of money) and furthermore this fact is
magnified if all this effort and expenditure
are then not even believed by the target
audience. So marketers might want to
spend more time differentiating by first
building substantive trust with the target
audience.
Building trust can be visualised as a
staircase with each stair representing
a stage in the process of building that
trust. There is a second model that could
also be explored where we would mirror
the stages in ‘courtship’ but perhaps we
will leave that for another day! (The
staircase process would be part of the
normal marketing activities undertaken by
construction marketers in the whole areas
of communications).
The stages would include: Making Initial
Contact – how professional personal
and ‘honest’ is our approach? Building
Credibility – how do we demonstrate that
we are truly different and will ‘deliver as
promised’? Demonstrating Interest and
Knowledge – just being good at what we
do is not enough – the client expects that
– we have to demonstrate that we are really
interested in helping them to achieve their
objectives.
You will need to add value – we can only
really build trust if the client believes we
do more than just ‘turn up and do the job’ -
where is the true and worthwhile benefits
in working with us? And walk the journey
of creating confidence – this is particularly
important if the target market believes
that we will NOT deliver what we promise
In all client research we have undertaken or
been involved with, the word ‘trust’ has become
the carrion call. Complaints about construction
firms making promises that seem believable but
subsequently were not delivered are common-
place. Therefore the construction marketer has
to overcome the problem of not being believed
when trying to differentiate!
– we have to give them demonstrable signs
that we ARE different.
The key to building trust is to demonstrate
that you are different rather than simply
telling the clients. This is not to say that we
should not use the normal communication
channels but more the way we use them
should be ‘different’.
All the research highlights that our
behaviours are going to be far more effective
than simply words – people judge us by what
we do more than what we say – how often
have we all heard the phrase “talk is cheap”.
Let’s look at some examples of the mixed
messages that are sometimes sent out. Every
client we work with has somewhere a plaque
or phrase like ‘the client is king’ or ‘we put
the client first”. This great mantra is often
denigrated by their actions and behaviours.
Here-under are two examples to further
illustrate tis:
Look at where client parking is situated at
your offices? Frequently the ‘best’ parking
spots, those nearest the reception area,
are reserved for Partners/Directors.
Where there are reserved visitor parking
spots they are often populated by late
arriving staff who cannot find a parking
place in the main car park.
These behaviours do not demonstrate
that the ‘client is king’ rather the
opposite it actually says “we just like the
other guys – talk is cheap”.
How are prospective clients treated
at seminars and similar events? Often
the very people who we are trying to
get onto the bottom rung of our ‘trust
staircase’ come to events that we run feel
very negative on departure. Often there
are not enough people from the firm
‘hosting’ at the event.
Therefore the firm’s participants are
often ‘cornered’ by existing client who
want to talk about existing or past work
with the consequence that the potential
clients are basically ignored. Their initial
contact (impressions) is that you are not
really interested in them – not a great
way to start ‘differentiating’ ourselves.
There is good news! If we truly want to
differentiate its basically free – all we
need to do is to change our behaviours to
demonstrate to clients and prospective
clients that we are different and truly
care.
The bad news is that changing
behaviours is not as easy as it sounds
and is almost always driven from the
top of the organization downwards. As
Ed Nixon (then Chairman of IBM UK)
said – “water never runs up a pyramid”.
Getting Partners, or Directors, and
senior managers to change the way they
operate is often difficult and frustrating