Assignment 3

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Understanding What Your Organization Wants LO 2-1

Building a Critical Skill

Michelle wondered whether her boss was sexist. Everyone else who had joined the organization when she did had been pro- moted. Her boss never seemed to have anything good to say about her or her work.

Michelle didn’t realize that, in her boss’s eyes, she wasn’t doing good work. Michelle was proud of her reports; she thought she was the best writer in the office. But her boss val- ued punctuality, and Michelle’s reports were always late.

Just as every sport has rules about scoring, so, too, do work- places have rules about what “counts.” Even in the same indus- try, different organizations and different supervisors may care about different things. One boss circles misspelled words and posts the offending message on a bulletin board for everyone to see. Other people are more tolerant of errors. One company values original ideas, while another workplace tells employees just to do what they’re told. One supervisor likes technology and always buys the latest hardware and software; another is technophobic and has to be persuaded to get needed upgrades.

Succeeding in an organization depends first on understand- ing what “counts” at your organization. To find out what counts in your organization:

• Ask your boss, “What parts of my job are most important? What’s the biggest thing I could do to improve my work?”

• Listen to the stories colleagues tell about people who have succeeded and those who have failed. When you see pat- terns, check for confirmation: “So his real problem was that he didn’t socialize with co-workers?” This gives your col- leagues a chance to provide feedback: “Well, it was more than never joining us for lunch. He didn’t really seem to care about the company.”

• Observe. See who is praised, who is promoted.

Understanding, by the way, can and should be a two-way street. Online shoe retailer Zappos.com listened to employees who said they wanted a workplace that is more accommodat- ing to their lifestyle. The result was a nap room for a quick snooze and social events that include after-hours mixers and

lighthearted “parades” in the office. With $1 billion in sales in 2009 alone, the company also encourages its 1,500 employees to tweet about Zappos and hosts free daily tours of its Las Vegas headquarters. The work still gets done. In 2012, Zappos was named one of CNNMoney’s 100 Best Companies to Work For.

Source: Morley Safer, “The ‘Millennials’ Are Coming,” 60 Minutes, November 11, 2007; and Jake Chessum, “How to Make Customers Love You,” Inc., 2010. Downloaded on February 12, 2010, at http://www.inc. com/ss/how-to-make-customers-love-you ; and “100 Best Companies to Work For,” CNNMoney, February 6, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/ magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2012/snapshots/11.html .

Who is my audience? LO 2-2 ▶ More people than you might think!

In an organizational setting, a message may have five separate audiences. 1

1. The primary audience will decide whether to accept your recommendations or will act on the basis of your message. You must reach the decision maker to fulfill your purposes.

2. The secondary audience may be asked to comment on your message or to implement your ideas after they’ve been approved. Secondary audiences can also include lawyers

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Module 2 Adapting Your Message to Your Audience 21

who may use your message—perhaps years later—as evidence of your organization’s culture and practices.

3. The initial audience receives the message first and routes it to other audiences. Sometimes the initial audience also tells you to write the message.

4. A gatekeeper has the power to stop your message before it gets to the primary audience. A secretary who decides who gets to speak to or see the boss is a gatekeeper. Sometimes the supervisor who assigns the message is also the gatekeeper; however, sometimes the gatekeeper is higher in the organization. In some cases, gatekeepers exist outside the organization.

5. A watchdog audience, though it does not have the power to stop the message and will not act directly on it, has political, social, or economic power. The watchdog pays close attention to the transaction between you and the primary audience and may base future actions on its evaluation of your message.

As the charts in Figures 2.1 and 2.2 show, one person or group can be part of two audi- ences. Frequently, a supervisor is both the initial audience and the gatekeeper. Sometimes the initial audience is also the primary audience that will act on the message.

Figure 2.1 The Audiences for a Marketing Plan

Writer An account executive in an ad agency

Initial audience Her boss, who asks her to write the plan

Gatekeeper Her boss, who must approve the plan before it goes to the client

Primary audience The executive committee of the client company, which will decide whether to adopt the plan

Secondary audiences The marketing staff of the client company, who will be asked for comments on the plan The artists, writers, and media buyers who will implement the plan if it is accepted

Figure 2.2 The Audiences for a Consulting Report

Writers Two workers at a consulting think tank

Initial audience A consortium of manufacturers, which hires the think tank to investigate how proposed federal regulations would affect manufacturing, safety, and cost

Gatekeeper The consortium. If the consortium doesn’t like the report, it won’t send it on to the federal government.

