When done right, an effective sustainability story can strengthen your business by uniting employees, customers, and shareholders around a common goal. To craft a sustainability story that resonates with employees and consumers, it’s critical to translate your sustainability story into simpler language. Here’s how you can start.
To celebrate Pride last year, we invited our colleagues, friends, and family to share how they articulate their identify in our first Language of LGBTQ+ Identity. This year, we’re inviting new team members to share, as well as those who previously contributed, to highlight how the ways they articulate their identities might have evolved over the past year.
Since the emergence of COVID-19, maslansky + partners has tracked corporate communications via social media, press releases, and emails to understand communication trends and what we can learn from them. One area of focus that has emerged is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. With so much new language — one word in particular stood out to us: “community.” It is being used in many cases to replace American. For example, the Black community instead of Black Americans, or the Asian community instead of Asian Americans, or the Hispanic community instead of Hispanic Americans.
Season One of HearSay ends with a bang: the smartest, savviest, + stupidest messages of 2021 so far. Michael and Lee are joined by HearSay veterans Keith and Katie to give their takes on the messages that have stood out: from Voltswagen, to Harry and Megan’s Oprah interview (and the royal response), to President Biden’s infrastructure plan and the true pronunciation of “cheugy.” They focus in not just in some of the biggest language moments of the year so far — but what we can all learn from them.
With everyone telling their sustainability story, are you cutting through the crowd? Have you found one bold idea to center your communications around? It used to be that sustainability experts evaluated how companies were performing in this area. But now, customers and employees alike are paying attention. The old language of sustainability doesn’t work now. This week on HearSay, Michael and Lee welcome back podcast alumni Will Howard and Sachi Pettit to talk about all things sustainability, including how to respond appropriately to your critics, examples of successful corporate sustainability communication frameworks (from programs/products like Starbucks’ Shared Planet, Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan, and Adidas’ Ocean Shoe), and how to depoliticize your sustainability language.
Which audience is most important for your business? Many say it’s clients or customers. But often the most overlooked and valuable audience is your employees. Whether it’s communicating about the post-COVID return, your mission and values, or your new offerings, how you engage your employees is critical to your business success. This week on HearSay, Michael and Lee welcome Larry Moscow and Katie Cronen to talk about all of that and more, including why some words like “agile,” efficient,” “innovative” and “transformational” might not be effective and what language you should use instead.
So much is written about how important purpose is to a business especially now. But what is purpose? How do you become a purpose driven organization rather than just a company with a purpose statement? Podcast alumni Katie Cronen and Sachi Pettit join Michael and Lee to talk about identifying scalable stories, getting your purpose in front of the right people, and the value of a master narrative. They use poignant examples from companies like Toyota, Airbnb, Google, and Hershey to help you find the symbols that bring your company’s story to life.
What’s the difference between a glass half full and a glass half empty? A school with the most graduates and a school with the largest alumni network? Plant-based protein and synthetic meat? In this week’s edition of HearSay, Michael and Lee are joined by colleagues Will Howard and Katie Cronen to talk about framing — the heart and soul of m+p’s language expertise. Join us for some of our favorite framing examples and why it’s an important exercise for companies.
maslansky + partners’ Senior Vice Presidents Maria Boos and Katie Cronen join Michael and Lee to talk about the language of customer experience and why it’s so important to get the language right. Especially now, what makes it harder? How can we do it right? We share what we have learned from companies in the marketplace today and work that we’ve done in the past. They cover the one question all communicators should be able to answer, how to define success, and the importance of intuition and simplicity.
Michael and Lee are joined by colleague Sachi Pettit in a conversation about when companies should speak out and what it takes to be a leader, especially on difficult issues. They talk about confronting racism, equality, and how to find common ground even when it seems impossible. They talk about specific case studies from Proctor & Gamble and a project where they found a way to engage even the most skeptical audiences in the climate movement.
