Why is so much marketing bland and generic? Early in my career I did a lot of corporate communications projects – copy writing for brochures, web sites, and so on. Most of the time, the work went well; when it didn’t, it was often because an interesting dynamic took hold on the client team. You might recognize this effect from your own experiences.
Get a group of stakeholders in a room and ask them what they want from a communications project. The answers will usually be something like:
- “We want to stand out.”
- “We need a clear, simple story.”
- “We want something that will really make our customers react.”
Here’s what that same group might say later, when presented with the draft copy:
- “I like this, but it feels too bold.”
- “We say we do X, but we also do Y and Z – shouldn’t we also say that?”
- “I like this part here… and this part there… can we combine them?”
Great communications never come out of a committee. The natural tendency of the group is to target what is distinctive and new, to question it, and strip it away. This effect is greatly magnified if there no clear decision-maker; now the communications project has to satisfy everyone. The draft review becomes a big consensus-building process.
If your messaging or communications project goes down this path, you won’t end up very far from where you started. The group will retreat towards familiar, comfortable messages and themes.
Interestingly, at the end of projects like this, clients are often very satisfied; they are flushed with their success in achieving consensus. They feel validated – “the group really came together there” – and that good feeling colors how they see their messaging. They are delighted with the outcome, even if they have the same dreary, cluttered muck that so many companies do.
If you are running a communications project or working with a creative agency on messaging, here’s how to avoid this:
- Take input from many – but limit final content decisions to few. Or just one, ideally.
- Work with the right talent. If you want distinctive communications, review their portfolio to see if they’ve delivered in the past. Does their stuff sound like everything else you’ve ever read?
- Test with your target audience. Unless you test your messages through focus groups or surveys, you won’t know how they resonate. Everything else is just talk. In the messaging work we do, whenever possible, we test for impact.
