APAC media communication plan and policy
Request to Schaeffler China to lead work package. With the exception of Schaeffler China, the rest of the Schaeffler companies in the Asia Pacific region were still in an early developmental phase with regards to leveraging media activities for branding and product promotions. I therefore decided to leverage Schaeffler China’s competencies as a benchmark to inspire and develop the media capabilities of the other companies in the region. In fact I recommended Schaeffler China to lead the work package to develop guidelines for media activities for the Asia Pacific region. As an outcome of our planning efforts, we managed to achieve the following outcomes.
Hiring of APAC press monitoring services. I pushed for the hiring of press monitoring agencies to better understand the news being circulated about the industry, related government policies, our competitors and about ourselves. This generated weekly electronic press reports which I circulated to the management and senior managers. This not only kept them not only updated but also created an awareness on the potentials of positive, independent, credible publicity.
List of APAC spokespersons defined and trained. We identified a set of press spokespersons in each market and ensured that they were offered proper media training. We also made sure that they clearly understood the company’s corporate key messages for their respective areas specialisations for interviews and press conferences. For example, the finance or HR vice presidents or directors need to know the kind of facts and figures that could be shared and what can never be shared, basically the rules of engagement. We also produced standard media FAQs for our spokespersons so that they are prepped for the job, especially useful for ambush interviews.
Development of a APAC media strategy. We worked on a media strategy for the APAC region using China as a benchmark. We ran messaging workshops with our communication team members as well as senior management colleagues to develop key messages.
APAC guidelines for press activities
A process to ensure quality media interviews for positive press publicly was prepared and piloted with Schaeffler China. Schaeffler China had the most matured press relations and press activities experience in the APAC region and therefore was the perfect candidate to pilot these new press processes and standards. In total, three processes were prepared, piloted and implemented in China as well as in other key APAC markets such as India and Korea:
- Working Procedure for Press Release
- Working Procedure for Media Interviews
- Working Procedure for Press Conferences
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APAC Guidelines for Advertisements
I tasked Schaeffler India to lead the work package on advertisements. The team came back with a comprehensive analysis of all the various newspaper and magazine channels by country, industries, sectors, products and brands.
Drilling deeper into that report, we managed to identify areas where we could benefit by bundling contracts for better pricing from regional publications. We also saved additional costs by sharing advertising copies and design templates within the APAC region. I also ensured that our key messages for our advertising campaigns were aligned within APAC as well as with our German headquarters.
In addition, there were also inconsistencies in advertising in the APAC region due to lack of a proper understanding of the differences between the company’s corporate and product branding philosophies (we had one umbrella corporate brand and three product brands under it).
This task was easy to overcome as I arranged for our German headquarters to offer our communications teams and our local agencies the necessary trainings via video conferences. Thereafter we also standardised the different types of advertising design templates for various needs and started organising them into resource libraries in our intranet.
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