STORIES FROM THE FRONT: What we learned at retail

Been a regular devotee of Communicating By Design?  Then you’ll know we’re passionate, even batty about visual therapy; we go shopping often to get a regular dose of ideas and (in)sanity.

No kidding.

Our latest Eureka! emanates from the year-or-so-old retail tempest, called “showrooming.”  It’s an activity by a consumer who visits or calls a bricks and mortar outlet to check out products, then goes home, clicks, and buys online. 

At least one august b-school research claims that move is all about price.  Sure:  “Who’s got it cheapest” is definitely a motivator for many would-be buyers.  Other surveying institutions attribute the trend to less-than-satisfactory in-store customer service.  [And who among us can’t throw a stone, even at some of the best in the business?]

Target, for instance, has countered by pulling Kindle Fire and other Amazon products from its shelves. Some merchants add services or special deals to entice in-store buying.

Now it’s time to turn that topic inside out and relate it to our issues:  How many candidates or potential employees showroom your Web site?  Or surf the Web, even read print media and ask friends and family to check out your company and the deal it offers to its associates?  What does vault.com (or other online evaluators) say about working at Company XYZ?  What kind of “customer” service do prospects receive when contacted about a position … even when they’ve advanced to being a high-potential candidate?  How well do they understand what the company’s all about … if they’ve only clicked through your Web presence?

Yes, countering this slightly different form of showrooming is the province of human resources.  It should also be the territory of marketing and branding and design and communications, in partnership with the CPO.  Because no one function, no one department owns 100 percent of the real estate that attracts (or not) new employees. 

We all cover the front.

SAD AND GLAD ... AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

With Valentine’s Day in the recent past, we were musing about expressions of like and love in these e-days.  If not before.

Few realize that, even before Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee was born, Morse Code and Puck magazine and satirist Ambrose Bierce all talked about love and kisses and vertical emoticons and snigger points.  Though a Carnegie Mellon University student might have proposed the idea in the 1980s, today, emoticons – and their Japanese smartphone cousins, emoji – have become world-wide substitutes for saying how we feel, digitally.   Teens we know use these pictographs extensively in texts (in fact, often without words).  And yes, we’ll admit a guilty pleasure in occasionally using a smiley or frowny or LOL symbol when we’re e-talking with good friends and colleagues.

Think with us, though.  How frequently do these symbols truly portray what we’re up to emotionally, in the moment?  Is it easy to show our concerns or fears within our smartphones or Outlook or Lotus Notes?  Have your colleagues misunderstood your intent within the message’s content?  And if so, how long did it take you to explain what you meant?

That’s been the task lately of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, charged with interpreting political sentiments of Twitter feeds.  The most difficult analysis, says a spokesperson, is determining sarcasm.  The computer does so in a unique combination featuring human and data-mining services, but not always successfully.

Remedies run from adopting new pictographs (yet another visual to remember!) to avoiding the sentiment altogether.  One reason to discontinue these pictures:  Researchers have discovered that millennials and younger tweeters use emoticons sarcastically as well as to show a lack of feeling altogether.

No surprise:  But why don’t we, as the ultimate communication and marketing professionals, set the new standard?  Like picking up the phone.  And meeting face to face. 

THE ART OF TALK

These days, conversation just might be the 2013 version of texting. 

Then, again, a second talk trend seems to contradict that. 

One positive we’ve noticed, personally and in the media:  Encouraging, even engaging all around the table in hearty dialogue during mealtimes. “The family that converses together, stays together” is how the adage might play out. And families and couples, from the Obamas to, yes, Joe the Plumber and his peers, tune up the conversations at dinner.  Some focus on more meaty subjects, like politics and the state of the green world.  Others, simply on sharing the day’s events.  There’s no right or wrong way, say proponents, to talk.  Just do it.  Minus the television, cell phones, video games, and other tech distractions.

Trend two:  Casual restaurants (Applebee’s, Chili’s, even P.F. Chang) are installing mini-screens at the tabletop, offering diners the options to order, play games, and pay.  And not communicate.  Quite a few of these pilots claim great success in driving more frequent table turns, increasing dessert orders, and helping determine if the kiosks will become more permanent profit centers.  Parent reactions are mixed; waiters, even more so.  In this not-so-giving economy, we get it:  It’s time to continue seeking additional sources of revenue. 

We as proponents of the art of talk aren’t thrilled with the advent of diningIT.  There are good and valid reasons for eating outside the home, whether it’s a choice of more Top Chef-like menus (sorry, Mom!) or simply a relaxing escape from daily cooking.  Inserting technology into the experience negates personalized service offered by wait-persons and eager-to-serve counter people and, most important, limits our human interactions.

We know it’s hard enough to get managers and employees to talk casually and meaningfully with each other about work that matters.  So advocating that anyone adopt another tech-y habit is akin to endorsing “no talk zones” … everywhere.  Or is it enough to endorse the art of dialogue, as does Robert Louis Stevenson?  “Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health”?

SAY IT AIN'T SO [with not-so-abject apologies]

Sometimes, it’s just tough to think of a compelling headline

We toyed with “Loose lips sink businesses.”    Or:  “Parse the ones you want to keep.”

We’ll spare you (and us).   We’re talking the decline of grammar, at work and at home, a subject that’s engaged (and often enraged) more than quite a few writers, journalists, and columnists in a literal war of words.  

The reasons for misusing affect-effect, I and me, dangling modifiers and the like are multifarious:   Little educational emphasis on writing principles, the domination of social media, even the informality of our world today.   The rise of OMG, LOL, pictorial emoticons and 140 characters, by themselves, negate elegant phrasing and paragraphs.

No one agrees on one overriding cause.  Nor, unfortunately, about the solutions.   Nearly 50 percent of the 400-something employers surveyed in 2012 by SHRM (the Society for Human Resource Management) and AARP (we hope you know the acronym) indicated they were increasing training, and offering more printed and online guidelines, coaches, and templates.  Again, no single panacea.

Generally, those most alarmed by the trend underscore its negative outcomes, from mistakes in marketing materials that have to be corrected to not-so-great client/customer perceptions.  The conclusion by most?   Good grammar, which shouldn’t be an oxymoron, is the architecture of good writing and, by extension, good thinking and clear understanding.

Which brings us to a remedy.  How about reviving the antique art of sentence diagramming? Created in the mid 1800s by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, it’s an illustrated map, also called a parse tree, of the logic behind a sentence.  It combines visuals with the appeal of a puzzle, showing how each word fits into the structure of a sentence.  Think building blocks, with easy-to-use lines and diagonals.

No doubt, this elementary school module had its foes.  After all, parsing a sentence is akin to eating canned non-gourmet peas that have been cooked to mush (thanks to my Mom).  But then I hear her voice:  “Do it; it’ll be good for you.”