Business Comms Vs The Modern Landscape
Communications is a very broad term, still used very loosely by companies. The thing about communications, regardless of company, is that it needs to be empathetic, decisive and clear. Most of all, it needs to be understood and engaged with. The point of communications is to deliver insight. Insight, which is always being delivered with a specific outcome in mind. What is the outcome that we want to achieve with this marketing message, or with this PR release? Know it, or don’t publish.
Unless you define the goal well, design the message to correspond to the goal and clearly deliver, communication only creates noise, causes confusion and detracts from the overall goal. For me, these things never change.
Internal Struggles & Comms Aspirin
One thing that modern, tech companies have in common is hitting the ceiling of complexity, mostly caused by exponential growth driven by extremely competitive environments and investment models driving the need to acquire daily active users. This internal growth (manpower, processes, workload) has made it increasingly difficult to, simply put, get things done. Companies take years to break the ceiling by rebuilding the relationships between departments, creating mission teams, devising new collaboration models and applying additional focus to an overwhelming number of competing goals. This is one of the areas where communication acts as a bridge like nothing else actually can. It can cut down your time to productivity vs. exponential growth to half, if done right.
The customization aspect of communications in such an environment is extremely key. Where and how you deliver organizational messages to target audiences (I’ve always hated that word because “audience” implies people are only here to listen, when in fact feedback is what makes any communication complete) can make a big impact on its overall success. Not only in terms of internal impact, but with the complexity challenges externally.
Staying on message and delivering unique value in the era of digital saturation is the main external challenge. This mostly starts with research, which has to be qualitative, quantitative and emotional, to find and unearth the actual value that exists in the company — be it in terms of culture, product, people or knowledge, alongside goals. It requires not only active collaboration with ownership (and other key stakeholders) but also a trust factor, which helps you, a comms person, translate the actual value, not just your impression or what you were told the value is. The next big challenge is translating, or communicating that value in a strategic manner in line with key objectives, but in a new way.
Misconceptions About Narrative Design
Narrative design is something that helps us with this. People, I think, wrongly look at narrative design as fitting only when creating a new product category. To me, narrative design is simply talking about unearthed value in a unique way, which then becomes one of the essential points of differentiation.
Today, with obnoxious user experience expectations (around curated, personalized presentation) and fighting for space in the most competitive landscape humanity has ever seen, narrative design can literally mean the difference between your product being looked at as fresh, cool or even rejuvenated (hey.com is a perfect example when we look at email) or just another “email client”.
In a way, narrative design might be the best example of narrative design.
Most marketing people make the mistake of being stuck in the digital past when looking at visibility. Being seen is only part of the equation, not the whole thing. You need to add emotional layers and uniqueness to the product to stand out, because everyone is already standing out. You do this by telling a more compelling story.
A compelling story is usually unique, so this is how I approach narrative design.
When I hear about a thing for the first time, or start re-thinking things, I isolate from all present opinions about the topic and try to gather my semi-informed thoughts about it. At the time, you might be operating with less facts and knowledge about the subject, but given how it’s still roughly focused around your field of expertise some of your initial thoughts will still be valid. And very unique. Once you do further research and understand the topic in depth, you will still be able to offer a genuine perspective (or a unique take) on the topic/problem. Not just parroting what everyone else is saying — which delivers no new value to the conversation.
Perfect route to our next topic. The evolution of the media landscape and the adjustment of the comms role.
It’s more crucial than ever to deftly navigate and control the message on a rising number of media platforms (places like Reddit vs TikTok, but also click-first mainstream media) with key audiences very much differing in personality. Then there is also a matter of communicating something in an increasingly vocal digital landscape where everyone, no matter their level of expertise in the field, is likely to address, discuss and voice their opinions on. There’s tremendous influence and reach to be gained if you can communicate effectively and create compelling narratives for people to connect to, and evangelize further. But there was never a bigger danger of your message being perverted, for a lack of a better word.
The real danger in today’s media landscape isn’t as much about being invisible, as it’s about being misunderstood, misrepresented. This is why it’s always better to stay silent unless you have anything insightful to add, or you’re simply not convinced that you fully understand what it is you should be saying. There, I talked about work. Ugh.
Until next time, bon voyage!
