Employees 'should be ambassadors'

The seminar “The New Basics of Advertising” was part of last week’s 11th Adman Awards and Sympo-sium, an annual two-day event to promote high standards in Thai advertising and creative agencies. 

The key issues discussed by marketing and branding gurus covered how to design and plan appropriate marketing communication and branding strategies to cope with changes in the media landscape and customer behaviour. 

Witawat Jayapani, chief executive officer of Creative Juice\\G1 advertising agency, said that in a holistic branding process, a company must make sure its human resources department worked closely with the marketing communications departments, particularly in creating brand ambassadors. “The external marketing communication strategy is crucial, on par with internal communication and training all staff to have a better understanding of the corporate brand’s value,” he said.

Witawat used several examples of how personal behaviour of an employee in a company could have a negative impact on brand. One was a post widely shared on Facebook about a girl in the uniform of a leading Thai bank getting angry at a traffic police officer on the road. This Facebook message become a controversial issue in the online community and had a direct impact on the corporate image of that bank.

“Though the company deleted that post from the site, consumers still remembered the story,” he said.  

Pawoot Pongvitayapanu, president of the E-Commerce Association of Thailand, said a company should prepare a crisis-management system for online conversations. The company should have a system for monitoring and observing conversations and messages generated among online users. “Once a crisis occurs, the monitoring team would be able to manage that risk promptly and minimise losses that could affect the brand,” he said.

This is a very important thing for any company as the number of Internet users continues to grow. 

Satit Jantawiwat, chief creative officer at JWT, a leading advertising agency, said that in the current communication world, content was still king, while story-telling should be attractive and engaging with target audiences.

“If the story touches their hearts, customers will help spread the brand’s message to their peers and community.”