How did a 140-year stalwart of the British high street nearly get obliterated? What if it was because it talked to the wrong people without even realising it?
Growing up in a coastal town in the west coast of Scotland, a trip to Glasgow was required at some point during the summer holidays for that rare commodity: summertime clothing.
We’d often head to Marks & Spencer, a chain of stores dating back 140 years which was most known for clothing in the 1980s, with a sideline in expensive but good food.
Fast forward to today, and most teenagers will think of Marks & Spencer as the shop where you buy a sandwich and drink before you jump on a train. Or a nice frozen pizza for the oven at home.
The company is turning around now, but not until the culmination of a 20 year decline revealed just how the chain was at risk of being eliminated from the high street altogether in 2019.
The reason? Its fashion lines had gained a seemingly unremovable stain: they were boring.
Even as the most unfashionable teen in the west of Scotland I knew that Marks & Spencer wasn’t the definition of style and sophistication.
The language of Marks & Spencer clothing might not just have been a clue it was unfashionable.
The language of the organisation might have been the reason for its failure.
The language of clothing was written more for suppliers than customers. During my teenaged years, the firm spouted technical details of clothes as the means to try and shift them, rather than making them look good.
“Non-iron” and “machine washable” became more important, arguably, than “this will make you look great”.
John Simmons, legendary copywriter, makes the point that the linguistic influence at the core of the company was that of the suppliers.
In so many schools, while there is talk of putting students at the centre of things, the linguistic influence at the core of the school is that of the parents and Board, or the teachers, or the senior leader.
So what does that mean? It means that the language used by schools to describe what they care about is funnelled through a narrow prism that makes the stories matter more to the adults in the community than the students.
There are plenty of reasons for this. Adults make the decisions, really. Adults pay the bills (in private or international schools). Adults write the weekly newsletter. Adults are assumed to read stuff schools send (even if they don’t).
So what could you do to put the people you say matter at the heart of the way you communicate?
It doesn’t mean you have to hand them the pen itself. But it does mean you have to ask one question:
“Why does the thing I’m about to write for our ‘community’ matter for the students I say I care about?”