The Next Big Thing in Marketing: Transparency

As ad spending increases globally, companies are once again developing new and innovative ways to place their messages into the eyes and ears of prospective customers. The best companies, however, are developing campaigns by looking not outwards, but inwards.

Although we call ourselves GEM Advertising, GEM is in fact much more of a communications agency than an advertising agency. Why communications? Because in today's transparent landscape, corporations must have a free-flowing and effective communications strategy within the organization as well as outside of the organization.

Case in point: consider today's most successful social enterprises, like TOMS Shoes. Take, for example, this excerpt from the TOMS website:

"At TOMS® we invest in our employees in many ways. We provide training for our employees on a number of business and leadership topics, including training for our supply chain employees by a respected third party expert on the important topic of human trafficking and slavery prevention. We provide a variety of benefits to them, including Medical, Vision, Dental, Long Term Disability, Life Insurance and AD&D, Healthcare and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts, Employee Assistance Program, Paid Family Leave, and 401(k). We also offer Paid Time Off and a variety of fitness and wellness classes at our headquarters building outside of Los Angeles, California."

If you think about TOMS' entire marketing strategy, it is built on providing transparency to its inward operations, and leveraging its corporate culture into outbound public relations and ad strategies. You can even read about transparency in its supply chains, right on its website. This type of strategy is markedly different than brands of yesteryear, which separated corporate culture from public image (think ever-changing pop-curve messaging, like Pepsi in the 90's).

Millennials are driving much of the shift towards a transparent marketing dogma. Having grown up in the information age, in which almost any information is immediately available via Google search, Millennials almost demand transparency in their approach to commerce. This shift presents a problem for organizations that have toxic cultures, abusive employee policies, and environmentally-unfriendly practices. Because the lines between inward identity and outward perception have blurred, organizations need to look to their internal communications strategies more than ever.

So, if your organization is looking for the next big thing in marketing, look no further than your own corporate culture. Today's greatest organizations are gaining immense ground by simply revealing their true colors to their prospective audiences. Not to mention, they're creating a better place to work, too.

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• Marketing
• Transparency
• Innovation