Your Brand is Everyone’s Responsibility

Don’t Leave Everything Up To Your Communications Department!

Branding and marketing tips that could save your life.

Communications departments are powerhouses of modern marketing.  But if you rely on your communications department to take care of every facet of your marketing and public relations, you may be unconsciously sabotaging your company’s brand and image.

Humans are communicators – all of us.  The majority of your employees don’t work in the communications department and would be shocked to know that part of their job is representing your corporation, portraying your image, and actively promoting your brand.  At best, they may consider themselves to be in the business of selling your company’s widgets, and that’s it.

There are a lot of people in your corporation who communicate with your customers.  Many of them are trained for the role:  sales people, front line personnel, service support staff, telemarketers, receptionists, communications and marketing personnel, and most executives.

But there is a hidden pocket of people who have no training in corporate communications:  Support staff, administrative personnel, cleaners and janitors who wear your company logo on their overalls, the parking attendent, and anyone in the corporation who works in what is considered an “internal” support role removed from the business of the corporation.

It’s here that some of the worst blunders in branding and customer experience can take place.

It pays to be vigilant!

Here are a few areas you may not have considered as branding tools – yet can have a massive impact on your customers’ perceptions.

Verbal communications

This can be the most difficult to control.  Verbal communications can resemble a child’s game of Chinese whispers.

For instance, I was asked recently to find a white paper on a corporation’s network, which I did, and sent it on to the person that asked for it.  I heard her handing the print off to her

superior.  “Tracy found it,” she said.  No problems, right?

Except that two hours later, I overheard that “Tracy had it all the time.”

Err…no, I didn’t.  I just found it.

This all sounds innocent enough, but what if it had been a customer who had been given the same answer?  She would have, at best, thought the company was retarded in their filing and organization, or worse, thought that the report had been deliberately withheld by someone within the corporation.

Unless you have industrial strength governors dictacting who in your corporation gets to speak to members of the public, then anyone could be conversing with your Fortune 500 client, including the youngest Vice President’s new secretary.   Verbal slips and casual inaccuracies that seem completely trivial can take on dire overtones in these circumstances.

Something as simple as an employee guessing about information, or making assumptions (“sure, we could get that to you by tomorrow,”) can have an immediate and long-term impact on your customer’s impression of the company, and the service and support the customer will expect from you in the future.  That impression is what they will convey to others they network with.

Solutions:

• Leading by example will help eliminate some of these innocent branding bruises.  Take care to always speak accurately, take the time to get facts right, or correct wrong impressions as soon as they’re made.
• Limiting the number of employees with outside contact is an extreme solution, but if your brand is particularly critical or sensitive, consider this option.
• Adequate support documention, including FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions documents), manuals, and up-to-date databases, can help your staff speak knowledgeably and accurately when they’re dealing with customers.
• Consider external customer communications training and orientation for new staff and regular updates for all staff.

The use of acronyms and jargon.

Nothing can bewilder a new customer faster than the use of unexplained acronyms and buzz words.  Some industries – such as computers and information technology – are particularly prone to the use of acronyms and no industry is spared completely.

When you are immersed in the business every day, you may not even be aware that you’re using phrases that a stranger on the street wouldn’t understand.

Unfortunately, jargon and acronyms are sometimes flung about as a way to make the user feel superior and more knowledgeable, and this can be particularly prevalent amongst lower ranking employees – especially those that deal with the public.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this phenomenon yourself when you’ve been in the customer role.  The bored, brain-dead sales clerk is filling in the necessary forms, and mutters:  “Do you want the Q-NET AV, or the LCD version?”  When you blink, completely baffled, they look down their nose, sigh, and explain in tones they’d normally use with a three year old.

Yes, this is a slightly exaggerated rendition, but I bet you remember receiving this sort of treatment at least once, as a customer.  There could be versions of this happening in your corporation, too – and they don’t have to be verbal, either.

The letters that get sent out under your letterhead, your marketing materials, your website, telephone answering messages, and signage may contain jargon and acronyms that aren’t explained.

Solution:

• Never assume anyone will “just know” what an acronym means, even if they’re in the business.  Explain the meaning the first time you use the acronym in a conversation or document.
• Become aware of the jargon you use, and try to reduce or eliminate it, especially when dealing with external customers.
• Encourage others in your organization to adopt the same standards.  Don’t let a letter go out over your signature (or your subordinates’) that includes in-house language that isn’t explained.

