Stop the corp-talk

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.