By the end of the first sentence, most customers have guessed the sandwich is expensive. By the end of the second, they’re wondering what LunchTown could be trying to hide. Halfway through the third, they’re so annoyed by the non-clarifying explanations that they’ve already decided to try the taco shop next door instead.
You can probably recall a dozen exchanges like this from your own life. Airline customer service agents, government spokespeople, nonprofit fundraisers—they’re all masters (or at least frequent practitioners) of the buzzword-laden anti-answer.
So why are so many organizations afraid of giving straightforward responses to simple questions?
At the risk of stating the obvious: it’s because they think being honest won’t reflect well on them. The sandwich is expensive; the product is a dud. The project that took forever didn’t amount to anything in the end. It’s embarrassing to put things so bluntly, so you hide the real headline in a dense block of text and hope people’s eyes glaze over.
Unfortunately, sooner or later the truth tends to come out anyway. And by that time, the organization has lost both the benefit of the doubt and the opportunity to cushion the blow.
If your sandwich costs $25, then you’re selling a very pricey sandwich. There’s no amount of flowery, sensitive language that will change that. But if you have the guts to answer the customer’s question directly, then you’ve not only demonstrated your honesty, you’ve also opened a window for persuasion.
Maybe your sandwiches are expensive because you’re providing top-notch health insurance for your team and free meals for your disabled neighbors. Maybe half the proceeds of every sale go to saving whales, educating children, or protecting rainforests.
Whatever the specifics might be, maybe you have a good reason for telling people something they’d rather not hear.
Is that going to convince every person who walks in the door to pay $25 for a pastrami on rye? Of course not. But it’s almost certainly going to do better than a rambling lecture about Our Values that’s indistinguishable from a hundred other lectures people have already heard from a diverse cast of bullshit merchants.
The most nuanced message is often not the most effective one. Sometimes getting straight to the point is the best way to deliver “bad news.” There will always be a percentage of people who aren’t willing to hear it in any form—but you might be surprised how many appreciate a rare dose of honesty in our grift-ridden world.
Because the last word is rarely the end of the conversation.
Much like penguins, we enjoy bringing you little gifts to show we care:
The LGBTQ advocacy organization Equality Federation is hiring a Vice President of External Affairs—fully remote, $170k a year plus a lot of benefits.
If a survey of 800 HR leaders that found 9 in 10 actively avoid hiring recent college graduates can teach us anything, it’s that commissioning a survey which confirms an influential demographic’s gut instincts is always a good way to make headlines!
The 2024 word of the year was “rawdog,” and we can only imagine what horrors await in 10 months :)
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Guessing about what the future holds is an amusing and low-risk pastime—most of the time, newspapers won’t write stories about you admitting you were wrong—but we still think it’s best to be realistic. We also believe it’s important to have a sense of humor about these things. Because have you seen the world out there? So, having established the parameters of “practical” and “fun,” here are the themes that (we hope) will define communications in 2026:
In many ways, “know your audience” is the comms world’s version of “profit = revenue - cost.” ... To be fair, few people in any line of work would argue that knowing their audience doesn’t matter. They just don’t know what they don’t know, or they put too much faith in what they think they know.
The platform doesn't drive traffic to your site. The ads don't convert. And these days most of the "engagement" comes from spam bots or virulent bigots. It's time to move on from Twitter—but to where?
