Corpospeak: Why you still sound like a faceless corporate entity

The structural reasons why trad marketing can’t evolve

We all use social media these days so we know what it means to sound real. By now, we know this intuitively, and get instinctive cringe when things are inverted. So why do so many marketing teams still communicate in corpospeak? “We are delighted to announce a new product.” “We value your patience.” “We believe in breakthrough, innovative approaches.” And all of this said from anonymous, blank, faceless brands, that can’t and won’t ever reply to their customers. It’s wooden. We all know it’s bad, but we can’t help ourselves.

I know many of you work in these companies! And I know you’re working on it, hiring social media interns or someone presented a short form video strategy, or whatever. But IMHO that is not addressing the root cause.

There’s a lot more working on as a broader transformation of marketing:

• This is a massive reordering of trad marketing. Before the invention of mass communication, there actually weren’t national/global brands. If you were thirsty, you’d go to your local carbonated soda shop and just have whatever they had — not ask for a Coke. Using radio, newspapers, and TV to reach billions of consumers spurred up entire industries (just watch Mad Men, or read Claude Hopkins), mass industrialization, and mega brands so that everyone will buy and use the same things. So what happens when the big centralized mass communication channels get turned into million of microniche channels? What happens to all of our cherished brands, and the marketing playbooks that have been written over decades? It might be that the notion of a brand, and a brand voice, and strategies we’ve used to consistently reinforce a brand — well maybe they away.

• Marketing channel reboots are ugly. Have you ever seen a company figure out that a certain marketing channel works — say, buying paid ads, or heavy SEO — and they double down and triple down… and then suddenly it stops working? (because of saturation, channel competition, platform enforcement or otherwise?). It gets really ugly. If you look at some of the biggest blowups in ecommerce startups, it’s usually because of this — when CACs go up and LTVs start to diminish in more marginal audiences, and the paid marketing cycle is inverted. (I’ve written about these dynamics here). This usually causes an existential moment as marketing needs to get rebooted. This is what’s happening to trad marketing. The gradual then sudden implosion of corpospeak is this played out at an economy-wide level, because the centralized gatekeepers (press/“experts”/legal/etc) are in severe decline, but companies are so used to interfacing with these middlemen they don’t know what to do next. They need to reboot.

• It’s all about vibes now. Whether you like him or not, Elon talks to you like he’s a real person, and with his 24x7 posting, you get a good sense of the thinking behind all his companies. In the political realm we have seen the rise of Mamdani (sorry), or Trump (sorry to the other half!), and we could make a list of dozens more examples that fall into this bucket (AOC, Kim Kardashian, Warren Buffett, etc etc). I remember being shocked when I heard Steve Jobs would actually answer his email when random people emailed him. Being real matters a whole lot to people, and they will even overlook many flaws if they connect with you. Vibes.

But look — I don’t need to tell you all this. You already intuitively know all this. Again, because we all use social media these days. As a result, we’ve all developed the ability to discern what people vibe well (and what doesn’t) in this new order. We have the taste, but may not have the ability to actually create the content we want.

By default, marketing professionals create corpospeak. It jumps out particularly in email marketing, or on the about page of a website, or with a lot of conference content. Ironically, the more effort and the more people are involved in something, the worse it is. How do we get rid of corpospeak in our companies? How do we talk to people the way they want to be talked to? And why is this so hard?

The slow long death of corpospeak

The funny thing is, we actually all know the root cause — we’ve spent about a hundred years creating an intricate ecosystem of marketers, lots of jargon like “positioning” “brand” and so on, plus gatekeeper media corporations with trad channels, lots of experts, hundreds of books and HBS case studies, etc., etc. — and the mega fracturing of channels in the age of the internet is about to ruin it all.