Primary audience The federal government agency that regulates this consumer product. It will set new regulations based in part (the manufacturers hope) on this report. Within this audience are economists, engineers, and policymakers.

Secondary audiences The general public Other manufacturers of the product Other clients and potential clients of the consulting think tank The consulting think tank’s competitors

Watchdog audience Industry reviewers who read drafts of the report and commented on it. Although they had no direct power over this report, their goodwill was important for the consulting company’s image—and its future contracts. Their comments were the ones that authors took more seriously as they revised their drafts.

In what can at best be described as a baffling move, Nivea for Men ran an advertisement in Esquire suggesting men “re-civilize” themselves, complete with an image of a man in business casual clothes tossing away a head with a beard and Afro. The company later apologized for the ad, which prompted public outcry. Even if some audiences are untroubled by the content of a message, good communicators take into consideration all of the audiences for that message. At the very least, they should re-think messages that appeal to some audiences at the expense of other audiences.

Source: Ellen Tumposky, “Nivea for Men Pulls Plug on Ad It Calls ‘Offensive,’” ABC News, August 19, 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/ Business/nivea-men-pulls- plug-ad-calls-offensive/ story?id=14342539 .

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22 Unit One Building Blocks for Effective Messages

Instant Replay

Five Kinds of Audiences

Initial Is first to receive the message; may assign message.

Gatekeeper Has the power to stop the message before it gets to primary audience.

Primary Decides whether to accept recommendations; acts.

Secondary Comments on message or implements recommendations.

Watchdog Has political, social, or economic power; may base future actions on its evaluation of your message.

Why is my audience so important? LO 2-3 ▶ To be successful, messages must meet the audiences’ needs.

Good business communication is audience-centered. Audience is central to both PAIBOC and to the communication process.

Audience and PAIBOC

Think about the PAIBOC questions in Module 1 (▶▶ p. 12). Of the six questions, the five in blue relate to audience.

P What are your purposes in writing or speaking? Your purposes come from you and your organization. Your audience determines how you achieve those purposes, but not what the purposes are.

A Who is (are) your audience(s)? How do members of your audience differ? What characteristics are relevant to this particular message?

These questions ask directly about your audience.

I What information must your message include? The information you need to give depends on your audience. You need to say more when the topic is new to your audience. If your audience has heard something but may have forgotten it, you’ll want to protect readers’ egos by saying “As you know,” or putting the information in a subordinate clause: “Because we had delivery problems last quarter, . . . .”

B What reasons or reader benefits can you use to support your position? What counts as a good reason and what is a benefit depends on your audience. For some audiences, personal experience counts as a good reason. Other audiences are more persuaded by scientific studies or by experts. For some people, saving money is a good benefit of growing vegetables. Other people may care less about the money than about avoiding chemicals, growing varieties that aren’t available in grocery stores, or working outside in the fresh air. ▶▶ Module 8 gives more information on developing reader benefits.

Carl Caspers understands the market for Harmony Systems’ prostheses because he is part of it. Often, however, you’ll have to analyze audiences of which you are not a part.

On his blog, Robert Greene, who co-wrote the best-selling The 50th Law with musician 50 Cent, notes the performer’s four principles for reaching his audience. Among them is to “crush as much distance as possible between you and your audience,” reaching people and their inner lives and reflecting their spirit in your message.

Source: Robert Greene, “Four Things 50 Cent Can Teach You About Connecting with Your Audience,” downloaded on February 16, 2010, at http://www.copyblogger.com/ robert-greene-50-cent/ .

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Five Kinds o

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Module 2 Adapting Your Message to Your Audience 23

O What objection(s) can you expect your reader(s) to have? What negative elements of your message must you deemphasize or overcome?

Different audiences will have different attitudes. One audience may object to a price increase. Another audience may expect price changes as routine and not be bothered by them. ▶▶ Module 12 on persuasion gives more information on overcoming objections.

C How will the context affect reader response? Think about your relationship to the reader, morale in the organization, the economy, the time of year, and any special circumstances.

People exist in a context. How well they know you, how they feel about you and your organization, how well the economy is doing, even what’s been in the news recently will all influence the way they respond to your message.

