One of the challenges that many businesses face is increased competition. That’s probably the understatement of the century. I think our current financial meltdown is a textbook case of how ‘too-big-to-fail’ entities mismanaged the competitive environment. How companies respond to increased pressures is revealing – and not always in a good way.
This gets even trickier at smaller companies who may not employ the kinds of checks and balances and LEGAL oversights/constraints that larger companies routinely employ. So let me segue into copywriting and how competitive pressures and copywriting can, like a pretzel, get twisted and baked.
Smaller company “A” chooses, out of short-sightedness or budgetary constraints, to have “Joe” the head of sales, write the copy for the company website. Joe is an average writer and is known as a top salesperson, but Joe is also known for “inflating like an air mattress on steroids” the claims he makes for his company’s products.
Joe believes that no one ever checks the claims that are made — especially the ones on a company website. “Who the hell is going to call us and ask us to prove something? What loser would do that? No one does that.”
Maybe he’s right. Maybe no one will call. But they probably won’t call for anything else either because people have a way of sniffing out poseurs. And the other problem this creates is that Joe, by writing things that are simply not true, has made his company a liar. And if the company’s website has on its homepage a claim that everyone in that company knows is not true, then how does that impact the rest of the employees?
What a given company says about itself in the public domain has deep and lasting consequences. Taking shortcuts with the truth for short term tactical advantage is a great way of deep sixing your own prospects.
