16 March 2010

On-message?

“GOOD MORNING CAPITALISM”.
That was what greeted me as I cycled the last 100m towards the front door of the office today. A hastily (and rather poorly) erected banner has been affixed to the building 2 doors down from Redhouse Lane Towers.

Now, I’m not really against the idea of people squatting disused buildings. With the cost of housing so high and so many empty properties, I do feel that there should be more effort made to make better use of the built environment before we embark on new and ever more costly construction projects.

So I approached work with an amused grin, which all of a sudden became a wry smile as I noticed the bottle of Coca Cola chilling on the window ledge next to the sign. Was this an incredibly well thought out piece of post modern irony? An advertisement which on the one hand pillories capitalism, whilst simultaneously lining the pockets of one of the largest corporations in the world? Or was it simply a failure to ensure that everybody in the building was ‘on message’.

As my first contribution to the Redhouse Lane blog, my question to communicators is this: Is everybody in your organisation saying the same thing and heading in the same direction? Can any communication output (blog, company newsletter, press release or hastily erected hand-written banner) be truly effective if there are elements within the organisation who haven’t fully bought into your central messages? I don’t think so.

Get your own house in order and get 'on-message' before what you are saying is diluted by sloppy thinking. Or bad product placement…