The “About us” page

Try this.

Open your organisation’s “About us” page. Delete the company name. Remove the logo. Take out the two or three words that are specific to your industry.
Then do the same with your closest competitor’s.

Put them side by side.

Which one is yours?

I’ve been running this test for years, and most of the time I can’t tell.

Both texts seem to come from the same place. A customer-centric organisation that values its people and cares about sustainability. Innovative. Trustworthy. A true partner.

None of it is wrong. That’s the problem.

When organisations sit down to describe themselves, they usually end up describing their industry. What comes out isn’t the story of that company; it’s a description that fits everyone in the business.

Nobody objects, because it’s true.
Nobody remembers it, because it doesn’t set anyone apart.

And yet every organisation has a mark of its own. Something it does in a way nobody else does. Something it’s stubborn about. A habit nobody pays much attention to, but without which the place would be different.

That’s hard to see from the inside.
From the inside, it looks ordinary, because everyone has done it that way for years.

This is where the real work of communications begins.
Finding that mark before writing a single sentence.
Seeing the difference the organisation itself hasn’t noticed, and putting it into words.

When it isn’t found, what’s left is the average.
The average is safe. It bothers nobody. It draws nobody in, either.

What sets one organisation apart from another is never a sentence the other could have written.

Finding it is the hard part. Writing it is easy.