Write simply.

Related to, but distinct from acronyms and jargon, is the tendency to over-write, to use redundant and passive language, and to use large words where short ones will do.

Most marketing and communications personnel learned long ago the power of simple, direct writing, but most of the letters and memos that go out from your company are not written by marketing professionals.  A great deal of your internal documentation – manuals, reports, meeting minutes, for instance – is not written by trained professionals, either.

If an untrained writer must communicate a difficult or negative message, overwriting is almost a knee-jerk reaction.  It’s easier to try and hide the unpleasant message beneath run-on sentences and polysyllabic words, perhaps with the subconscious hope that the message will be blunted or hidden by all the verbage.

Also, if you’re not sure what you’re trying to say, you’ll explore what you really want to say on paper.  The fix for this is easy:  Figure out what you’re really trying to say, screw up that first draft, then say what you mean simply and directly.

Simple writing is elegant writing.  It helps the message come through with clarity.

Solutions:

• A great deal of documentation will cross your own desk, where you will have an opportunity to simplify.  As soon as you find yourself re-reading a sentence in order to understand the message, you’ll know you’ve found writing that needs pruning.  Once you get into the habit of simplifying, you’ll see writing in need of surgery everywhere you turn.
• Encourage and train subordinates to aim for the same simplicity in their communications.

Font use

These days, with computers that do everything but wipe your nose, and with everyone in your company using one, the less timid are experimenting with the really cool stuff a computer can do.

Fonts are a particular hazard.  They are often overlooked elements of your image that can be completely changed with a few keystrokes.

Fun-loving employees may even download and use some of the really awful ones out there.

Although internal documentation doesn’t have as critical an impact on your image as external documents, there are still a number of non-marketing-department generated documents that do make it out into the public:  Letters, computer forms, sales receipts, invoices, and the holy grail of wannabe computer geeks:  email.

Email and letter formatting

You can’t duck it.  The formatting of your employees’ emails and letters is a direct reflection of the company image and brand.  Do you know what your employees are sending out in your name?

Are they using the horrible fonts?

Worse, are they inserting all those cute little smilies  and emoticons  that can be downloaded by the thousands for free from the Internet?

do they rite in all lower caps ‘n use SMS shorthand? (eg: RU there? i cu.)

What does their signature line say?  Does it have a quote from the latest slasher movie?

What about the <gulp> background image?  Flowers, sunsets, cute babies and the latest Playboy centrefold can all be dropped into the background of an email these days.  They’re fine for private mail, but does a rosy-cheeked cherub really communicate the trustworthiness and solid value your firm will provide your client?

If you think traditional letters are safer, you may need to rethink.  It’s not just a matter of ensuring a letter goes out without spelling errors and grammar gremlins (although simplified writing helps with this, too).  The font and layout of the letter adds subconsiously to a customer’s impression of your company.  Badly laid-out letters looked cramped, clunky and badly composed (yes, they look like they’re poorly written!)  Even before your reader gets beyond the salutation, they’re already braced for the hard work of reading it, and your message may be lost as a result.

Your own letters may be well constructed, but what are your Vice Presidents sending out? And their subordinates?

The solution:

• The solution may already exist.  Your communications and marketing department may have already compiled house standards for letters and electronic communications that dictates the fonts, backgrounds, layouts, signature files, etc.  Now, it’s simply a matter of enforcing those standards as rigorously as you can.  Yes, this stuff matters that much.
• If you don’t already have house standards, or don’t like them, review or create formatting for all company documentation that is pleasing to the eye, and generates a feel that speaks to your image and brand.  Insist that everyone use those standards for everything.  Insisting will ensure the standard is, well, standard.  The customer gets the same feel and look from every document they receive from your company, no matter who is generating it.

Email attachments.

It used to be that a responsible corporation wouldn’t send attachments via email.  These days, especially in bigger corporations and government behemoths, sending letters, faxes, memos and entire documents via email is the expected and preferred method of communication, as it saves tiresome copying and distribution at every point.

