Newsletter #147
This Week
The Gift of Role Clarity
ICYMI: Bringing Your Audience Along
Spotted
Before We Go…
1. Eliminating Unforced Errors: Role Clarity
Maybe it’s because I’m a Nebraskan, but fall sports season is my favorite. Volleyball, football and a little hockey sprinkled in? That’s how we spend weekends at our house.
I’m a fairly casual observer. I can’t tell you much about different formations, plays or strategies, but I can tell you one thing that’s glaringly obvious to me every time: miscommunication. The mistakes that happen when a player isn’t sure of their role or misses an assignment.
Dropped balls. Missed defensive assignments. Wrong routes.
They’re all unforced errors that give the competition an advantage without requiring them to do much of anything.
The same thing happens on communications teams. A task on a project doesn’t get assigned. Assumptions are made that everyone understands the plan. There’s a belief that everyone knows their role.
Except, many times, they don’t.
Here are three reasons this might be happening and how to course-correct.
2. ICYMI: You Might Be Assuming Too Much
Since we’re talking about assumptions this week, here’s a throwback EO Report on the subject.
While our main story looks at the assumptions we make internally, this one explores how you might be assuming your customers know more than they actually do. Here’s how to close that gap and bring them along.
3. Spotted
Last week, we shared how Coterie, a diaper brand, published an ad in Golf Digest. It made waves because baby brands rarely, if ever, buy placements in publications primarily consumed by men.
Sephora is taking a similar approach. As Justin Taylor posts on LinkedIn, the makeup company brought on comedian and director Seth Rogen to be a face in their holiday campaign, targeting the husbands and boyfriends buying gifts for their significant others.
4. Before We Go…
From PR Daily: Be the CCO: What the Cheesecake Factory should do about its political moment
The Cheesecake Factory, bizarrely, found itself in the center of a political battle this week when former President Barack Obama made a jab that current President Donald Trump’s White House decorating style looked like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” PR Daily asked readers what they would do to respond to the moment if they were the company’s CCO. Here are their responses.
From Digiday: How Lush quit social media ads and still drove growth
In 2021, Lush stepped away from social media platforms when it was revealed that Facebook knowingly developed the platform in a way that caused harm to the mental health of teens. It seems unfathomable to succeed in marketing without social media, but the brand has continued to flourish. Here’s how.
From The New York Times: Netflix is great at making money. Its problem is keeping viewers hooked.
“Netflix has an engagement problem, and that’s a worrying trend going forward...Users are drifting toward TikTok and YouTube for the attention Netflix used to own, and the trimmed full-year outlook is basically management admitting they can’t see a way back to growth on the current trajectory. Netflix needs another hit on the content side.”