Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Our words have a stock imagery problem

Stock metaphors are diluting your message.

Stephen Waddington recently published a fun blog post about business jargon. He asked people which bits of business jargon they loved to hate and organised the responses into a structured list.

Social media went wild for it and everyone agreed we hate jargon. And yet it is everywhere. Indeed, it is the commonness of certain phrases that makes them jargon. So how do we free ourselves from its clutches?

A good place to start is stock photography. Just like jargon, every right thinking person hates stock photography. We despise its over-acted poses. We loathe its homogeneity. And, above all, we hate its omnipresence.

The solution to avoiding poor stock imagery is simple: get better images. You can search for images with greater nuance. You can pay more to access a better quality image library. Or, budgets allowing, you can commission original work. Doing these things takes time, money or both.

Browsing through Stephen’s list of jargon, it’s striking how many phrases employ imagery.

Thinking outside of the box
Low hanging fruit
Lipstick on a pig
Blue sky thinking

Our jargon problem is a stock image problem. This one is about the images we conjure with words. As with stock photos, the solution is simple: get better images. Doing so will take time, money or both. But the cost of failing to find better images is an audience that switches off.

Whether in meetings, at conferences or in the various bits of branded content that are churned out every day, stock metaphors lose you eyeballs and ears and, most importantly, the minds they are connected to.

Does radical engagement mark the death of CSR?

Evolving Influence, in partnership with the PRCA, recently hosted a breakfast debate to discuss Lord Browne’s new book, Connect, which is a Sunday Times bestseller.

Tommy Stadlen, entrepreneur and co-author of the book, joined Evolving Influence founder Karan Chadda and Mary Whenman, President of Women in PR to discuss one of the books most provocative conclusions: CSR is dead.

In this video, filmed immediately after the event, Tommy provides an overview of the book and its findings.

The controversial topic led to a fulsome debate with strong contributions and personal experiences shared by the panellists and audience alike. For me, there were three key points to take from the discussion:

Competitive advantage

Doing good isn’t a ‘nice to have’. Research quoted in the book has found that companies that engage with society outperform their peers by 2% annually in terms of share price performance. Moreover, that return is consistent over time. In an age where new technology, low borrowing rates and a general anti big business mood means that companies find it hard to find and maintain a position of competitive advantage, radical engagement and connected leadership offer an attractive commercial opportunity.

Authenticity

Calls for greater authenticity are as commonplace in PR and marketing as discussions of big data, disruption and integration. Its mention often leads to weary sighs and yet, as the whole room agreed, executives and businesses almost always speak in bland, homogenised and often meaningless language.

If it’s comfortable, you’re not doing it right.

The problem isn’t just about language. It’s about being more open, engaging in conversation your audience and, when mistakes happen, being truthful about it. Authenticity, ultimately, is about having an open culture and this can be scary for companies. As Tommy says, “if it’s comfortable, you’re not doing it right.”

Is CSR is dead?

I think the answer to this question isn’t definitive, but it is mostly “yes”.

If CSR is an add on, something done by a team that has little contact or influence on a company’s operations, then it’s definitely dead.

If, however, a CSR function influences a business. For example, if it helps reduce water usage or minimise waste. If it helps reconcile how a firm affects society, then it isn’t dead. It’s exactly what’s needed.

Many marketing, PR and brand experts will say that the latter is exactly what a modern CSR function should look like, but I’m not confident that we can say such modernity is the norm.

This post was originally published here at evolvinginfluence.co.uk.

Disconnected communications?

ConnectConnect, Lord Browne’s latest book poses serious questions for the aspiration of public relations in the boardroom.

Lord Browne’s latest book Connect was published last week. You can’t have missed hearing about it. He had a column in The Sunday Times, an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and a smattering of other coverage. It was very well promoted.

Browne’s publicist did a great job, but if they were to read the book, their heart might sink at some of the implications its ideas have for the future of public relations. In particular, for the corporate public relations functions that run Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and external relations programmes.

This isn’t a book review so I’m going to summarise Browne’s core argument, present three salient points and recommend that you read the book.

CSR is so last century

Lord Browne’s core argument is that business needs to take account of the wider social context within which it operates and, in doing so, the most successful businesses will be those that contribute to society through the core of what they do. He calls it Connected Leadership. He believes that CSR, the tool currently used by business to engage with society is too detached from actual business functions.

None of what he says is revolutionary. The idea that businesses should have a purpose beyond profits is pretty popular these days. Most of us will advise clients that the best CSR comes from doing things that align closely with what a business does, that philanthropy unrelated to what you do is pretty pointless from a commercial perspective.

