A couple of weeks ago I read an interesting article from Lucy Tobin at the Evening Standard, discussing the pitfalls of corporate talk. Though her view point essentially explained how ‘management slang’ is often used by corporations to conceal a negative picture, it is also true that including too much jargon within an announcement can put businesses at a disadvantage when trying to portray positive messages, too.
Most mornings, I scan through the pages of the Financial Times and The Times and feel as if making sense of some company quotes and news is like trying to decipher code penned by Leonardo Da Vinci himself. Plenty of companies appear to be ‘leveraging’, ‘strategising’ and ‘creating synergies’ in their business, but what do these words realistically mean in context to the message they are trying to convey; would businesses benefit from simplifying their message in order to make it easier to assimilate? The answer, unless they are trying to conceal something, is almost always going to be yes!
During my time in PR, I’ve witnessed a fair amount of ‘white collar rap’ which has often been met by sighs and, admittedly, the occasional expletive, from the media community. As PR professionals, our job is to achieve media recognition for our clients, which in turn helps to nurture their presence inside their industry.
The most successful way to do this is to make the lives of journalists as pleasant as possible; we understand they have little time to decipher complex language and turn it into compelling news stories during the course of their day. So by providing them with concise, factual and readable content that’s written in simple English, we can increase the likelihood of them using the information that is given to them. In addition to this, it will also ensure that what they do write and publish is factually correct and thus more clearly understood by the people reading it i.e. a client’s stakeholders!
Simplifying a corporate message so that it’s fully understood might sound like an easy task. But without correct guidance, even the most reputed companies can fall prey and miss that all important opportunity to gain recognition of a valuable announcement.
Console Wars Redux: where exactly is the war won?
However, this year I quite frankly don’t know where to start. Was Microsoft’s launch and showing of the Xbox One (or XBone as the inevitable abbreviation seems to be turning out) a lesson in how attempting to adapt to the increased functionality of devices and attempting to take control of an entire user ecosystem needs to be balanced with a clear message and clear benefits to end-users at every step of the way? Or was it a sign of how brute force may be one way for organisations to claim ownership of their software? Was it a slightly worrying sign of just how some organisations see their customers? Or was it saying that you should really work out a naming convention for your products and stick with it?
Was Sony’s corresponding PlayStation 4 announcement and apparent PR victory as far as customer goodwill is concerned a lesson in how to read your customer base and know when to stick with what works? Was it a sign how relative success can easily switch between close competitors, within the space of a single hardware generation? Does it suggest that success in technology is won or lost before your product even hits the stores (or resellers)? And should we consider that a single, swiftly-made video can be a huge PR tool in the right hands?
Will Nintendo’s Wii U’s relatively slow year and slate of software for 2013 and 2014 demonstrate how standing your ground and planning for the long haul can make up for a poor first impression? Or will it show that when all’s said and done customers look to vendors for reassurance and that’s something they have to provide?
Is there also something to be said about the relative homogeneity of software, with relatively little to differentiate one product from another? After all we’ve been promised emotive experiences this generation, which is fair enough; provided the primary emotion you want to evoke can be summed up as RRRRAAAAAAARRRRRRGH. Does this point to an inevitable commoditisation of both software and hardware, with those products that can differentiate themselves standing out even more starkly?
Lastly, what is the potential for suggesting that there is a time and a place to upgrade, and you need to measure exactly when that is to get the best value for money. After all, if you’re like me this is always the best point in a console’s lifecycle: when everyone clears off to the next version and you can sit back and buy all the software you missed first time round on the cheap and pick up the last few gems being produced. At least as a spectator, we’re seeing another round of always-entertaining system wars: although whether it ends up a classic like Spectrum vs. C64, Amiga vs. ST or Nintendo vs. Sega is still up in the air.