Why is Siemens so bad at marketing itself, particularly in difficult times? I have looked at the current as well as many former pitfalls and found a handful of reasons.

• Siemens fails to describe the magnitude and severity of its problems. Rather than communicating these, its CEO Mr. Kleinfeld is trying to solve problems left over from his predecessor quickly, and while he does so (sale of the mobile phone unit to BenQ) it all looks like a nice deal for everybody. Siemens gets rid of a problem, BenQ gets lots of patents and a highly qualified workforce (at least that's the impression, fact is they are also very expensive and slow in a rocket-speed market), and the employees get a great new opportunity. Now everybody is happy and problems are solved - or so the public and Siemens thinks. Not so, as we know now.



• Siemens fails to use new online marketing communication tools properly. This happened when Siemens tried to "clean up" a negative entry for its CEO in Wikipedia and added lots of other nice CV elements on top. Bad though that the Internet community found that out and made a big fuss about it - naturally. The whole thing backfired and its CEO and Siemens look like foolish beginners who have no clue really how to use viral marketing properly.



• Siemens fails to properly prepare its CEO for short TV interviews. This just happened last night and I witnessed it myself. Mr. Kleinfeld appeared on both prime news shows Heute Journal and Tagesthemen. The majority of Germans are watching these news shows. They are slighty behind each other so you can watch them both if you like, and indeed Mr. Kleinfeld was interviewed live on both channels within 10min or so. What happened there was so embarassing that I asked myself, is it him who has no skills for public relations or is it his PR advisor who failed to prepare him with short, clear statements. Those should have been: 1. explain the big problem that they had with the mobile phone unit (could have described this in a dramatic way), then 2. that they found a solution - thought so at least - with BenQ at the time, 3. now it's time to rescue what we can... He had that storyboard but entirely failed to bring it across. He sounded very cold and lacking any feelings. I am sure that's how he probably is and has to be in such a position, but of course you need to be able to put on a mask and appear different on TV prime time stage.



• Siemens lacks sensitivity for public opinion. They announced last week a 30% board member salary increase. OK, that's always difficult to communicate, of course. But PR should have stopped them from doing this all together. 30% is a hell of a lot when at the same time Siemens is cutting costs and demanding lower salaries from its employees. So impossible to communicate to the world. What they should have done (assuming the salary increase was indeed justified of course) are other means such as stock option grants which don't show up as salary increases in public media.

Now the above is just what surfaced up. I am pretty sure there have been many other things as well. Bottom line is: Siemens PR sucks and with it its brand image...