His conclusions, however, call for a step change. He argues for rolling back CSR teams, that those managing business units take control of engaging with stakeholders, that the business value of societal goals be built into business planning and that businesses become radically transparent. All of this, he says, should start from the CEO and work its way down a company. It takes corporate communications and calls for it to be stripped down and its responsibilities to be spread across operational teams.

A fifth and a third

The book’s findings are underpinned by a McKinsey study among 2,000 executives from around the world. Its two key findings are that, “less than 20% reported frequent success in influencing state and civil society decisions.” And yet, the, “value at stake from plausible government intervention alone represents approximately one third of corporate profits.”

The message is that external relations as it currently stands is underperforming. The book details other data that indicate business leaders believe there is a lack of capacity and capability in their external relations at present.

J&J

Johnson & Johnson’s response to the Tylenol crisis is well known. It is well known for a reason. It is the standout example of how to handle a crisis. But the Tylenol crisis happened in 1982. I was only a year old. It is still the go to case study when discussing crisis communications. This isn’t because of a dearth of crises in the intervening period. It is telling (and somewhat depressing) that there are few other case studies of best practice.

Smarter Planet

On a similar theme, IBM’s Smarter Planet and Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan are used as examples of the importance and power of having a purpose. These are examples that are used time and again in various books, conference presentations and pitches. They’re used because they are good and, crucially, successful examples. However, the issue, again, is that there are too few examples.

These three points coupled to Browne’s broad point about the need for purpose and engagement to be more closely meshed within businesses, point to a failure to inspire, and demonstrate value to senior executives. They point to disconnected communications.

Read the book. There will be bits you agree with and others with which you will strongly disagree. Crucially, it poses difficult questions about the way businesses operate and engage with their stakeholders.

This was originally published as a guest post here on Stephen Waddington’s blog.

The properties of reputation

Reputation is both simple and complex. At first glance, it’s very simple indeed; it’s what people think of you. However, when you try to formalise it and then try to measure it, things gets much more tricky.

Borrowing from science, it is sometimes helpful to observe a subject’s properties in order to better understand it.

I’ve listed some of the properties of reputation below. I’ve found them helpful in understanding its complexity and managing it. Do you agree with them? Would you add to them or remove any of them?

Divisible

Reputation is divisible right down to the individual – you can have a different reputation among different groups.

Connected

Reputation is connected – if you change your reputation among one group, your reputation among others might change too.

Clustered

Some people or groups have more influence over your reputation than others.

Irregular

Reputation cannot be accumulated or diminished in standardised units – it cannot be spent like money. This does not mean you cannot draw upon a good reputation during troubling moments

Sticky downward

It’s easier to lose a good reputation than it is to build one.

Schemes and syllables

As the summer draws to a close, it feels like a good time to take stock of where we are with Poetry by Numbers.

A lot has been achieved. Working with economists, pollsters, programmers and tech founders, our poets have created art. More than that, we’ve created art that has a purpose and enthused our audience.

People have sent me emails saying they’ve used some of our turns of phrase in their presentations and meetings. We’ve created images with words that are now being used outside of high-minded art. That’s a real sign of success.

One of the best parts of running this project is how quickly poets have engaged with it. We’ve had submissions sent in independently, completely unsolicited but very gratefully received. We’ve not published every poem we’ve received but have tried in every instance to provide constructive feedback.

We couldn’t have got this far without the backing of our growing list of contributing poets. I believe poets have embraced the project because data analysis is, at its heart, a search for patterns. Poetry, at its technical core, embraces patterns too.

Whether it’s the rhyming schemes so prevalent in Western poetry or the tight meter structure of ghazals from the Middle East and Indian Sub-Continent, patterns of rhythm and rhyme are found in different cultures of poetry. The language of numbers is present too, referenced in terms including the classic couplets, quatrains and octaves. There’s probably a blogpost to be written on this topic. Keep your eyes peeled for it.

Anyway, we’ve been scheming all summer to make sure we have a stand out autumn. We’ll be publishing more poems, including some created through conversations with data specialists. We’ll also be spreading the word at events and by producing videos of performance poetry. The first event outing for the project will be at The Tech Off on 30 September. I’ll be pitching the value of bringing poetry to data against competing creative technology ideas. Come along and support us, sign up here.

If you’d like to get involved with Poetry by Numbers, either by helping us scheme or by contributing syllables, then please get in touch.