We created this system, and here’s how it works:

• Voice of the marketer versus the builder. Corpospeak happens when a professional marketer writes the communication (which is then subsequently approved by lawyers/etc), rather than when it from the voice of the founder/builder/creator. It’s when the speech is formal, trite, and uses business idioms that you’d never use in everyday conversation. Further there’s an entire ecosystem of “experts” (sometimes I call this the PR/brand industrial complex) of agencies/PR staffers/etc will tell you it’s important to be elevated and polished. It’s meant to be short and sound bitey, and not nerd out too hard. However, it’s exactly the tone that pushes customers away in a world when they’d rather be real.

• Created as marketing, dies as marketing. People can always sense when something is created as marketing. Your customers are smarter than you think, and they immediately know when they are being sold to. And when you only communicate with them via gatekeepers — traditional marketing channels like journalists, or advertisements, or customer support call centers, then you’re like the “friend” that only calls you when they need to borrow money. Particularly when the marketing is all just one way. Often, brands are confused when they post to social media channels and no one interacts with them, no matter how many followers they buy. People know when they are being marketed to.

• Culture of scarcity. Another funny thing is that corpospeak tends to be published only at very specific, calendared intervals — after all, you have to worry about “brand dilution” and “making the biggest impact” in a world where print media is physically limited in size, and you can’t launch and re-launch a product. (what would the journalists think?) Contrast that to Elon’s hourly/daily discussions about Tesla — is that marketing? Or just a guy talking about his great passion for his cars? If you’re asking this question, you’re going to the right place.

• The misguided desire to please. The temptation is always there to seek recognition from the trads. Yes, 20-somethings all want to be Forbes 30 Under 30 even with the occasional criminality of their alumni, the complete decline of the Forbes brand, and the fact that there’s like 500 people on that list, not 30. But I see this in startups too — even though they ought to know that Techcrunch doesn’t matter for growth, or fundraising, or hiring, they still want a launch article. If it doesn’t work in any practical way, why do it? (we all know why). The same happens in the agency industrial complex where there’s numerous awards, conferences, and boondoggles for advertising professionals. These insular networks perpetuate a certain style/culture/tonality that furthers trad marketing.

• Fear of the public. This all happens in companies when people fear interactions with the public. If someone complains about a bug, it’s not the job of the actual app developer to reply and figure out the bug — no, you give that to customer support. What if you say something wrong? Aren’t you stepping on toes? From a customer’s POV, of course, interacting with a customer support agent is like the DMV experience of the corporate world. You have to wait, you are talking to someone who’s probably either a bot or based overseas, and you have to constantly explain your situation over and over. Imagine just interacting with someone at the company who can solve your needs — we’ve all seen the stories, and when it happens, it’s magical.

Much of the root cause is the functional distinction between marketing and R&D.

This will all seem familiar to many of you because for those of you who are builders — in the EPD teams of tech companies — you naturally turn all of your communication over to the marketing teams. They are the experts of course. If they need you to stand on a stage, or be in a webinar, they will help with that. They will help script your speech so that you say all the right things. The separation of the builders from the marketers is fundamental to the dynamics at play here.

In same ways this all mirrors what I saw first-hand with marketing as separate from product management when I first got to Silicon Valley. Back then, the marketers knew all the customer metrics and PMs often didn’t understand basic concepts like CAC, LTV, retention, or otherwise. A decade later, if a PM didn’t understand growth marketing concepts, they would be considered ineffective. In many ways I wonder if the evolution of corpospeak will require decentralized participation from an even larger number of individuals within a company.

The weird thing is, no one will defend corpospeak and its associated strategies. Because we all use social media, we see where it’s all going. No one wants to be trad. No one wants to be stiff.

Why corpospeak can’t just be delegated away

There is always the go-to fix for all this. “Can’t we just come up with a social media strategy” you ask? And then try to work with the brand/PR agency industrial complex to implement said strategy. Like any project, the company leadership wants to just delegate it away to the experts. Sometimes these experts then further delegate it to younger, junior staff. But this generates a lot of problems:

• People don’t want to hear from your 22 year old social media intern. They want to hear from the people who are building the product, and often they want to have substantive conversations. The more customers care about the product, the more they want to have real discussion and not just funny witty social media memes. This makes this entire task hard to delegate.