Audience and the Communication Process

Audience is also central to the communication process. The following model of the communication process drastically simplifies what is per-

haps the most complex of human activities. However, even a simplified model can give us a sense of the complexity of the communication process. And the model is useful in help- ing us see where and why miscommunication occurs. Figure 2.3 shows the basic process that occurs when one person tries to communicate ideas to someone else.

The process begins when Person A (let’s call him Alex) perceives some stimulus. Here we are talking about literal perception: the ability to see, to hear, to taste, to smell, to touch. Next, Alex interprets what he has perceived. Is it important? Unusual? The next step is for Alex to choose or select the information he wishes to send to Person B (whom we’ll call Barbara). Now Alex is ready to put his ideas into words. (Some people argue that we can think only in words and would put this stage before interpre- tation and choice.) Words are not the only way to convey ideas; gestures, clothing, and pictures can carry meaning nonverbally. The stage of putting ideas into any of these symbols is called encoding. Then Alex must transmit the message to Barbara using some channel. Channels include memos, phone calls, meetings, billboards, TV ads, and e-mail, to name just a few.

To receive the message, Barbara must first perceive it. Then she must decode it, that is, extract meaning from the symbols. Barbara then repeats the steps Alex has gone through:

Understanding potential objections from audiences requires thinking about the context of the situation, including timing. When the Cedar River flooded his home with 13 feet of water and destroyed most of his possessions, Justin Van Fleet asked for help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He was living in a FEMA trailer when, after repeated applications, he was granted more than $20,000 from the agency. The following March, however, Van Fleet received a letter from FEMA stating he should never have received the money and had 30 days to repay it. The agency admitted to such mistakes but also noted by law it’s required to recover funds—little comfort to thousands of Americans who collectively received more than $22 million because of FEMA errors.

Source: Ryan J. Foley, “FEMA Asks for Return of Disaster Aid,” May 10, 2011, http://news.yahoo .com/s/ap/20110510/ap_on_re_us/ us_fema_reclaiming_aid .

Figure 2.3 A Model of Two-Person Communication with Feedback

*Noise (and miscommunication) can occur here.

Reality

*Perception

*Interpretation

*Choice/Selection

*Encoding

*Perception

*Interpretation

*Choice/Selection

*Encoding

*Decoding Person

B

*Feedback

Person A

Stimulus

*Transmission through a Channel

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24 Unit One Building Blocks for Effective Messages

interpreting the information, choosing a response, and encoding it. The response Barbara sends to Alex is called feedback. Feedback may be direct and immediate or indirect and delayed; it may be verbal or nonverbal.

Noise can interfere with every aspect of the communication process. Noise may be physical or psychological. Physical noise could be a phone line with static, a lawn mower roaring outside a classroom, or handwriting that is hard to read. Psychological noise could include disliking a speaker, being concerned about something other than the message, or already having one’s mind made up on an issue.

Channel overload occurs when the channel cannot handle all the messages that are being sent. A small business may have only two phone lines; no one else can get through if both lines are in use. Information overload occurs when more messages are transmitted than the human receiver can handle. Some receivers process information “first come, first served.” Some may try to select the most important messages and ignore others. A third way is to depend on abstracts or summaries prepared by other people. None of these ways is completely satisfactory.

At every stage, both Alex and Barbara could misperceive, misinterpret, choose badly, encode poorly, or choose inappropriate channels. Miscommunication can also occur because different people have different frames of reference. We always interpret messages in light of our personal experiences, our cultures and subcultures, and even the point in history at which we live.

Successful communication depends on the common ground between you and your audience. Choose information that your audience needs and will find interesting. Encode your message in words and other symbols the audience will understand. Transmit the mes- sage along a channel that your audience will attend to.

What do I need to know about my audience(s)? LO 2-4 ▶ Everything that’s relevant to what you’re writing or talking about.

Almost everything about your audience is relevant to some message. But for any particular message, only a few facts about your audience will be relevant.

Since the factors that matter vary depending on the situation, no one-size-fits-all list of questions for audience analysis exists. In general, you need to use common sense and empathy. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to feel with that person. Empathy requires not being self-centered because, in all probability, the audience is not just like you. Use what you know about people and about organizations to predict likely responses.

Analyzing Individuals and Members of Groups

When you write or speak to people in your own organization and in other organizations you work closely with, you may be able to analyze your audience as individuals. You may already know your audience; it will usually be easy to get additional information by talk- ing to members of your audience, talking to people who know your audience, and observ- ing your audience.

