Missing the Marketing Opportunity

Looking at the BBC web site business pages today, my attention was drawn to an article on Compass Group and the fact that their annual profits have been boosted by cost cuts. It seemed like an excellent financial performance and I was curious to see if there was a more detailed press release on the Compass Web Site to explain their cost cutting strategy - in particular, I wanted to know how their cost cutting had been managed to ensure longer term profit growth. As we all know, it is very easy to cut costs in the short term to deliver an instant fix in the form of a profit boost. It is much harder to develop and implement a long term cost reduction strategy that is part of a wider plan to grow profitability in future years.

I was disappointed. The most recent press release on that I could find on the Compass Group UK web site was dated 22nd September and was an announcement that from October all their fresh beef will be sourced from Britain (I assume their frozen and processed beef will continue to be sourced from multiple countries - especially as the notes to editors includes a reference to the ration of fresh to frozen beef).

In marketing and brand building terms, and especially in an industry which is targeting strategic outsourcing deals, they have missed a trick. It is imperative that marketing messages are consistent and consistently applied throughout an organisation. And that includes publishing links to important financial announcements on local operating company web-sites. The group web-site has all the financials - but I had to go back to Google to find it.

In your own business, it would pay you to create a simple check list. That way, when you publish something opportunistic, you can double check for consistency across all media forms.
Now, before I hit "Publish", I had better check www.results-zone.com for consistency with this Blog posting!