Businesses need to stop looking for a public pat on the back and gold stars
Businesses must realise that just bragging about how good they are is not a great communication strategy. They won’t win a gold star for simply doing their job, writes Simon Neville
Every few days, I find myself telling businesses that, no matter how great they are, no matter how positive their purpose is or impressive their fundraising, simply bragging about their success won’t guarantee a spot on the front page of every newspaper.
Perhaps I’m doing my job wrong and I should just say “yes, of course we can action that”, then, either don’t do it, or try to reverse engineer it. But maybe over-promising is a column for another day.
The truth is “business does well” isn’t news. As a journalist, when I received the calls from companies asking me to write about how great they are, I would tell them it isn’t one for me and asked if they’d like to be put through to the advertising department instead.
I would typically tell them the example of a hospital curing a patient. If I was to read that story in a newspaper, my first instinct will be “how bad is the hospital that curing a patient becomes news?”
On the weekend, a perfect example of this genre came along to underscore this. I think it could usurp my hospital analogy.
The story was a look at how excellent the passport office is. With summer holidays almost upon us, the report went into details about how quickly applications are being processed and how great staff morale is. A perfect story the Home Office press team will be proud of.
But you don’t have to think back far to remember just how awful the passport office was a year ago when a huge post-Covid backlog and staff shortages threatened to ruin holidays for thousands desperate to get away.
Newspapers were scathing, laden with case studies of families in situations where one member couldn’t get a passport, meaning the entire holiday collapsed.
Politicians shouted about something needing to be done, as they reeled off their own constituents’ examples, and the government tried to reassure the public that it was dealing with the backlog.
Therefore, in this case, the positive story was “news” by virtue of the fact the passport office pulling itself together was worthy of attention.
Hopefully this example can be seen by business leaders as to why the simple idea of landing “positive” news is so tricky.
The options for them are essentially: you can ensure your business goes through an existential crisis, then herald the turnaround and reflect on what went wrong.
Or, the second option is to accept that “our company is great” is more likely to appear in a publication as an advert rather than a news story.
The third route is asking yourself: how can my business become part of the national conversation? The final option requires a firm to identify the three or four topics on everyone’s lips right now – the economy, cost of living, inflation, interest rates – and offer up information, insight or analysis that can hit those areas.
There are opportunities for businesses to make a mark in that space. Think, for example, of Wise, the fintech, offering savings accounts which pass on the Bank of England’s interest rate hikes. Meanwhile, the rest of the banks have faced a bollocking from MPs.
Another example of this phenomenon could be the high street lenders.
If they wanted to, they should be talking about new mortgage products or support they are giving to victims of fraud.
But any business in that space would also need to recognise that the positive story about supporting customers is only of interest now, because the perception of the sector is one of failing to protect people.
If a company is happy with taking ownership of the problems and issues that have come before – either at their business or in their sector – they can emerge as a true leader.
If they want to think they can get a “well done” without any acknowledgement that it must be juxtaposed with the bad bits, I wish them the best of luck.