• It’s hard to be an expert in one thing, get disrupted, and then be an expert in the new thing. If a marketing team is an expert in advertising, conferences, traditional media, etc., they will simply think of social as “just another channel” rather than a fundamentally different approach. The natural approach will be to create an integrated top-down strategy with social as one of many things to consider, and staff it with some junior people and collect the invoices

• The actual builders inside a company are busy. Or they don’t want to be in the limelight. Maybe they don’t like making videos or hanging out on X. This might be, frankly, a generational thing between boomer pre-social media professional expectations, versus what’s coming with the digital native workforce. I’m sure the GenZ founders who are building the next generation of companies will be far more comfortable. So again, it gets asked — can’t this be delegated? No, sorry.

Any by the way, social media “experts” are often not actually good at social media. I’ve now interviewed a ton of them over the years, and one of the wild things is when they don’t actually use social media themselves. Or they don’t actually create any content on any platform. I’ll ask, “what’s your favorite platform” then look up their profile, which will have 200 followers. That’s an auto-reject for me. Why is this so common? Oftentimes social media jobs are more about perpetuating something than building. They might know some of the analytics packages, they might be able to edit videos so that they work on social, but they haven’t actually built up an account successfully from zero. Instead, many of these experts have just worked on big brand accounts that bought all their followers, and posting daily inconsequential slop. From that expertise, they are hired to do the same somewhere else.

These are common pitfalls. They may not affect your company, but this chain of events starts with the desire to outsource the responsibility of talking with customers, partners, stakeholders to marketing experts.

So instead, I argue the opposite — you can’t outsource.

The new normal is that the builders of products — the founders, the engineers, the designers — will have a decentralized responsibility to actually talk to people. They will have to learn the skill of asking questions, replying, having interesting things to say — all without causing sharp changes in their company’s stock price due to unfortunate outbursts. They’ll need to figure out lightweight frameworks to work with legal, or compliance, or brand marketing, so that they can actually make this happen. And maybe those teams will be set up to enable these interactions, rather than protecting the downside.

A few small tactics in a new playbook

I wanted to share a few things I’ve seen work out in the wild — here’s how many new startups I’ve been working with act and sound real:

• Make it everyone’s responsibility to talk to customers online. For the camera shy, this means yes, you’ll need to get used to creating content — written or increasingky in video form. And yes, it’s OK to reply to people on social media. (And if someone on your team says something off, well, tell them why, add it to the playbook, and keep going)

• People want to hear from the founder/CEO. It’s especially the founder/CEOs responsibility to talk to customers and represent themselves online — not their marketing team. Maybe the marketers can help flag important threads, ghost write, etc., but you need the real main person. That’s who people want to hear from, and who they will build a relationship with over itme

• It’s OK to talk about your products in relation to your own motivations. Say “I thought” and “Why I did X” about your why you did something, rather than referring back to the company’s sales pitch. Post from your personal accounts, not the companies. Use photos of yourself, not exclusively glossy professional content

• Don’t be afraid to nerd out. If you’re passionate about something and could talk about a thing for ages, do it. Your most hardcore customers, potential employees, or partners will want to talk about the same things. It’ll attract them

• Don’t delegate the doing. Maybe you can learn from folks who are native to a channel on what works, but then you actually have to do it yourself

• Quantity beats quality. Brand ubiquity beats brand dilution

• Imagine that you are signing off every email as yourself, not as the company. When you say, “hello all” then write a message, and sign off as yourself, there’s something special and important that is being communicated there. Write your message that way, then remove the header and footer. It’ll sound much more as you intend

• If you decide you need a social media strategy, look at the profiles of the people pitching you the strategy. Make sure they’re actually social-native and not just making a great pitch deck

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