For a big enough company you'll likely have one person designing your ad, another person writing the ad, another person doing the research on the market the ad will be focusing on, another person taking care of the commercial printing orders, and yet another person figuring out how the distribution will go.

From the larger advertisements like catalog printing to the small styles of postcard mailing, you're going to have more than one person taking care of things.

That means you have a certain amount of room for errors and mistakes due to miscommunication if you aren't careful. It isn't really a matter of someone being wrong, either. Very reasonable and very normal mistakes can turn into a major problem if people aren't bringing everyone together and making sure people are on the same page.

That's my point with this entry, to try to emphasize the need to open up a strong and steady line of communication.

If you have five different people helping to start up a marketing campaign using a full color brochure, a delay in one department might have a big affect on another. What if the person handling the commercial printing has told the printer the brochure will be ready by this specific date, only the person designing ends up needing an extra week to get their work done.

Now, if you have good communications going then the designer can contact the printer right away and let them know about the delay well in advance. But if no one is letting others know what's going on, the printer might not realize something is wrong until they should've already sent in the finished product to be printed.

This also applies to things outside of the marketing department. Here's a situation that I'm sure a lot of people have probably dealt with before. A new product release is coming soon, and the marketing department is told that things will be ready by X date.

So the marketing starts doing its job, sending up postcards, brochures, hyping up the release and telling everyone to be ready to make their purchases.

And then, just a few weeks shy of the release date, the team developing the product drop the bombshell by saying they need more time, and all that marketing needs to change to a new date.

Had the two departments been talking more than the potential for delay would've been mentioned earlier, and the marketing department could've been prepared to push the date back if they needed to.

I've been there before when trouble came in the form of little to no communication. My hope is that no other company has to go through some of the stuff I've dealt with. Start talking, and start listening.