Talking to a client this week, I was reminded of Lucy Kellaway, the former FT columnist and expert on corporate bullshit, who remarked that “the first rule of guff is complicate then obfuscate”.
Her example was an HR manager running an offsite meeting, who warned attendees to “be cognisant of the optics of your personal brand”. In other words: tuck your shirts in.
My client’s excuse for not having looked at a press release I’d drafted for him was that he “didn’t have the mental bandwidth to look at it”. In other words: he was too busy.
Soph and I have been struggling with our financial bandwidth (not enough fees) but we received a shot in the arm when we were contacted out of the blue by a big logistics developer wanting to raise its profile. Doing PR for a logistics developer is currently the best gig in town. There are so many press releases to draft, opportunities to comment, columns, blogs and so on that you never have that dreaded moment in a PR meeting when you ask the client for a news update and there’s nothing. No news is the death knell for PR activity.
Oh, logistics! Those big ugly sheds, far more so than beds and meds, are where the money wants to be. We are – in the world of corporate bullshit – 110% committed to our new client.
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