February 21st, 2008
Each day we go through routine motions - wake up, personal hygiene, dress, whatever. At what point do we stop doing our routine and start thinking? There are some days when I never start thinking.
To keep our communications fresh and interesting, we have to stop the routine and question everything we do: Why am I doing this? How will this be packaged? What tangible results do I want to achieve? Who is my audience? Set up a daily routine to break out of your daily routine. Wait, that’s not gonna work.
Leadership trainer Howard Lagarde (www.alphaleader.net) recommends gaining a new perspective just by moving around. Sit in a different place in your home or office and see things from a different angle. That may sound strange, but try it. Do the same thing inside your head - move to a different perspective and view your message. Do things that you don’t normally do. Visit a store or restaurant you’ve never been to.
If you are an expert at something, try to forget what you know and remember how it felt when you didn’t know anything about your field. That’s how the audience for your message probably feels.
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February 12th, 2008
I recently got to thinking about brands and personalities, thanks to a blog post by Lyn Chamberlin, who is an expert on personal branding (the brand dame). In a lot of cases, I hear “branding” used to describe advertising that didn’t work, but Ms. Chamberlin sheds new light on creating brands for individuals, usually women. What a great way to increase your self-awareness - thinking about yourself as a product. How would you package that product and tell it’s story?
We can take it one step further and start branding jobs. Merge your personal brand with your job brand and we have the product of you on the job. What do you bring to work each day? How does it fit in with the daily workflow? Does that work, or do you need to redefine the job or yourself? Hmmm…
A Company is the cumulative effect of all the person/job products that it contains. We may try to hang another brand on it, but it is what people think of it. A person can present an image by the way they dress, wear their hair, where they go and the people they are seen with, but sooner or later they open their mouth and we get the rest of the story.
So it goes with a company. The image of the company is a composite of the advertising message and the way that people perform their duties. A great disparity between the two will create a more negative image than no advertising at all. Like an elegant lady in an evening gown picking her nose and belching. With a bit of work, the company can live up to the advertised image, but that takes clear communication from the leadership about the advertised message and how that relates to the various job brands.
You can’t look at marketing and advertising as an exercise separate from a company’s operations. Make the company look its best, but also strive to be the best.
Tags: advertising, brands, corporate image
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February 11th, 2008
They came in the night and quietly infiltrated our civilization. Slipping quietly into the world of advertising, they assumed the roles of human beings until one day, there wasn’t a single brochure, web page or advertisement that hadn’t been brought under their control.
These are dangerous invaders from a distant galaxy who, after receiving broadcasts from earth of TV sitcoms and awards ceremonies, determined that the human race was made up of models and actors wearing the latest fashions and hair styles, posing in pristeen offices where no paper is to be seen. Their goal is to control all business advertising forms and kill off the human race by disrupting our world economy with their ultimate doomsday weapon: boredom.
We’ve all seen Men in Black and we know how to look for the tell-tale signs of intrusion: people smiling in the workplace; offices devoid of any signs of human habitation; smiling people pointing over each other’s shoulders at laptop computers that we’re supposed to believe are running business applications software, but in fact they are receiving orders form their home planet.
How do we protect life as we know it from total destruction? We have to fight them on their own terms. Ignore all extraterrestrial advertising. (This won’t be hard, due to its boring and lifeless nature.) Seek out intelligent communications forms and boldly go where no runway model has gone before: to those forms of business communication that are punctuated with real people doing real things in real work environments. There is no time to lose. The future of our children and our children’s children depends on it. Get Real.
Tags: advertising, armageddon, boredom, business communications, extraterrestrial invasion
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February 6th, 2008
Back in the day of the typewriter, typists were limited to a single typeface with four special effects: bold (type over the text a second time), underline, all caps and centering. The 1980s brought desktop publishing to the world and enabled millions of untrained and untalented people to play at graphic design. If you could read PageMaker for Dummies, you could terrorize innocent readers with pages loaded up with various fonts and cutesy clipart.
The tendency is to emphasize an important passage by making it look different from the rest of the text. Since more is better, it only stands to reason that every other line needs to be highlighted. To avoid repitition, use a wide variety of gimmicks to shout out your mixed messages in an explosion of bad taste. (Do they still sell those cereal boxes at Best Buy that contain 50,000 clipart images or 30,000 fonts?)
The result is that when every word is screamed at the recipient, the message is lost altogether. It becomes a mass of white noise, like the din of a loud restaurant where no single word is heard. The eye is no longer drawn to one key phrase, it’s just confused. And it takes longer to read, cutting down on the number of people willing to fight through it.
