Just being different is all a bit ho-hum. Different isn’t even all that hard. Change a couple of things, and you’re different. Me being in this location, and you being in that location means you have something that makes you different. My prices are low, and your prices are high. Yep, different....
This week I’m handing over my blog to the wonderful Nancy Hellmrich (@getnance). A bit over 15 years ago when I was looking for a writer to work with, a colleague said, “oh, you have to meet Nance” and I’ve been forever grateful. We all need people around us who...
It takes courage to tell the other story – the one where things didn’t go as planned – and to share the hard lessons you’ve learned with others. A few months ago I received an email from Luke Taylor with just that kind of story about his company TPC. I...
Over the years I’ve seen organisation after organisation tie themselves up in knots over words. In absence of a genuine understanding of what they want to say, messages are subjected to endless wordsmithing, copy by consensus and all manner of other assaults on language and meaning. From purpose statements, to core...
Information designer Edward Tufte has said “to clarify add detail” and while I appreciate and often use the sentiment, the detail can be the devil. Across many projects I’m involved in I encounter the same thing – organisations are drowning in words. Take a look at any presentation, report, strategy, vision et...
For years now I’ve been using the example of terms and conditions when I talk to organisations about customer experience issues. It’s a great illustration of how organisations somehow expect their customers to be a different kind of people than they are themselves. When was the last time you read a...
This is probably the 10,001th article on the topic of jargon-laden, by-committee, not-worth-the-paper-they-are-written-on, vision statements. Which begs the question: if everyone knows that too many vision statements are rubbish, why do people keep writing them like that? And why do the legion of consultants who are often in the mix aid...
“Don’t think of an elephant.” I’m not sure the exact origins of that phrase but I first became away of it via George Lakoff’s book of the same name, and a story in Chip Kidd’s book Cheese Monkeys. My take on the meaning is once you think about one of those lumbering grey pachyderms it...
Companies are communicating more than ever before. So why does so much of it fail? Amid entreaties to engage customers, an important first step languishes in a mire of jargon and self-aggrandisement. Think “About Us” pages, profiles, bios, product and service descriptions, vision and values statements, and media announcements. It seems...
This week is all about what I called “the third element” of brand – your positioning. It’s the element of brand that’s most often treated as key basis for marketing, but I take a different view and think it should go much deeper than that. I like the general Free Dictionary definition...