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Chapter 7 Total Quality Communication TQC Planning TQC Planning Planning a Total Quality Communication program is a different process from problem solving as introduced in Chapter 4. In the case of problem solving, you as an organizational manager are reacting to an event in your operational environment that must be addressed by the organization. Events requiring your response could be such things as competitors changing prices or products, government agencies enacting new regulations, new fads taking hold, or some natural disaster that affects you or your audiences. In fact we consider some of these issues in Chapter 11, where we discuss crisis management. TQC planning includes preparation to meet these kinds of response demands. But the primary focus of TQC planning is on identifying and implementing opportunities to communicate to audiences, internal and external, with the intent to affect their behaviors through internalized information. As we learned in Chapter 4, organizational planning can be said to meet two needs for the organization: the adaptive need and the developmental need. The adaptive need is the need for the organization to respond to changes that have occurred in the operational environment. The developmental need is the need for the organization to anticipate change in its environment, to introduce change it can control, to reduce the impact of change it can't control. In the case of the adaptive need, problem solving, as we discussed earlier, is the method applied to achieve a well-thought out response. The developmental need requires a different approach and a different mind set among managers and employees to be effective. Many managers have the feeling that, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." In other words, these managers believe that the organization's operation should continue in motion until something happens to disrupt the process. Then is the appropriate time to make changes. However, the costs to the organization for this type of thinking are potentially huge. Lost customers, litigation, employee dissatisfaction, and public pressures, all become a drain on organizational resources as the organization tries to "fix it, after it broke." A Total Quality Communication program requires increasing expenditures now in an effort to reduce expenditures later. Engineers are already very familiar with this concept as preventive maintenance. Engineers make maintenance repairs on machinery or systems when they can control the process to limit downtime and loss of production. If an engineer waited until the machine broke down to repair it, the costs to production would be enormous. For a Total Quality Communication program to be successful, however, the organization must ensure that all messages, explicit and implicit, contribute to the same basic message or idea. Remember the bottom line of the Theory of Adoption? If the audience perceives changes in the message or contradicting messages, then the adoption process by our audience begins all over again. So, a major question TQC planning must resolve is "How do we ensure all of our messages and actions are consistent?" When a new skyscraper is built, it is kept on course by a rigid infrastructure that ensures the building goes up straight and tall, resists wind and weather, and serves the same function as your skeleton. TQC planning is no different. It, too, must begin with a rigid framework if we are to know where we are going. TQC Planning Framework
The Mission Statement The mission statement is a definition of the reason an organization is in existence and its vision toward its operational environment segments. The mission statement should be concise and precise--specific enough to provide effective guidance to organizational members regarding appropriateness of contemplated organizational behaviors, but loose enough to permit creativity. The problem with the mission statement
as a guide to organizational behavior is that it is crafted as a high
order abstraction making its interpretation by mid- and first-level
employees difficult. The lack of conceptual skills among these employees
limits their abilities to see how their behaviors fit within the mission
statement guidelines. Vignette. It's not too strong to say that "scientific management" schemes contribute, like poorly crafted mission statements, to preventing employees from seeing the "whole picture". In fact Frederick Taylor said, "Brutally speaking, our scheme does not ask any initiative in a man...In the past the many was first...In the future the system will be first." Obviously, this notion also suggests that employees don't need a real grasp of where the company is going. So, neither scientific management nor mission statements contribute to helping lower-level employees understand the "big picture." Tony Jackson (1997), "Know Your Place: Taylor Arguably Both Enriched and Enslaved Humankind," The Financial Times (May 16), p. 14. Departmental Mission Statements This weakness in interpreting the abstract mission statement suggests that some framework of guidelines must be established at each level of the organization relating that functional area to the overall organizational mission. Each succeeding level produces a mission statement based on the functional area applied against the organizational mission. For example, if the firm's mission is to produce "good, safe baby products," then the marketing department's mission might be to "market through pricing, product design, distribution, and promotion the firm's good, safe baby products." The public relations department's mission statement might be to "tell constituencies important to our organization that we make good, safe baby products." Then, a copywriter in the PR department only has to assess today's press release about a new product against the departmental mission statement for consistency. If management has done a good job of creating the mission framework, then the copywriters' work will make its contribution to the firm's mission through the relationships of one mission to another. In your policy capstone course, you'll spend a couple of chapters discussing this type of planning framework for organizations. In the event that your find yourself in an organization that doesn't establish such planning frameworks, then you can still take advantage of the strength of the planning method by creating your own unit structure. Once the organization's mission is pinned down, you, the planner, proceed to identifying the mission of your unit. You can do this even if no other operational unit in the organization uses the proactive planning approach. Once your decision framework is in place, the process of TQC planning can begin. TQC Planning Model
