Danielle Regan is head of marketing and communications for Mace, the international consultancy and construction company best known for its iconic projects: the Shard, the cable car across the Thames, and for being a delivery partner for London 2012.
She is speaking at the B2B Summit on 22 June on the topic of getting buy-in to marketing campaigns from a sceptical board. Will Green sat down with her ahead of her talk to discuss her work at Mace, the exciting campaigns she’s been a part of and what she’s learned about winning over the people at the top.
Q: Your talk at the Summit is titled ‘How to sell an idea for a large global campaign to a sceptical board’. Have you had lots of experience doing this?
A: 2015 was Mace’s 25th anniversary, so we decided to use it as an opportunity to build advocacy both internally and externally. I went to the board with a business case and asked them to invest in the campaign. For me, it was all about going back to our core values, looking at why Mace was set up all those years ago. The big idea at the heart of the campaign was ‘twenty five years of a better way, a more adventurous way’, which really was why the founders set up the business in 1990.
When I first took this idea to the board, the response was quite mixed. Some people realised straight away this was a great way to engage our key audiences and also celebrate a milestone and thank everyone who has helped us reach this point in our life as a company. But some people were less sure because they didn’t see what value we’d get back from it.
Q: How did you go about overcoming the value issue?
A: In two ways, one looking back at previous success and one looking forwards. The first step was demonstrating the impact the 20th anniversary campaign had. There was a lot of long-lasting goodwill that came from what we did during that campaign and I quoted client feedback to the board that we still get to this day about how engaged they were with the concept.
The next step was tying the 25th anniversary campaign to overall business strategy, looking at how these celebrations could help us meet our 2020 business objectives. So rather than seeing it as a standalone campaign, it was about how we could use it as a vehicle for getting employees engaged with the company’s commercial objectives.
Q: So, for Mace employee engagement is as important as engaging customers?
A: Our employees are a key audience for us, because they’re our brand ambassadors. We have 5000 people talking to clients, delivering for clients on a daily basis and the more engaged our employees are, the more engaged our clients are. Our employees are our route to market. If the people we recruit are sent straight out onto a project site or into a client’s offices, they’ll they be seconded into that client’s environment. If we’ve not educated them to answer the question ‘why Mace?’ they’re not going to be able to talk about why who we are, why we’re different, what we do. So we often find, for instance, if someone has hired Mace for a project management job in the public sector in Manchester, that’s what they think we are. They don’t necessarily know we offer construction services, cost-consultancy services. It’s important for everyone in the organisation to be able to talk authoritatively about our company and all our offers so we can maximise the value of our clients.
What was great about the 25th anniversary campaign is that we did an employee survey at the end of the year which showed engagement had increased by nine per cent. That spoke volumes about the impact the campaign had internally.
Q: What did the 25th anniversary campaign look like? What were the main successes?
A: We built a year-long multichannel campaign, with online, offline and experiential activities. We launched the campaign with a global event in which all our global offices took part: a Mace global Lego competition. We had over 400 entries into the competition, it was very competitive and everybody wanted to win. But interestingly, nobody asked what the prize was. It was a night out for your team – but no one cared, they just wanted to win for the pride of doing so. Right from the off, everyone got involved and was really engaged.
Then throughout the year we had various events for clients, including a big client reception in June where we broke a Guinness World Record for the most aerial acrobats performing on silks, which was a great talking point at the celebration. We really felt it was a living example of our core values, our adventurous spirit. It was something that had never been done before, it was really energetic and dynamic. And it was all about looking up, like our buildings reaching up to the skyline. It was all about looking at things from another perspective, which is what we often encourage our employees and clients to do. Challenge the norm, the status quo is over-rated. It was a bit of fun, but it was also quite symbolic.
We also had communications events across the globe for our employees, we created video content, we produced a book, we built a living, breathing virtual online world called Mace World which was a collection of our most iconic projects over the last 25 years, along with lots more thought-leadership content promoted across our channels.
Q: Outside of that campaign, what do you think the main challenge is for marketers taking ideas to the board?
A: The major pain point for marketers pitching to a board is all about how we demonstrate and prove value. Some members of the board, and quite understandably, believe that investing in doing a good job for the client is how we get repeat order business – so it’s easier to get investment for training and staff development. Board members don’t always see the link between marketing and communications investment and generating business. So for us, it’s all about trying to prove that link.
It can be difficult in a professional services B2B industry, because we are dealing with low-volume, but very high value projects. You can’t send out an email campaign and win a building contract on the back of it. It’s a complicated buyers’ journey, so my challenge is to show the buyers journey and how all marketing efforts at all the different touchpoints incrementally played their role in achieving an outcome. That’s quite a difficult conversation to have unless you have the metrics to back it up. But we’re getting there: the more data we can generate, the more we’re able to have that conversation based on fact.
Q: In terms of marketing and communications, what do you see as the greatest challenge you’re facing at the moment?
A: One of the biggest challenges I’m facing is differentiation. The market is so competitive now; it’s harder to tell the difference between the key players. It’s difficult for clients to know where they are getting value. In a world where a lot of people are offering a solution or service that looks the same, buyers will just go for the cheapest. At Mace, we’re unlikely to be the cheapest, so we have to ensure we can communicate the reasons we’re the best. Our job as marketers is enabling our stakeholders to understand us, remember us, do business with us and recommend us.
The approach we’re taking to addressing our differentiation issue has started with a detailed research piece. We started by interviewing the board, to find out what their aspirations are for Mace now, and in the future. We then interviewed and workshopped about 70 of our employees to find out what it’s like to work at Mace and what they thought Mace should be famous for. And then finally we conducted 120 external stakeholder interviews to find out what it’s like working with Mace and what they think our strengths and weaknesses are.
We need to be authentic and it’s only by knowing what our stakeholders really think of us that we can develop and hone the perception of Mace in the marketplace.