A Veteran's View of The Engagement Movement in the U.K.

Few people are in a better position to reflect on the state of the engagement movement in Great Britain than John Fisher, Managing Director of the 30-year-old FMI Brand Engagement Agency and author of multiple books on engagement. 

• Engagement Is About the Enterprise
• A Focus on the Channel

 

Fisher is among the early leaders of what the British call “below-the-line” marketing—all the tactical elements organizations use other than advertising to activate key audiences. He has written a half dozen books on all aspects of the engagement field, including Strategic Brand Engagement, Strategic Reward & Recognition, and How to Run Successful Employee Incentive Schemes. 

 

From Fisher’s perspective, the fundamental problem with the Engage for Success effort is that “There is this notion that companies must increase employee engagement, but that it’s a separate process that’s not really connected to the entire business. I’m coming at it from the holistic approach; it’s about the brand, distribution network, sales staff, customer service and the general staff coming together under a single hymn sheet. If it comes from HR, everyone ignores it. It is about Enterprise Engagement.” 

 

The problem is compounded, he says, by the fact that HR often moves at a different pace cut off from the business plan. “Companies survey employee engagement then set up subgroups to review the results, and maybe in a few months come up with a plan and maybe in 12 months’ time see how it’s going. That’s a dead hand. You can’t get a CEO’s buy-in to improve engagement unless you can improve the bottom line, and 12 months is way too long a haul.” 

 

Fisher believes it’s imperative to connect employees to the brand and organization goals. “If you can get the staff engaged with meeting the needs of their colleagues, distributors, consumers, with all sharing the same expectations, you will get more traction.” 

 

FMI, which describes itself as a “Brand Engagement Agency to connect brands with people to drive genuine results,” offers a full suite of one-one-one event, incentive, promotional and digital services mostly to support business-to-consumer clients. 

 

The days of relying on mass advertising are gone, says Fisher. “It’s about going direct and below the line that together make up a strategy. Now the spend money is divided up among 15 different media, social media, to get the message across. Messages are much more unusual, one-off. Marketers must have something new or you’ve lost them. People are always asking ‘what’s in it for me?’”  

 

Today, Fisher says, “Most of our work is related to distributor and sales engagement. What is the promotion? What is the communication, the audience, the locations? It becomes a lot more than a promotional activity but rather a strategy to engage consumers or buyers with clear results. We measure what is the foot fall (traffic), how many trials for product, what was the increase in sales and how did it boil down to the bottom line.” Fisher says he prefers to work on accounts in which he can demonstrate a clear return-on-investment. 

 

For instance, he says, FMI helped the Chinese cell phone maker Huawei promote a new AI camera (not available in the U.S.), demonstrating how social media could be effectively used to create a “flash mob” to a pop-up boutique in a popular west London mall. The weekend campaign, he explains, engaged about 300 people in a contest to guess the amount of photos that would be taken that day, nearly 100 of whom showed up on the second day to learn the name of the winner. “From the information we gathered,” Fisher says, “We have the analytics we need to determine how to scale this model to achieve specific product sales goals going forward.”

 

Fisher sold his agency but remains with the company. 

 

Contact John Fisher at: 

john.fisher@fmiagency.com

Tel. 44-7980-804868