Identify Organizational Mission Most organizations these days have a recognized mission. It may be understood as an operational mission or committed to paper and displayed widely in the organization for all employees (and customers) to see. In the event that the firm only has an operational mission, at this point in the TQC methodology, it's probably a good idea to commit the mission to a formal statement. We might want to call this step 1. Observe Organizational Performance In step 2, the performance, or activities, of the organization are assessed for consistency with the stated mission. Ensuring a match between the mission and the organization's performance is necessary because of the degree to which actions contribute to image creation in an audience, in comparison to words. No matter what we say about ourselves, our observed behaviors will be the primary determinant of our image in the minds of people exposed to our organization. Identify Departmental or Functional Area Mission Every level in the organization should produce a mission statement. Each successive mission is built on the one above. This series of mission statements becomes more specific to the functional area of the unit as it moves downward in the organizational structure. Identify Publics Before we can seek any opportunities, all of the publics or audiences important to the organization must be identified. More importantly, the characteristic of self-interest must be carefully defined for each group. It may be determined that while the community is an important public, there are significant subsets of interests that should be addressed. For example, within the community public (general interest as a community member), are local businesses (one group with supplier interests, one group with customer interests, etc.). Even for moderately sized organizations, this list of publics may be quite large. Devise Audience Message Statements The Audience Message Statement can be thought of as a mission statement for a particular public. It is a statement that "defines the overall image we want to create in the minds of people in that public regardless of how they are exposed to our organization." In other words, no matter how a person is exposed to our organization, no matter what explicit or implicit message they receive, they all reinforce the image defined in the Audience Message Statement. We can use an example of the students in your class. Assume that when the class comes to an end and the students step into the hall they are met by a researcher who asks, What do you think of this university?" The student's response might be, "it's a great place to earn a degree." When the student steps outside to see the flowers, palm trees and cared-for landscape, and is asked the same question, the response might be, "This is a great place to get a degree." When the student calls computer registration, gets right through, selects a class, and enrolls with the punch of a button, the same question is asked by the researcher and the answer is, "It's a great place to get a degree." The idea here is that all of the exposure, explicit and implicit, reinforces the fundamental image we want to create. In other words, the messages are consistent. That consistency is important because we want to guide creation of consistent messages over time.
This statement becomes the fundamental yardstick by which every communication, implicit or explicit, is compared for consistency. Why are these images so important? Remember the idea we introduced in the very first chapter? George Naimark's observation in the 1970s was that technology had reached a point preventing any firm in today's markets from achieving a competitive advantage on technology alone [1]. His reasoning was that competition responds too quickly to innovation. Naimark suggested that the emerging differentiation in the minds of most buyers is the image they hold of the selling firm. The image takes precedence over product or service traits for many customers.
Identify Media Identify all the media that can be used to reach each audience. A list should be made of the media for each audience. When such a list is completed, patterns of media shared in common among various publics can be identified. These patterns of exposure can be assessed to determine if any media reach publics that possess conflicting interest-relationships with the organization. For example, the company newsletter might be identified as a medium that reaches employees and stockholders. We should then be able to see the potential impact of a story placed in the newsletter informing employees of a planned profit sharing program that management is contemplating. You may be able to guess the reaction of stockholders to the story. This kind of identification allows you to anticipate and address such conflicts before they become serious matters of contention. Prepare the Communication When the database of mission statements, audiences, message statements, and media is established, the communication planner can then assess where communication is occurring and can identify where opportunities for communication to constituencies exist. When these opportunities are identified, the specific tactics of communication can begin. In the next section, we'll begin an application of the TQC planning model. TQC Planning--Where to Begin In the last section we introduced the steps for the Total Quality Communication process. The TQC planning method begins with identification and harmonizing the organization's mission with its performance. Remember that because of the dynamics of our audience as a group, any perceived differences between what we say we are and what the audience perceives we are will confuse the adoption process. More importantly, the audience's perception of who we are based on our performance is the primary determinant of its relationship with us. Cantril suggested in his observations of public opinion that actions have greater effect on the opinion process than words. For this reason, we want to ensure that what the organization and its employees are doing is consistent with what we say they are doing, and the central guide to both is the organization's mission. Organization Mission Statement You'll take a policy or strategy course later in your curriculum toward your business degree. In that course, you'll spend considerable time talking about mission statements, what their components should be, and how they should be written. Depending on which textbook is used for that course, the mission statement is defined as comprised of the objectives of the organization plus other components. It can be written at a high order of abstractness such as American Telephone and Telegraph's mission statement that has served them for more than 50 years--"Our business is service." Or, the statement can be written in more specific terms, such as, "Produce fabricated steel shapes and forms for the construction market." Usually, mission statements define the overall goals of the organization, its market, its customers, its philosophy toward technology, employees, and its vision of its own image. For the purposes of this course, we will assume that you and your organizational management have harmonized the mission statement to organizational performance.
