Guarding companies, in a crowded market where it’s difficult to be different, want to market themselves and have a variety of real-world and online ways to do it, like any business. How about making a company magazine? Editing a magazine’s not that easy, writes Mark Rowe, who in 2024 is coming up to 25 years as editing Professional Security Magazine.
If anyone in the guarding sector has the resources to throw at a glossy corporate publication, it’s Allied Universal (whose 28 company acquisitions in the three years 2021 to 2023 included G4S) and Securitas. If they have a publication besides what’s required as a publicly-listed company (and Allied is privately-owned), it’s not showing on their website.
Securitas do a podcast series, with regular interviews, or rather ‘inspiring discussions with tech pioneers, social activists, and others’. Allied Universal has on its website a ‘hero hall of fame’ of outstanding and award-winning officers, or rather ‘professionals’, including some ‘killed in the line of duty’. G4S on its website has case studies that showcase its international work, from UK stadia to a mine in Africa to a ‘large Danish nationwide food manufacturer’. A magazine would feature such items. So why go to the extra trouble to make a magazine?
Consider where the word comes from; in the early modern period, when Europeans built forts at foreign landfalls, they included a room to store gunpowder and other necessaries for defence and survival; called a magazine. On the same principle, a magazine is a repository of the written word, published periodically (hence another word for magazine, ‘periodical’).
The pros for a company magazine: the business can put its best foot forward. That’s no different from a blog or podcast, but to read or listen to one, the consumer has to search for it. Provided you have the address of who you want to send a magazine to, you post it, it comes through their letterbox, and provided its cover is appealing enough, they will open it. Yes, print as a medium has passed its heyday, yet that can work for those that still go to the trouble of making a magazine; it has more novelty, compared with the ocean of online material.
The cons: the cost. A guarding firm that does a quarterly publication (a common frequency – monthly is too often, annual too occasional) with a print run in the thousands, spends a five-figure sum on it, when you add postage to the time someone spends putting it together, and printing. All but the largest UK guarding firms, even if they have a marketing person, will at least pause before signing off a five-figure spend. And does the marketing person, or even team, have the skills to edit and lay out a magazine, when anyone can post the same material on social media?
A mix of media may have more impact, by reaching different audiences. A website serves to announce a new appointment or contract win immediately (and lastingly, and can be silently taken off or added to), and the web link can be broadcast on social media. Anyone with the task of gathering such material, whatever medium they choose to present it in, will soon find how hard it is to find stuff, let alone beyond one-offs. That’s understandable: the superviser and account manager are busy people and their job does not depend on them doing you in marketing a favour, by writing even a few words about a sponsored walk for a good cause, or a client’s praise for a good deed; and a photograph; and a line to say who’s who in the photo; and any good from pleasing a client by posting their photo is lost if you misspell their name!?.
Whether posts on social media as they occur or a collection of news short of a magazine (a newsletter), they serve as a marketing tool; yet if they’re not regular, it can harm a company’s image (what does it look like on a company website if a publication petered out, several months before? Has the company lost interest, had a round of back-office cuts, run out of good things to report?). Two companies’ newsletters that have stayed the course are by the ACS Pacesetters guard firm CIS Security; and the stewarding firm SES Group. As of January 30, their latest editions are dated December 2023; CIS’ is quarterly, SES’ monthly.
Of the two, CIS’ is the more professionally laid out and by far the larger; CIS’ has 72 pages, SES Group’s two. That is not to knock SES Group’s: it serves a purpose, to address those who work for it (a reminder to wear SIA badge, as required by law; and how to beware of wintry conditions under-foot) and let those who didn’t take part in something, about what a part of the business did (fund-raising before Christmas around the company’s Harlow head office).
CIS’ is packed with faces, events, and details of the London-based guard firm’s mainly corporate sites, including end-user names (that rival guard firms could usefully read, to pick up competitive intelligence!?), details about health and safety, sustainability, ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), the work for the group of guarding firms the City Security Council, Christmas jumper day among other good deeds – the reader comes away with the impression that CIS is a company of substance.
For the medium is the message, as the thinker Marshall McLuhan said: besides the actual content of a publication, the very act of making a magazine or newsletter implies to the reader that the compiler has things worth reading about, whether a company’s moves to electric vehicles, or litter-picking for the community, or the chief executive or contract managers pictured handing out awards to and shaking hands with long-serving or otherwise deserving officers. That sends the message that the chief goes out to meet workers, knows who they are, and gives a damn; that the officer or other person given a certificate has a name, and is valid. If you are an officer reading elsewhere, you can think; I might be recognised, another time.
Also to consider, then, is who’s all this aimed at: an internal audience; or clients, potential or current? Or if online, possibly anyone. The CEO of one security company that has its own print magazine speaks of how a man featured in one edition took it home; the magazine served to explain to his family the job that the man did. Who’s to say that the publication might be the spark that prompts a daughter (or indeed the mum, if she wants to re-join the workforce later in life).
Such an effect is long-term, and can hardly be measured; in those senses, not much use to a company or the marketing department. Yet a security industry casting around for ways to recruit, let alone young females, needs all the help it can get, to compete with other occupations with bigger advertising budgets (such as the police and the armed forces). As intangible is the team or company spirit that a publication can create, so that the contract security staff identify with the contractor rather than the retailer, campus or whoever they’re based with.
