The Corporate Textbook

Have a read:

„An exciting milestone for BRAND Y: From grassroots to profitability, providing premium services across a multi-channel distribution text generator in support of our mission! We’re a lean, fast-paced company with incredible product teams aiming for the latest innovations with our storytelling tool for B2B. We’ve ambitiously gone from a dedicated venture to an established brand, enabling people and organizations to achieve more with our products. Two years of focus on building the foundations for our change-making efforts have now been transformed into a sustainable basis.”

All you remember at this point is that someone has achieved something. Now, let’s see how we can use those 80-something words a bit better:

“They say when dedicated minds work in unison, great things happen. Now, we’re finally able to proudly join that illustrious history with BRAND Y. Only two years ago, we started with a team of just five to make a splash in automated marketing text tools, and that splash is now rocking quite a few boats. On our journey, we have gathered more and more uniquely-skilled people around us to push our tools to be more precise, reliable, and to-the-point. We’re standing on firm ground now, ready to shoulder the future by your side.”

See how the corporate textbook might sound professional, but misses the mark? The problem with highly-polished and multi-approved language is that if everybody is doing it, nothing stands out anymore. It’s like LinkedIn posts. They’re even a meme at this point.

How many world-famous novels have been written by committees? Was your favorite movie made along safe lines of fifty-plus people agreeing on every scene? Who wrote the lyrics to your favorite song, was it a department? Have you ever heard a brand story late at night at a bonfire? Can you even tell your favorite joke to everyone, including your grandparents?

The oldest tales that survive in cultural memory are the ones that resonate the most with our curiosity: How does the story end? The human mind wants to be surprised, engaged, led on new pathways. You either take your target audience with you on that path by making them wonder what happens next or you sink in the sea of mediocracy.

You cannot stand out by doing what everybody already does all the time. There is a reason we skip ads. They’re not interesting anymore. But we used to even talk about ads in school, remember that? If you look at the 100 most effective marketing campaigns in history, all of them excelled at one thing: Telling an actual story. And that’s where true writers come in.

Steinschmatz

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