Have you considered how the attachments are going out?  There’s two things you need to watch, that you may not have thought of:

1)       The format of the attachment.
Most documents are created in a text editor of some sort – Microsoft Word is common, but there are others.  However, as soon as you send that Word document to another computer, the formatting changes to suit that computer’s already-installed fonts and preferred settings.
A carefully crafted document conforming to your house style may look nothing like what you intended when it reaches the recipient.  Depending on how different the other computer’s settings are – or if, say, it’s a MacIntosh computer – your document could end up looking like a jumbled hash of unreadable characters.

Solution:  Make sure everything that is sent to external (or internal) customers is converted to PDF format.  This will ensure your document arrives looking as you intended, with all fonts and formatting preserved.  PDF even reads well on Blackberries, Palms and other handheld devices.

2)      The name of the attachment.
I’ve seen some very embarrassing names on documents sent out to the public, even when everything else was perfectly respectable.  “kens_lastest_effort,” was the name of one PDF I got, that contained an annual review for services.  Ouch.

Regardless of what you name the document while it’s sitting on your own hard drive, make sure the name it goes out under is a name your recipient will understand, and that won’t leave him snorting bubbles into his coffee.

The name of the attachment is the first thing the recipient sees, and if it isn’t a name that doesn’t explain what’s inside, it’s possible they won’t even open it – they may think that the strangely named document is a virus.

Forwarded messages & subject lines.

Email is more and more becoming the normal mode of doing business.  It’s quick and convenient, and often easier to get an issue sorted out amongst a group of people who can’t meet in person.

But have you watched what goes out to external contacts?

I have received emails from contacts at other corporations that contain a long email trail beneath their top message, and what is contained in that trail is a fascinating, sometimes horrifying, glimpse of the internal politics and personalities of that corporation.

I’ve even read unflattering comments about myself and the questions I asked that started the trail in the first place, because everyone in the chain didn’t bother to edit what came below their own signature.

Contrari-wise, I once received a dry, below-the-belt comment from an associate, that I carefully edited from his message before forwarding the balance of the information on to my superior, with a CC back to him.  He was so grateful for the minor edit, he brought me lunch.

Subject lines are another point of embarassment that need monitoring.  Clean up the subject line before it goes out to an external customer.  Be especially careful about subject lines when dealing with email on a hand-held device, because often the subject is invisible until you shut the email down and look at the summary list.  By then, it could be too late to change it.

Solution:

• Education and awareness is the only cure.  Employees have to become sensitive to the information they’re sending out into the public, which includes everything in the email, not just the portion they wrote.  It’s perfectly acceptable to edit the trail beneath your signature, or delete it altogether.
• Edit your own emails with an eye to what the public gets to see.  Gently point out faux pas to other employees.  They should hopefully only need to be embarassed once to never forget again.
• Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do to take back shoddy internal communications that make it out into the public.  Even the “recall” button common in most email programs only work these days if the recipient agrees to let you have the message back.  Even then, if they’ve already read it, the damage is done.

Secretarial support and email accounts.

As the use of email increases, most secretaries, executive assistants and administrative support people are given access to their executives’ email accounts in order to monitor and control the flood of email.  Often, they’re also given “editing” privledges, which allows them to send an email from their own computer, using their executive’s email account, and the recipient can’t tell that it isn’t actually from the executive himself.

That’s a normal part of doing business.  But the reverse isn’t.

I’ve received emails from client VP’s and executives, and when I opened up the email, found that their secretary had just hit “reply” and dashed off an answer, complete with shoddy English and jargon.

It’s disconcerting.  It’s also an unnecessary reminder that the CEO himself didn’t have time to spare to answer my query.   I would much rather have received an email from the secretary’s own email account, explaining that she was answering on her executive’s behalf.

Solution:

• Again, education is the solution and insisting upon maintenance of standards and awareness of branding and image.

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These are eight tiny considerations that together, can add up to a huge difference in how your customers feel about dealing with your company.  None of these eight can be controlled by your communications department.

Brand sensitivity should filter through your entire organization, for everyone who works for you affects your image.

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Tracy Cooper-Posey is an award-winning writer, editor and copywriter, with ten years experience.  She has edited city and national magazines, teaches writing at college level, and has corporate clients around the globe.  She has also published thirty-three fiction titles.