Functional Area Mission Statement As introduced earlier, this statement defines the activities of our functional area and is based directly on the organization's mission statement. Depending on how the firm is organized, this statement could be a departmental statement or a functional area statement. For example, if our firm were organized with functional departments such as marketing, accounting, finance, and production, each of these areas would have its own mission statement relating to the organization's mission statement. In turn, each structural unit within the department would have its own mission statement relating to the departmental statement. In an organization organized on non-departmental structures, mission statements can be written based on functions. For example, a vice-president might find himself or herself responsible for communication and human resources for the organization. In this instance, he or she would product functional area mission statements for each of the functions assigned to his or her supervision. Audience Identification The process of identifying audiences for your firm can be a difficult task. One reason is the potential number of audiences or publics your firm might have in the operational environment. In fact, the number can be so large as to be very easy to miss some of the important publics. For this reason, the process of identifying audiences is one that must be taken slowly and in very small, precise steps to ensure that all our bases are covered. The stakes are too great in this age of increased global competition to make a mistake in identifying the publics with whom we should be building relationships. To ensure that we have identified all possible publics, we need some tool to help us organize our thinking about who the publics are and what their relationship with our organization is. One idea that comes from the Policy course that you'll take in the future and from the management course you may have taken already is the idea that the operational environment is comprised of sectors. Most textbooks suggest that the firm's environment comprises six sectors plus one we'll add:
The demographic sector is defined as physical characteristics. These are such things as age, income, family size, education, geographic location, and others. These factors are characteristics that are found to associate with particular behaviors. If you operate a music store that specializes in hard rock music, you can probably define demographic traits for buyers of that type of music as educated, moderate income teenagers and young adults. This suggests that an audience for your products may be defined by these characteristics. The competitive sector comprises your competition for the disposable income of consumers. The mistake students and early practitioners make sometimes regarding competition is to assess the competition in their product category. This can lead to some misinterpretation of opportunities in your market. For example, if you operate the music store, you might assess your competitive environment as other music stores. You may believe your have a market advantage because there is only one other music store in your town. But, when your profits lag far behind your expectations, it's only then you realize that the real competition is not the other music store, but the other stores offering items that the consumer can purchase with the same disposable income. Your competitive environment is not just organizations that supply the same product or service as you do, but any firm that sells a product or service that competes for the same disposable income.
The economic environment comprises those characteristics of the local, national, and international economy that may have an effect on our organization. Things that may fall into this category included current direction of the local or national economy, employment rates, and central bank controlled monetary policies. For example, is money getting easier or harder to borrow for business purposes or to make major purchases? What does employment look like? going up? going down? The technological environmental sector covers two areas of concern: technology of production and technology of product use. In other words, your assessment of the technology sector must be for changes occurring in how you produce your products or services and the technology of the product or service itself.
The political environment includes assessment of the political factors that affect business in the markets you want to serve. These concerns can include restrictions on products or services, restrictions on import/export activity, restrictions on repatriation of profits, expropriation of firms, and, in general, stability of the government. The cultural environment includes factors of local or national cultures that affect business. These concerns could include religion-based characteristics such as holidays, celebrations, restrictions on products or services. They could include matters of taste and preference for products or services.
The last of the environmental sectors, psychographics, is not usually included in discussions of environmental assessment except as it relates to marketing. This is too limiting a view. We define psychographics as differentiating the audience based on patterns by which people live and spend time and money. These patterns represent lifestyle categories. We could find that we have an audience based on attitudinal preferences or opinions rather than on physical demographic characteristics.
For example, in your hypothetical music store, you would make the assumption that customers for your hard rock music are young, educated, and middle income. What you might find out in researching the psychographics of the population is that customers could include people who come from different demographic groupings, but who have a common lifestyle trait. In other words, no matter what their ages, you might find your customers are more closely related by their common lifestyle desires for happiness, fun, and companionship (and common definitions of what those terms mean!) than they are by age.
Putting it together Now we have all the tools we need to begin putting together a complete identification of our audiences for Total Quality Communication for our organization. In addition, to the environmental sectors we just introduced, remember from an earlier discussion how we identified the operational environmental components under general systems theory? Well, we can bring all these ideas to the table to help us begin building or audience base. To use these tools, we might want to construct a planning worksheet. It probably looks something like that shown in Table 7.2--TQC Planning Worksheet 1.
