus, a significant amount of effort went into communicating the purpose and value of the new medium to internal audiences.
Representatives from H. Wray Media helped develop content flowcharts to describe the new CD and PowerPoint presentations used to explain the rationale as well as depict the imagery. I showed these presentations to several upper level managers whose cooperation I would need for obtaining content, scheduling video sessions, and promoting usage of the final product. Despite the best diagrams, it was hard for people to conceive of something with which they had had little or no experience. The hardest sell was to the salespeople themselves; they had difficulty believing that a four-page brochure could effectively summarize the corporate story and that clients would actually insert a CD to learn more. We accommodated some of their concerns by providing an extra pocket in the folder for adding paper collateral from the Marketing Library. Still, this resistance to the overall concept, plus the geographic dispersion of the sales force, made obtaining industry information for the CD very difficult. The means by which I overcame this obstacle—involving just a touch of subterfuge—is described below.
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Implementing the plan
Development and production of the project began in earnest on 1 April. To my lot fell the writing of every word in the project: from the text on each screen to the voiceovers, video scripts, even the fine print on the CD label. Since the greater portion of the CD comprised information about our focus industries—services we provide, projects we have completed, etc.—my greatest challenge was getting updated content from the operations sales personnel representing each industry. This amounted to collecting literally hundreds of pages of data from people who not only did not understand the purpose of the request, but also were unsympathetic to it. In the end, I related the need to technology they did understand—the Marketing Library—and told them I needed updates on the following pages to make the Library current. This was in fact true, although updating the Marketing Library was a continual process not connected with the CD effort. Since the content was the same, it was much easier for me to relate the information gathering effort to a process they understood.
This accommodation required me to print every page about every industry in the Library and send it to each representative for manual markup. I then electronically repurposed this revised content for CD screens (essentially editing for on-screen consistency while retyping). Although an incredibly laborious task, in the middle of which I nearly despaired of ever completing the CD, it was the only way to connect content to medium. This process alone stretched production time an additional two months. Many a late night I began to wonder whether the self-deprecating humor about our company were true: “seventeen decades of tradition unmarred by progress.“ In managing the workflow and the relationships between outsource and staff, I found it important to let people do what they do best, even if they want to do more. My in-house graphic designer had a better concept of how to tie together the design of the CD screens, the CD cover and the folder with our current corporate standards, while still establishing a fresh look, so I let him govern the CD look and feel, superseding the designs produced by the outside company. H. Wray Media, however, was expert at programming effects, navigation and videography; in those areas I kept Lockwood Greene out of the way and let them tell us how it should be done. We did video shooting at three locations—New Jersey, South Carolina, and Texas—for various scenes in the CD. Although I directed one shoot, attended another, and simply assigned the third for H. Wray to conduct on their own, I was merely the approver on the cutting room floor; with years of experience in television commercial production, H. Wray knew best how to sequence, segue and wrap scenes for the best effect.
This project introduced several new skills to my communication experience: how to coach voiceover talent for the audio portions of the CD; how to coordinate print and multimedia component production; and most importantly, how to negotiate between the ideas from the outsource and the opinions of our company management. I was in Columbia at least once every three to four weeks, advising on navigation, editing text on screen or approving completed modules. As beta versions became available for executive review, the negotiations became more delicate, because the time-money funnel narrowed toward a third-quarter release date. Over the six months of production time, the company logo changed once again, testing our ability to make a last-minute pervasive change. The final product—CD, jacket and folder and 5,000 copies—shipped on 3 October 2000. The total cost for all components, including development: US$60,000.
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Evaluating the plan
Copies of the CDs went first to upper management leaders, then to industry sales directors, then to regional managers, then to each of our business unit managers. The CEO was so pleased with the result that he ordered an additional 3,500 copies, one for each employee in the company. In his words, the project was “the best education we can give employees about our company.” This unplanned outcome was a pleasant surprise, given that the internal audience was the harder one to sell. Two further internal changes in the company resulted from this distribution: HR adopted the CD as a standard part of the new employee welcome packet; and IT upgraded the remaining 60 percent of the company’s PCs to include QuickTime® software, an audio card, and speakers—since these were all necessary for employees to be able to experience the CD!
We reached all of our targeted objectives:
With every objective met, the product has met with overwhelming acceptance among clients (our target audience), as evidenced by two reorders of 5,000 CDs based on a consumption rate of 7,500 pieces in three months. To meet demand, we have since created two industry-specific derivative CDs. The product became the marketing communication standard for our sister companies worldwide.
In 2001, this project won an Award of Excellence in IABC South Carolina's Palmetto Awards; in the same year, the project won broader recognition with an Award of Excellence in IABC District 2’s Silver Quill Awards.
In my own evaluation, I believe the objectives were accurate and sufficiently achieved; however, we did not build sufficient flexibility into the product to make it updateable without significant expense; a complete revision is now due and the development costs are estimated at a minimum of $15,000, not counting printing.
Still, in the marketplace of multimedia, this project represents one of the best products I have seen from any firm of our type, and given the reduced cost resulting from excellent cooperation between outsourced and in-house talent, it also represents an incredible bargain. For me personally, this project represents an entire education in communication management; it vividly demonstrated that an external communication effort of any magnitude is integrally dependent on internal and outsourced communication; all oars must pull together for a coherent message to get out of harbor.
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Other Information
The work sample consists of the folder and CD accompanying this statement of objectives and results. The CD requires a PC with a sound card, speakers and QuickTime® 4.0 installed. Users lacking the software can install it from the CD simply by following the directions once the CD is inserted and started. On some systems, users are required to exit the CD and restart after installation completes.
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