Defining the route to market

It was an ambiguous lesson without fixed context, given credence only by the fact that both the ‘lecturer’ and myself worked for the security service – in other words, MI5. The context I only discovered at a later juncture and, by then, he’d already made his decision.

Now, a lifetime later, the business of intelligence has – for me at least – become the business of communications. From gathering information and keeping it secret through to distilling information and making it public.

On the surface, there are few obvious similarities between these two very different worlds. After all, the task of the security service involves shining discreet torches into dark places at the edge of reason and learning enough about the dragons that lurk there to keep them safely hidden under bushels. There is, however, one enormous similarity between the two. Let me explain.

Once upon a time it used to be that people needed products to survive. Nowadays, products need people to survive. In a business context – and in a market economy – companies including those in the security sector need customers to survive.

In a cluttered marketplace, whether the product is baked beans, security screens or CCTV, every product needs a buyer. We’re always working to invent a better widget. What makes us successful (or not) is the glue that binds product to customer. That glue is marketing. The diffuse process by which we attract enquiries and eventually convert those enquiries into sales.

Within that conversion process the central element in any successful marketing strategy is information. We need to provide potential customers with the essential information to buy our product or service rather than someone else’s. So far, so self-evident.

Yet that’s precisely the central element that a great many security companies – both on the systems and manned security side of the supply chain – fail to recognise in devising marketing or promotional campaigns. The information that clients need to make the buying decision is blurred by fancy brochures and corporate techno-babble.

Marketing is about so much more than a glossy brochure or a scatter-gun mailing.

It’s certainly concerned with far more than spending oodles of cash on fancy corporate identities. It’s about recognising information as a valuable commodity and using that information to manage peoples’ imagination.

Sounds silly? Well, maybe. Essentially, though, we buy something because we’re pretty sure it’ll work. We may know that the product has been around for a while, and therefore it must be reliable. We may know

that the firm producing that product or offering the service is also reliable and can therefore be trusted. Price, quality and delivery are all important factors, but without that innate sense of trust we don’t buy.

In the business of trust, larger firms have the advantage. Particularly those who’ve grown to their current size by being good at what they do. They spend equally large sums of money on promotion and PR in buying client trust.

Certain security companies behave more like MI5 than MFI, though. They keep their marketing heads below the parapet in the (wrongly held) belief that the alternative is too pricey. Fact is, if you have a good story to tell there’s always someone willing to listen.

Charlie Laidlaw, Consultant, David Gray Public Relations