I’m the copywriter.
You’re the CMO.
If our office was the ocean, I would be the plankton and you would be the whale.
But I’m in a good spot to observe clearly, and I can see that you are sinking our business.
You’re several months into this role. You commissioned email marketing, approved more online advertising and rolled out a brand new website.
About now, you should be hitting your stride with successful campaigns that are maneuvering our company into capturing more market share.
Nope. Nothing you’ve done has made a dent in our revenues. You’ve started blaming the product, but your team knows the truth.
By trying to control our image so tightly, you’ve erased the brand identity that made us popular in the first place.
Life Before You
Our company had been around for five years before you started. The marketplace saw us as a geeky, scrappy, hardworking, hard talking, crazy smart bunch of people. We’re young, but not too young, with most of us in our 20s and 30s.
We have years of experience in our industry, but we live outside the echo chamber. We write, a lot, and we’re outspoken. We make people laugh. We make them think. We make them want to be our Facebook friends, not just our LinkedIn connections.
Real people like us because we’re real people.
When so many others do, why don’t you respect the brand voice we’d developed?
Life After You
You don’t allow us to publish anything that doesn’t fit exactly within your narrow definition of good business writing.
You’ve restricted when and how we can reply on social media, lest our customers get used to casual conversations with us there.
You’re uncomfortable when we’re invited to speak at industry events. I’m pretty sure you would script every one-on-one conversation we had, if you could.
I understand that your marching orders are to take our marketing from Level 5 to Level 10. Your job depends on it.
Clearly you think everything that got us to Level 5 isn’t worth building on. OK, kill it all. Challenge us to improve. Show us a better way. But please, please, let us keep our voices.
As a brand, we say what we think.
What we say is why people value us, as a brand.
Now you’ve muted us, and there’s no original thinking or personality for people to notice. Your new website is beautiful, with 100% accurate copy, every bit of it written by you. And it’s 100% forgettable.
Nothing ever became popular by being boring.
Life Together
I want our marketing to succeed. My job depends on it, too.
l’ll do my best to bring back the personality. I bet I can do some A/B testing to find out what kind of words resonate most. If I’m wrong, then the data will prove it. If I’m right (and I think I’m right), then I have a way to suggest changes.
Until then, I wish you knew that brand identity is bigger than any one person. Brand identity is about us.
Don’t stifle us. Join us.
Editor’s note: Today’s writer is reflecting on a time not long ago when she was a copywriter at a small company in the tech space. Have your own story you wish you could share with your CMO but are afraid to tell? Contact us — we’ll respect your anonymity but also welcome any who want to be on-the-record, too.
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