In-house Essays: Watch Your Language

You know when someone speaks at you and they're just wording? It sounds like it should be meaningful so you nod along but nothing is sticking in your brain.

Now imagine you're the one doing the talking and your audience are nodding along but haven’t understood a thing you've said.

This was happening to me all the time without me realising it. Inevitably I learned that the only way to help people understand what I was saying was by changing my language, because the concepts I was describing aren’t complicated, my delivery was.  

Like all specialists, inhouse marketing and creative teams bump into this issue on a regular basis. The trick is to hear yourself as someone else might.

Marketing, advertising, and design are full of gobbledegook.

The 4Ps, Brand Strategy, Marketing Mix, Design Thinking, Quant and Qual, Funnels, you get the idea. And some terms are shared by Tech, Product and Growth but mean different things, and we all think we’re right.

Our ambition was to create a great brand experience, but for that to happen we had to learn how to talk to everyone at what3words.

In 2018, the marketing and studio team started talking about “the what3words way”. It was an attempt to adjust the language and processes we were using so they were more commonly understood by as many people in the business as possible.

We needed to work in ways that were fit for purpose, not just comfortable or familiar.  We took inspiration from our colleagues across what3words and reused language and concepts that were working for them rather than forcing them to adjust to us.

The next step was to make the creative process easy to understand, so we invited everyone in.

Creative work can sometimes feel like it's your baby, you don't want to show it to the world until it's fully formed and has the best chance of surviving the critics. Part of that protective instinct is also about protecting your job. If you're a copywriter or a designer, criticism can feel like a personal attack and poor feedback can make the work awful.

We give everyone access to copy docs and presentation decks as standard practice.

What we’ve found is that we get to better solutions, much faster, by working openly and asking project stakeholders to participate in the creative process early.

The side effect is that everyone becomes familiar with our jargon and realises the work isn’t that easy.

Don't make the mistake of thinking what3words is a democracy, someone still needs to make a decision about the work, but all stakeholders have had the chance to come on the journey, give comment, and understand why the final choices were made.

It’s quite rare for us to redo a piece of work because of miscommunication.

And finally, we also coach everyone on how to give useful creative feedback.

After all, it’s not just the marketing and studio team who have an obligation to make themselves clearly understood.