Somewhere in every company there is a sentence worth printing. It is rarely on the website.
It usually turns up halfway through a meeting, when somebody stops performing and just explains what the business actually does and why they bother. Everyone in the room recognises it. Then the meeting moves on, and the website keeps saying "innovative solutions for a changing world".
Why more never fixes it#
The instinct, when communication is not landing, is to add. Another channel, another campaign, a refreshed palette, a louder headline. It almost never works, because the problem was not volume. The problem was that the strong thing was buried under the weak things, and adding more weak things buries it further.
So the work starts in the other direction. What is here that nobody chose on purpose? What language was borrowed from a competitor? What has been repeated so long that it stopped meaning anything? Take those off the table and see what is still standing.
What is still standing is usually the thing the company was built on.
Print and digital, in that order of respect#
A brand that only exists on a screen is a brand that only exists while somebody is scrolling. That is a thin kind of existence.
Something printed behaves differently. It gets kept, or passed on, or left on a desk where someone reads it a week later. The two are not rivals — a piece that runs as a publication and as a campaign and as a series of posts is one voice reaching people in the different ways they actually live. But it has to be planned as one voice, not adapted into one afterwards.
The test#
The standard is simple enough to say and hard enough to hit: would this still be right in five years, and will anyone remember it?
Most communications fail both. The ones that pass are the ones that were true before they were written down.
This is a placeholder post, and it is deletable — but the argument in it is not.