On the left axis of the chart, we have our audience environmental component. Across the top of the chart, we have the environmental sectors. The cells of the chart are places where we can identify audiences or publics based on the two traits represented by the chart's axes. For example, one audience we can think of that fits in the internal environmental component is employees. Where do employees fit in the typology of the environmental sectors? They could be characterized by demographics or psychographics or cultural. What about customers? They are a direct component and can be associated by demographics, psychographics, or cultural sectors. What about the country's central bank? It's an indirect component that falls into the political and economic sectors. You may be getting the idea. This step in the TQC planning process is a brainstorming exercise. We want to identify any group by a common interest and find where they fit in the chart. Our reason for doing this is relatively simple. It helps us:
TQC Planning--Messages and Media The last section focused on identifying as many audiences important to your organization as possible. The characterization of these audiences was made on the basis of the relationship or interest that each audience has with our organization. By the time you complete this exercise for even moderately sized organizations, the list of audiences and potential audiences can be long. General Motors maintains about 150 public relations and advertising people in each of its regional offices because the number of audiences and potential audiences they must deal with as a very large company are almost endless. Anyway, now you have a list of audiences and an indication of their interest relationship with your organization. This array can provide you with guidance abut the type of information about each audience you must acquire. Many of the identified audiences can be research by secondary sources, such as the economic and political sector audiences. Some of the audiences may require primary data collection to determine current attitudes and opinions about the organization, its products, or its services. When you have collected data on your audiences from appropriate sources, you are then ready to begin the next step in the process. As a tool to help us organize our thinking here, we can create another work chart, shown in Figure 7.3-TQC Worksheet 2.
This chart will have a place for our audience name in the first column. The second column contains a descriptor of the interest factor the audience has with the organization. The third column is a place for us to write the message statement for the audience. The last column is for us to use a little later. It will contain the list of all media that may be possible conduits to that audience. Message Statement Column one and two are transferred information from our first worksheet. Column three is new information. Remember what a message statement is? It's a precise statement based on the mission statement of the overall image you want to create in the minds of a specific audience no matter how they are exposed to your organization. This message statement is the guide for any message we intend to send to our audience or that they will infer from activities exposing them to our organization. In this step, then, we want to write a statement that will serve as a guide to all messages we send to a specific audience. The message statement is written to encompass the interest that audience has with our organization and the organization's mission statement. Don't allow yourself to be misled. The message statement is the overall image we want to create, it is not specific message strategies, as we'll talk about in a few sessions. Let's take an example to try to clarify this point. You work for a bank. You have the bank's mission statement; "This bank's goal is to supply commercial and residential customers with the highest level of service at reasonable costs as a contribution to the economic welfare of the city, state and nation." In real life the mission statement is likely to be more complicated than this, but this serves for our illustration. Among all your audiences, you identified commercial loan customers as one important audience. You defined this audience's interest with your organization as, "it wants readily available commercial loans at reasonable costs for short-term or long-term commitment." You then gathered information about the size of this audience, what constitutes commercial loans, what competitive services are, and much more. You are now ready to write the message statement. In this case the statement might be, "This bank is a good place to secure commercial loans because we are committed to making loans available to local and national companies that contribute to local and national economic development." The mistake many rookie planners would make at this point is to define the message statement on the basis of the current situation. For example, some may define the message statement as, "We offer 11% commercial loans to area businesses." Notice that this message statement is in keeping with the organizational mission. The problem with it is that interests rates vary. So, in a few days or weeks, we would have to change the message statement to reflect the change in interest rate. What happens to the image we're trying to create in the minds of our audience members? Remember the Theory of Adoption? We have to start all over again trying to achieve adoption among or audience members. For the message statement we wrote for this audience, the interest rates can change up or down. As long as the messages we imply to this audience reflect that the loans are available at the lowest cost possible, our message is consistent with the image we want to create. Any message--advertising, public relations, direct mail, e-mail, WEB page, telephone, personal contact-- then is written as a reinforcement to the individual audience message statement. Our task is to write message statements for each of our audiences based on that audience's relationship with our organization. One thing you may notice when you try this exercise is the seeming redundancy of the effort. In other words, most of the message statements are similar since they are all based on our mission statement. That's as it should be. Nothing in business is accomplished in great leaps, Most business is successful by taking little bitty steps. When you try to make great leaps, that's when little details are overlooked that can cause serious damage to an organization's effectiveness. In order to be effective for our organizations, we want to ensure that all the details are covered. The potential cost to the organization for one of these overlooked details is horrendous. Media In this section we focus on different types of