The remedy to this is understatement. Calm down and write well. Use a title for your work that intrigues the reader and write with economy and impact. Choose a font that is easy to read and use no others. And above all, lose your bullets. Probably the most overdone affectation in writing is the bullet, but it also opens an avenue for poor writing. Bullets don’t have to be complete sentences. Communication breaks down.
Oh, and leave graphic design in the hands of qualified professionals.
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February 6th, 2008
One of the more rewarding moments for writers is when people look at your work and say, “Nobody is going to read all this. People just don’t read these days.” Not sure what is meant by “these days”. As opposed to say, the dark ages when only monks were allowed to learn to read? We live in the most literate country in the most literate times since the first cave dweller painted a picture of what he just killed on the wall (prior to that, all meat was mystery meat to the women and children). So why won’t people read?
Because they’re used to avoiding the tons of boring, pointless, self-serving trash that is passed off as marketing materials. And why is this writing so boring, pointless and self-serving? I used to think that was because the marketing copy writers of the world were boring, pointless and self-serving. I have since learned that while this may be the case in some instances, most of their customers wouldn’t let them write anything different. Because there is a consensus that “professional” is synonymous with boring, pointless and self-serving. (For those of you who have been successful in your avoidance, I’m refering to phrases like, “an easy-to-use, flexible, seamlessly integrated, end-to-end solution.”)
Call me an incurable optimist (everyone does), but I have a theory that people really do want to read and be entertained and educated. They also want to watch video and multimedia presentations that tell a story well. People do read tons of email jokes on a daily basis. And youtube.com is proof that they’ll watch anything that’s on videotape.
So let’s try something new and start creating marketing literature that people want to read and see what happens. Unprofessional as it may be, if it entertains, people will read it. Better they read your product jokes than the junk their buddies send them. Come to think of it, if your material was good enough, their buddies would send that. Think of a world where workers are blowing off their jobs in order to read stuff that educates them about products and services pertinent to their jobs. Hey, they wouldn’t be blowing off their jobs anymore, would they?
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February 6th, 2008
We all know how many words a picture is worth, but what about dollars? If you use Microsoft clipart in your product flyers, you might be a cheapskate. If your newsletter has little hearts in February, shamrocks in March, bats in October and Santa in December, you might be a cheapskate. If the picture of your president in the corporate brochure has red eyes, you might be a cheapskate.
You don’t have to be an art critic to instantly register the quality of graphics used in a communication. All of us are immersed in graphics every day. Our brains are trained to detect the difference between Super Bowl advertisements and late night TV; top quality fashion magazine ads and the homeowners association newsletter; and we have a number of levels in between that label the publisher or producer as high class, cheapskate or something in between.
So all the graphics you use in your communications will instantly tell the viewer exactly what type of spender you are and how much taste you have. It will also tell them how you feel about the different parts of your company that author communications. A classy sales brochure followed by ugly support documents will tell people, “Now that we have your money, get used to low quality.”
How do you monitor what goes out of a company to prospects and customers? Attend meetings between customers and operations staff. Find out what is used to tell the story of your company after someone becomes a customer. Look at proposal documents, flyers, newsletters, etc. Look for the frustrated designer wannabes in your company and see if you can find examples of their output.
Message consistency is a tough issue that every company should face. I’d be interested to hear how others have dealt with this problem
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February 6th, 2008
The easiest point of view to communicate from is your own. Unfortunately, each person has their own set of background information and context that probably isn’t shared 100% with their audience. This rift in communication, taking a statement out of context or with a different understanding, is the basis for the humor in situation comedies. It is also the basis for poisonously bad communication.
The key ingredient for the antidote is empathy. Comedy is funny to the audience because they understand the whole story and can feel the pain of the misunderstanding. Bad communication in life can be countered by studying your audience and telling your story in a way that they can fully understand.
This can be achieved in one on one communication by simply asking questions and finding out what the person knows. Communicating to groups of people requires research. Cultures are groups of people with a partial common understanding. But within a culture, ethnicity, gender, education, age, level of social involvement and many other idiosyncracies define subcultures with different understandings. Empathy takes understanding and adds an emotional willingness to feel another person’s joy and pain. Empathize with your audience and they will listen and want to hear more.
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February 6th, 2008
This site is intended to examine methods of communication in our society at this point in time and how we can improve the way we disseminate information. Good storytelling is an ancient art that seems to have been lost, even though we have so many more communication tools than our ancestors. How does that happen? This should be the golden age of communication and yet we experience misunderstanding, misinterpretation and a lack of connection. So let’s get to the bottom of this matter and find out how to communicate clearly to the audience we want to reach.
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