What Oura Got Right
Newsletter #88
This Week:
Now THAT’s How You Maximize Your Channels
ICYMI: An Original Clarity Scale Story
Brand Snippets: Ffern
Before We Go…
1. Oura’s Crisis Response: From Conspiracy to Clarity
When you offer a complicated product or service, you get the joy of doing double the work to ensure your message is understood. Often, this means taking off our marketing and PR hats for a moment and putting on our translator hats. We need to cut out the industry jargon that no one outside our ecosystem understands (what PR consultant Scott Merritt recently called “jargon monoxide”) and simplify processes until they’re clear at the most basic level.
What happens when you don’t? Oura, a company that makes wearable fitness tracking rings, learned the hard way.
2. ICYMI: AT&T’s Outage Response
We brought back the Clarity Rating Scale for this week’s lead story, so it felt right to revisit one of our original Clarity Rating Scale assessments. This one shows how AT&T communicated with customers during a frustrating outage to its phone and Wifi customers.
How did they score a 3? Read on to find out.
3. Brand Snippets
Ffern is a luxury, small-batch perfume brand that knows how to market. How? By telling you that you probably can’t have it.
Their ads contain beautiful imagery with copy that informs you that they’ve consistently sold-out batch after batch. They never make the same batch twice, creating a sense of FOMO.
Their website prompts you to sign up for the opportunity to maybe get to buy a bottle. A 2024 New York Times article reports that their waitlist, dubbed “the ledger,” has around 500,000 names on it.
4. Before We Go…
From The New York Times: She decides who is famous enough for free U.S. Open tickets.
Amanda Wright plays an important role in promoting the U.S. Open. She’s in charge of the celebrity and influencer program. She’s the one making sure you can’t escape it on your social media feeds and favorite media outlets.
From NPR: PBS cuts 15% of jobs in the wake of its federal funding loss.
Federal cuts of $1.1 billion over two years, paired with the loss of a major grant, have forced PBS to cut 15% of its staff. More cuts are to come as the organization sorts out its next steps, including the elimination of 70 to 80 of NPR’s 246 member stations.
From Inc.: The best marketing campaigns of 2025 so far.
Here’s one to spark some inspiration. Inc. has compiled a list of the most creative and interesting marketing maneuvers we’ve seen this year.
If we bottled The EO Report, it’d have notes of clarity, expertise, and obsessive communications strategy. Forward this to someone who could use a whiff of that.