Crimes against the audience

I am not a big fan of Sex and the City. The anticipation surrounding the release of the second film is ridiculous. But what really gets my goat is this; my opinion doesn’t count. It’s a film with a ready made audience which will succeed despite the one and two star reviews. Because it has a loyal following of fans that will go and see it whatever any critic says. Well, as far as I’m concerned it’s a crime against the audience. Here are others that should be reported to the style police. And my offender prevention programme.

• Navel gazing. Mission statements and values often mean nothing to anyone outside the organisation. And I speak as one who used to work for a big financial services company where my job was to engage employees to ‘wear the widow’s cape’ or somesuch. But it worked; the values meant something because of the close alignment with employee behaviour. And not behaviour that should be taken for granted. I’ve seen values such as ‘proactive hands on management’. Right. As opposed to reluctantly accepting calls from your villa in the South of France?

Prevention: Get your values or mission statement reviewed by someone unrelated to the organisation. And get their honest opinion of what the business looks like. If their vision doesn’t match the reality revise your values and mission statement. It’s easier than trying to align your business to an idealistic pipedream.

• No call to action. What do you want me to do? Today I received a dispatch confirmation email for a pair of shoes despite sending emails to three separate addresses trying to cancel the order (sadly my feet are more Coco the Clown than size 3). Silly me for assuming an online retailer that communicates by email would respond in the same way. I should have tried harder and dug deep, deep down in a website with more levels than Tetras, to find the T&Cs where it said to call to cancel. Make it easy for the user please.  Or as Steve Krug says Don’t Make Me Think.