Whoever thought up the term ‘brand loyalty’ was on to a good thing. But, sadly, anyone who believes the term is guilty of self-delusion.

I am loyal to my family, my close friends and my dog. When they do things that offend me, like misleading me, failing to keep a promise or chewing my shoes, I don’t turn my back on them and go elsewhere to seek out new family, friends or dog. I stick by them, and I hope they will do the same if I do something that offends them. That is what loyalty is about.

I don’t have this type of relationship with a brand.

When I walk down the aisle of a supermarket, looking for a can of tomatoes, I look for a specific brand. I do this because I have bought that brand of tinned tomato before, and it’s just right for using in pasta dishes and curries, which I cook a lot of. Now it may well be there are equally good alternatives, or even better ones, but life is short, and I don’t have the time or interest in trying out every single item on the shelf. Inertia, not loyalty keeps me buying the same brand. But if the flavour or consistency suddenly changed, I found a dead rat in one of the tins, or it made my dog sick, I’d turn my back on the brand without a moment’s guilt or regret. So much for loyalty!

Equally, the service I get from my bank is at times poor, sometimes inadequate, but I stay with them. Is this a sign of loyalty? Not really! The effort of changing to another bank is greater than the potential reward. Inertia again. But if they did something that was misleading, like take money out of my account without telling me, failed to keep a promise, like not providing a loan that they had agreed to, or one of their tellers attacked my dog, I’d go elsewhere. This is not the behaviour of a loyal customer.

If brand managers spent more time trying to understand and work with brand inertia, rather than chasing the mythical brand loyalty, they might spend their advertising dollars more wisely and communicate more intelligently with their customers.

If you are an executive with responsibility for your organisation’s communication with customers you need to read this.

My job is to look at the effectiveness of the advice consultants give on how best to communicate with customers. Research shows that most of the advice consultants offer will not provide you with a return on your investment (ROI). There are many reasons for this, but that is not your problem. Your problem is to improve profits and reduce costs.

How then do you chose advisors who will help you achieve your targets? The first thing is: Avoid advisors who tell you that their advice is sound because it is based on sound methods, theory or principles.

For example web designers will tell you that they are ‘customer focused’, document designers will tell you that they use ‘plain English’, experience designers will tell you that they use ‘personas’, information architects will tell you that they are using world best practice, and campaign managers will tell you that they are using the most advanced behavioural modification theory to guide their work.

So what!

You are not an expert in any of these areas and you are in no position to judge the validity of what they claim. Whether well meaning or not, consultants will always try to persuade you to become committed to their particular approach. Possibly the worst thing you could do as an executive is to become ‘committed’ to being customer focused or ‘committed’ to the value of personas, or any other approach. Once committed, you are trapped, you become a believer, and when things go pear shaped, as they often do, you are not inclined to blame the advice you got, because you, too, believe in the approach.

It’s like believing in the effectiveness of rain-making ceremonies. When they don’t work (as often happens), if you believe in the value such ceremonies you don’t question the approach. The most radical thing you might do is hire a different rain-maker. But if the current rain-maker has done a good job flattering you by telling you how socially valuable your funding of such ceremonies is, and how you have at least done your best, you might not take even this radical step. Steer clear of this type of logic, unless the effect you want is to persuade people that you care?without having to do anything. As a political motive, it’s not unlikely. But if your preoccupation is with the bottom line, don’t get caught up in the flimflam and magic.

The second thing you must do is: set agreed and specific expected targets. Now you can only do this if you know what your current performance is. In our experience, most organisations have only the vaguest idea of their current performance and launch into change programs without knowing quite what it is they are changing from, let alone to. Don’t be persuaded by the old argument that such and such an approach leads to improvements. Unless you have a clear idea of your current performance, how can you claim at a later date that you have improved anything? Moreover, the argument that a communication problem-solving method can result in improvements is yesterday’s claim.

Back in the 1970s some of us working in the area of communication problem solving thought that certain approaches had the potential to lead to improvements in communication between organizations and people. At CRI, we sifted through the different approaches, and by the late 1980s came up with some that showed it was possible to bring about consistent measurable improvements. But then we moved on to a different, more demanding question: how much of an improvement is possible? We discovered is that it possible to set quite specific targets and meet them?not just vague notions of ‘improvement’ but measurable performance against agreed benchmarks and performance targets.

The final thing you must do is: hold your advisors accountable for meeting agreed performance requirements that can be translated into ROI. After all, if you ask an engineer to build a bridge and it falls down, you would want your money back, or the fault put right at the engineer’s expense. Given what we now know from research about how to communicate effectively, you should expect nothing less from communication advisors.

Put simply, it’s misleading.

Sometime back in the 1960s those of us who had read Orwell’s seminal essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’, and Ernest Gower’s little book on ‘Plain Words’ realised that not all was well with the way business and government used language in their communications with the public.

The answer, or so it seemed at the time, was to reform the language used by large organizations in their dealings with the public. This was the motive and rationale behind the growth of advocacy for PL in the UK, and through similar ‘provocations’ on the other side of the Atlantic.

Advocates like Martin Cutts and Chris Maher in the UK, Robert Eagelson in Australia and Joseph Kimble in the USA began spelling out what PL meant as a style, and how to write in a PL style. Many of the ‘truths’ of PL seemed self evident; read the ‘before’ and ‘after’, and it was OBVIOUS which was clearer. But it didn’t always work out. CRI (formally CRIA), among others, undertook and reported research showing that in some cases PL did not result in clearer documents. So we began to ask why, and what needed to be done to make communication between organizations and the public clearer.

Gradually what emerged were a number of factors outside language style that have a profound effect on the clarity of communication.

First among these is typography, or more broadly graphic design. No matter how simple the words or sentence structures, if the layout and overall design does not support the words, then clarity suffers. But this means that for writers to achieve PL as a worthwhile experience for readers, they require a set of skills that are well outside the teaching of writing in a particular style. But the name PL has stuck.

Second among the factors affecting clarity are the particular local contextual factors of how people read, their expectation of what they read, and the specific things they want to do with what they read. No amount of insight or empathy helps the writer deal with these contextual factors. The only way to ensure that something is clear to a specific type of reader is to test the material with potential readers. Once again to achieve PL outcomes requires yet another set of skills that take people beyond words and beyond graphic design. But still the name PL has stuck.

I could go on at some length to mention other vital skills that have been discovered to be essential to achieve PL outcomes: skills associated with design methods and processes, management of stakeholders, the introduction of performance requirements, benchmarking, etc etc. I could also mention that along the way, many of the principles and practices of PL as a writing style have since been found to be inapplicable in some circumstances.

So what is left that is truly PL.? Probably just the original intent of making written information clear for readers. How ironic that the very term we use to describe a desirable outcome of clarity should itself turn out to be misleading. Therein lies an interesting insight about the nature of language that no amount of clear writing will scrub away.

All this makes the establishment in Washington recently of a Centre for Plain Language somewhat anachronistic (except perhaps in Washington DC).

Later this month the Centre is having a welcome discussion on the ‘Research, Evidence, and Tools for Action’ needed to promote PL! Many of the people involved in this worthy organization not only know better than to claim that good communication is just about words but have contributed significantly to the research which has demonstrated this, which makes the choice of name for the centre odder still.

Perhaps the best way to end this little rant is to take a passage from Orwell’s seminal essay of 1946, substituting the phrase ‘plain’ for Orwell’s ‘democracy’:

“In the case of a word like plain, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a [document] plain we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of [document] claim that it is a plain [document], and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.” (With apologies and thanks to George Orwell.)