What is your role in the company and who do you interact with the most?
I joined BOS Italy almost two years ago as Marketing and Sales Director. During the first year I mainly focused on brand positioning and communication strategy, working on company dynamics and activating a reorganization plan. It was a matter of researching and understanding the company's strengths and making them shared topics to be enhanced and communicated. Everyone at BOS now represents and manifests these values. The Brand now has its own clear identity and the entrepreneurial project has a connotation in the market in line with the business plan we have developed for the next few years. From the beginning I aimed to create a synergy between inside and outside. I am convinced that it is essential to understand what is known about the company and the opinion of our customers. For this reason I studied our past and the history of the brand, in such a way as to have a complete perception of this reality. We want to continue to bring excellent solutions and services to the market: professional; but to do it in the best way we must make known the company, the values, the services that make the difference in our proposal. To develop our catalog we rely exclusively on international producers. They are able to guarantee us a safe collaboration, up to our expectations, and accommodate our specific technical requests on the development of our proprietary firmware. For our growth in the market we dedicate time and attention to our partner distributors and their installer customers for whom we organize active training courses, guaranteeing an efficient help desk. We manage technical assistance with a ticketing system that allows us to keep all the actors involved aligned and updated on the status of the case.
What led you to take on a position in marketing?
In 1988 I started working in Marketing in a multinational company which, a few years later, was acquired by General Electric. Here I joined as a Junior Product Manager and then became a Senior, working alongside the Commercial Marketing Director, who would later be one of my mentors in my professional life. I therefore learned this job in an environment that welcomed me with warmth, seriousness and formal respect, despite my young age. With the arrival of General Electric the change was radical. If on the one hand the way of working was totally revolutionized, on the other it made me understand that I had a great interest in the development of the organization. I saw my path to training in Sociology and Social Psychology. I then embarked on my university studies, graduating in Sociology. After these first 10 years as a multinational, I began to gain experience in other companies, differently structured and sized. I worked in Gardening as Marketing Manager and then as Assistant to the Sales Director, dealing with multiple projects, with responsibility. I then moved on to communication and marketing management, moving to other structured companies, increasingly building my expertise in marketing and knowledge of the entrepreneurial world in different sectors. In BOS Italy, I now have the opportunity to use all the skills acquired to create a stimulating, respectful, organized and dynamically future-oriented environment.
Which social network is more in line with your business model and which is less?
BOS Italy is a reality with peculiar characteristics where, before digital, interpersonal relationships with partners exist. We consider every internal and external relationship to be "social", from technological collaborations to daily interactions with distributors, installers and commercial organizations. The relationships of respect and trust that are nourished with the relationships and the work we do together are the bond that unites us that we care about, then we work with social media. As for platforms, we are present on LinkedIn and Facebook. The first is certainly the one closest to us, because it allows us to stay in touch and communicate with professionals who are influential due to their power of choice within safety distributors and with installers, who choose or can choose BOS to carry out their work. Facebook,
Instagram and other platforms are certainly interesting, but certainly further from our business model, because they have a generalized target and the typical contents are not exactly ours.
The data shows that having a low number of followers damages the brand image, what do you think?
I believe that the number of followers is a metric that is still relevant in certain areas. The top management of most companies, in my opinion, perceives it as a sort of litmus test of the work done in digital. BOS Italy has a measured fan base but we prefer to create informative and useful content for current followers than create ad hoc content simply to increase this metric. Our followers are organic followers who grow gradually thanks to corporate communication and the training and commercial activities that we like to carry out in person.
How important are online reviews, are they important?
Reviews are part of that side of the digital world that is always very interesting to discover and read, and to weigh. I think it's a sort of replacement for what used to be word of mouth and they are a tool through which to convey other people's suggestions. At BOS Italy we want to create a network of care and safety towards customers: more than actual reviews, we are interested in establishing relationships between people and creating tailor-made solutions with our products, careful to understand the real satisfaction we generate. In the future this value will also be confirmed by reviews, but only after having done an excellent job towards the customer. Reviews must be a natural and spontaneous result.
Have you thought about enlisting the help of professionals from the social world given the importance achieved by digital platforms and their management complexity?
Before my arrival, BOS Italy was supported for communication by an external agency that did a bit of everything, while now communication management is internal. I think that, as in any collaboration, the relationship between inside and outside is stimulating and necessary in order not to remain anchored in one's beliefs. No one can be complete in every way. It is precisely here that we need to realize the skills available and what we can receive from external inputs. For me it is essential to develop and grow within the company the importance of good communication between colleagues and commercial sensitivity in our relationships. This is the best way to also put an agency or external collaborators in a position to give maximum support, expressing their skills.
What are the future corporate communication projects?
We want to refine the tools, integrating automated work to and from our management and CRM systems. This will allow us to provide even more attentive and accurate services. We are also working in parallel on the website to make it more functional, adding content, routes and services. We wish to implement BOS Italy's communication towards a transparent presentation of the brand. It is the first step towards the search for new technological and commercial partnerships. All our communication must be made even closer and more effective to convey our values. We will respect this concept in everything we do, so that we can excel in our integrity.