Stakeholder management and targeting: making a budget cut work for you

Taking over a project that was not mine

I was not yet settled into the role when the campaign was handed to an agency. It was colleagues who, seeing the project drift, asked me to take a look. I could have stopped at an opinion. I chose instead to put forward creative directions, then a production plan and the story that went with it, which amounted to demonstrating a capability rather than claiming one. The project was handed to me after that.

That detour has a cost that has to be named: the share of budget already gone in agency fees never came back, and the whole production had to fit inside what was left. Legitimacy was therefore built at the same time as the delivery, within a schedule that was already tight.

Turning the budget constraint into a targeting method

What was left of the budget ruled out producing the sets needed to cover the diversity of industrial environments. Rather than spreading production thin, I chose to concentrate resources on three settings only, and to make selecting them a shared exercise.

I consulted the teams in Bollé Safety's three sales regions so that each would identify a priority market, with one condition coming from the product: that the setting present extreme working conditions conducive to fogging, since fogging is precisely what the coating addresses. The exchanges took a long time, because my staging intentions and their need for representation had to be made to fit together.

The result ties a region to a sector and to a physical condition: wind energy in EMEA, for wind, humidity and physical exertion; underground mining in APAC, in Australia, for heat, humidity, low light and the risk of scratching from flying debris; construction in the United States, for crushing heat and perspiration. Three settings instead of twelve, each defended by the region that had chosen it.

A change of register that did not carry itself

Communication around eye protection traditionally leans on risk and danger. I carried the idea of a shift toward empowerment, making the equipment a factor of performance rather than a barrier against accidents. This campaign was the pilot project for that pivot at Bollé Safety.

Buy-in was not uniform. The American teams backed the direction, empowerment being in their view a decisive purchase driver in their market. The European sales teams, used to the register of risk, were markedly less in favor. That disagreement was not a whim: it reflected genuinely different selling cultures.

The compromise was built around proof. On the voice-over and on the conversion material, I had the argument carried by the test data rather than by the promise alone. The register stayed one of performance, but anchored to a measured fact, which made it possible to bring the most reluctant teams along without going back to fear-based communication.

An activation plan that arrived after the assets

The activation plan was presented to me when most of the material had already been produced. That reversed order forced a series of late adaptations to connect assets designed for awareness to a lead generation setup that had not been specified at the outset.

It is the first thing I would do differently, ahead even of the budget question: an activation plan known upfront shapes formats, durations and video endings, whereas a plan discovered downstream can only catch up with them.

The setup nonetheless produced a volume of qualified leads that fed the sales teams, with a share converted into key accounts and favorable feedback from distributors on the campaign's effect on their business.

What did not work

The expected results were not achieved in the United States. Bollé Safety's presence there was recent and our knowledge of the market too thin to calibrate the message and the material correctly. The setting chosen was relevant, the execution was not sharp enough for a market we knew poorly.

With earlier framing and the full budget, I would have set aside part of the resources for a second production phase fed by what we had learned, and for an A/B test complete enough to produce measured findings rather than impressions. That is the main lesson I take from this project: in a market you know poorly, budgeting for the correction counts as much as budgeting for the production.