media to communicate to our audiences. Because of the bombardment of communications messages each person receives every day from a huge number of sources, we must find more effective and efficient media to attract our audiences' attention, retain it, and to deliver our messages. We can only scratch the surface in describing the types of media that are available to reach any given audience. Make out an audience message-statement worksheet and spend 10-15 minutes considering what media are available to reach each of the audiences you identified for your university. See how many different media you can identify for a couple of different audiences. What you may discover as a result of this brainstorming session is that some of the strangest ideas, or those which initially seem silly, may be potentially the most creative and distinctive tools to reach a specific audience. Another thing you may notice as you identified media for each audience is that you begin to see some media showing up on more than one of the audience lists. For example, you may have listed the local newspaper for students, faculty, employees, community, local businesses, legislators, and government officials. What's important here is to realize that many audiences are exposed to your organization though the same medium. Each of those audiences has a different interest relationship with your organization. Some of the interests may be complementary, while others will be contradictory. What you're looking for is a situation when a message targeted at the interest of one audience will be seen by another audience with a conflicting interest. This allows you to plan your message distribution to reduce this type of audience conflict. As an example, say you are trying to increase enrollment at your university so you place an advertisement in the local paper that announces Sunday classes, 24-hour student advising, and reduced assignment loads for classes. Wow, students see this ad and think that your university is a great place to go to school. On the other hand, the faculty will see this advertisement and threaten to leave en masse. You now have a tremendous problem with the faculty that you must try to overcome. If you had paid attention to the audience/media identifier work chart, you would have realized the potential conflict and could have initiated communication to reduce the effect of the message. This might mean recasting the message in the ad, communicating to the faculty before the ad appears, or a combination of both. The last element of information this chart implies you should acquire is the perceptions of the audiences concerning the credibility of various media as sources of information about your organization. What do members of the audience think about the medium as a source of information, how effective and efficient is it in reaching the audience, and what are the parameters of its use such as cost, lead time, limitations and the like? Some of this information is available as secondary data, and you may have to acquire other information through primary research. Preparing the Plan. Now you have all the parts to your database you'll need to begin to assembling your TQC plan. You know what you want to say, to whom you want to say it, and the tools you have to say it. Probably the first step you want to take in this phase of preparing your plan is to look at what the organization currently does to communicate to each of the audiences. You can combine this record of what the organization does with the information you generated about audience attitudes and opinions about the firm or its products. This can help you begin to identify the goals and objectives you can set for each of the audiences. In the university example, if you find a 35% approval rate among current students and a 75% approval rate among potential students, then you can assume that something is going wrong to change the expectations of the students after they enter the university. Your research on samples of each type of audience allows you to statistically compare expectations to determine which are significant in determining audience opinion about the university. This can give you direction on recommendations to make for changes in policy, process, or product that you can then communicate to the audience. Measuring the audience's opinions after your project is completed allows you to compare to the pre-program data. If these are statistically significant to the positive, and you have selected your sample representatively, you can make the inference that your program has had the desired effect. When you know what you want to accomplish for each of your audiences in quantifiable terms (such as improving student opinions of the quality of degree programs by 15%), then you can begin to fill in another work chart to help you organize your total quality communication program. Before filling in a program work chart with communication activities, you will want to establish two delimiters: When you propose the program should start, and when you will recommend that an impact evaluation can be made. The time between these two can be a month, a year, or several years, whatever you recommend as the appropriate length of time to accomplish what you set out to do. If we predict a six-month program and include six audiences, our work chart may look something like Table 7.4.
Why don't you take the university audience information we have developed to this point to see if you can come up with a similar chart based on your knowledge of communication to your university's audiences. Just think about the exercise. There is no need at this time for you to do extensive research to establish characteristics of the audience. Just use your knowledge base to do the chart, just to get the feel of it. When this chart is completed, we are ready to begin the process of creating the planning document for presentation to those who must make a decision to adopt our recommendations, or to those who must implement our proposals. In the next chapter, we'll turn our attention to how we convey our plan to others in the organization. References Ê[1] Naimark, George (1976). XxxxxxxXxxxxxxxx. Industrial Marketing. Practice Exam When you have completed reading this chapter, you may elect to take a practice exam on-line. You may take the practice exam as many times as you wish. Each time, the test will be compared to the answer key. You then have the option to review the results or not. You may wish to try the exam again before seeing the results of the comparison. ©1997 2000 David L. Sturges and Michael Minor These pages were created on November 1, 1999, and last modified on August 29, 2001, on a PowerBook G3-266 using Dreamweaver 3.0. Questions or comments should be directed to the WebJŽfe. |
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