Never Mind The Message, Look At The Budget.
How does your high-profile content stack up? Are you losing the message in the format?
OK I’ll admit I do it. Not on every flight, but I do it pretty often, especially on international flights.
I take out the Safety Card from the seat back in front of me and look at it. Not because I have any concerns or fears that we will need to follow its instructions, after all flying is still the safest form of public transport, but more because of professional interest.
In the early days of my career when I managed the Technical Publications department at an aerospace company, one of the tasks that my team worked on was the production of a range of Safety Cards for the different aircraft we supported. Although that was a couple of decades ago, I still like to see how different manufacturers and airlines approach things.
It’s a tricky piece of communication design. Having to come up with a way to communicate a variety of procedures that can be read and understood quickly by passengers who will most likely speak a variety of languages, and at the time the card is most needed may well be under extreme stress. The message has to be communicated and understood quickly and unambiguously.
For the same reason I like to listen to the pre-takeoff safety briefing to see how well those same messages are communicated verbally.
It’s a shame that often the flight attendants sound as bored and disinterested as the vast majority of my fellow passengers. If the person imparting the information sounds like they don’t care, then why should people listen.
Some airlines encourage the flight attendants to ad-lib a bit and inject some personality and fun into the process, which helps increase attention.
For longer haul flights where the safety briefing has migrated from the flight attendant in the aisle to the seat back screen, it seems more and more elaborate methods are being used to try and capture the imagination. Sometimes the briefings have become mini-movies.
Case in point the latest edition from British Airways.
I must admit my first thought when watching this was “How much did that cost to produce?”
And secondly, and perhaps most importantly, was the important messaging lost in the humor and spectacle?
There’s a fine line between wanting to grab someone’s attention, and making sure that the central message is communicated in a clear and easily understandable way.
I feel that British Airways may have crossed it.
How does your high-profile content stack up? Are you losing the message in the format?
Alan
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Weekly Thought
When it comes to transforming the digital experience, the problems you need to solve aren't only internal problems, they are first and foremost your customer's problems.
Customer Focused Storytelling Workshops
THE CONTENT POOL is pleased to announce that we are now offering our popular Customer Focused Storytelling Workshops
We are now taking bookings for the second half of 2024, and we wanted to make sure that as a newsletter reader you got an early opportunity to lock-in a date.
“Weaving storytelling into the mix makes the content more compelling, accessible, and effective!”
Learn how to deliver content-driven experiences that your customers relate to on our two-day Customer Outcome Focused Storytelling workshop.
In this workshop, we will:
Examine content from the customer’s perspective.
Plan how to adapt content delivery to meet the needs of a rapidly changing marketplace
Examine why every business transaction is a story
Outline the 10 Rules of Storytelling as applied to Customer Experience
Apply proven storytelling techniques to your content.
Identify potential opportunities for incorporating storytelling techniques
into the production of your customer-facing content assets.Facilitate an interactive feedback session on your existing customer-facing content.
If you would like more details, or you like to discuss reserving a date for yourself and your team to benefit from a Customer Focused Storytelling Workshop, just email us at ajp@4jsgroup.com to reserve your date.
In The Bookstore
If you enjoy the contents of this newsletter and would like more, we have three books always available from XML Press.
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Till next time - have fun paddling in The Content Pool.
Alan J. Porter
The Content Pool™ is a division of the 4Js Group LLC