In other organizational situations, you’ll analyze your audience as members of a group: “taxpayers who must be notified that they owe more income tax,” “customers living in the northeast side of the city,” or “employees with small children.”

Information that is most often helpful includes the following:

• How much the audience knows about your topic • Demographic factors, such as age, income, number of children, and so forth • Personality • Values and beliefs • Past behavior

A test question featuring a talking pineapple ended up baffling eighth graders on a recent standardized exam. Though offered in the context of a fable, the concept of a piece of fruit challenging anyone to a race so confused students that the question ultimately was thrown out. Care must be taken to anticipate how audiences will understand or interpret communication, especially if it presents unusual ideas.

Source: Valerie Strauss, “‘‘Talking Pineapple Question on Standardized Test Baffles Students,” The Washington Post, April 20, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ blogs/answer-sheet/post/talking- pineapple-question-on-standardized- test-baffles-students/2012/04/20/ gIQA8i01VT_blog.html .

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Module 2 Adapting Your Message to Your Audience 25

Message/Purpose Audience Relevant Factors

Memo announcing that the company will reimburse employees for tuition if they take work-related college courses

All employees • Attitudes toward education (some people find courses fun; others may be intimidated)

• Time available (some may be too busy)

• Interest in being promoted or in getting cross-training

• Attitude toward company (those committed to its success will be more interested in program)

Letter offering special financing on a new or used car

College students

• Income • Expectations of future income

(and ability to repay loan) • Interest in having a new car • Attitude toward cars offered by

that dealership • Knowledge of interest rates • Access to other kinds of

financing

Letter giving a meeting agenda and saying that you will bring your child along

Client • How well the client knows you • How much the client likes you • How important agenda items are

to the client • How the client feels about

children • Physical space for meeting

(room for child to play)

Knowledge Even people in your own organization won’t share all your knowledge. USAA provides insurance to military personnel and their families, but not all the 22,000 people who work there know insurance jargon. 2

Most of the time, you won’t know exactly what your audience knows. Moreover, even if you’ve told readers before, they may not remember the old information when they read the new message. To remind readers of information in a tactful way,

• Preface statements with “As you know,” “As you may know,” or a similar phrase. • Spell out acronyms the first time you use them: “Employee Stock Ownership Plan

(ESOP).” • Give brief definitions in the text: “the principal—the money you have invested—.” • Put information readers should know in a subordinate clause: “Because the renovation

is behind schedule, . . .”

Demographic Factors Demographic characteristics are measurable features that can be counted objectively: age, sex, race, religion, education level, income, and so on.

Sometimes demographic information is irrelevant; sometimes it’s important. Does age matter? Most of the time, probably not. (Mick Jagger is more than 60 years old, but he probably doesn’t subscribe to Modern Maturity. ) On the other hand, if you were explaining a change in your company’s pension plan, you’d expect older workers to be more con- cerned than younger workers.

Business and nonprofit organizations get demographic data by surveying their customers, clients, and donors; by using U.S. census data; or by purchasing demographic

Site to See

Go to http://www.census.gov/ for demographic information about the U.S. population and more. To get information on your community, click on “American Factfinder.”

When Louisiana Representative John Fleming downplayed his annual income of $6 million on MSNBC while discussing his opposition to taxes on the rich, he raised the eyebrows of interviewer Chris Jansing. Fleming pointed out he actually takes home only about $600,000, with $200,000 less after meeting living expenses, to which Lansing stated, “You do understand, congressman, that the average person out there who’s making maybe 40, 50, $60,000 out there, when they hear you only have $400,000 left over, it’s not exactly a sympathetic position.” How audiences interpret messages depends on both the facts being presented and their emotional reactions to them.

Source: Chris Moody, “Rep. John Fleming Fields Criticism Over 600K Income,” September 20, 2011, http://news.yahoo .com/blogs/ticket/rep-john- fleming-field-criticism-over-600k- income-153305241.html .

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26 Unit One Building Blocks for Effective Messages

data from marketing companies. For many messages, simply identifying subsets of your audience is enough. For example, a school board trying to win support for a tax increase knows that not everyone living in the district will have children in school. It isn’t necessary to know the exact percentages to realize that successful messages will need to appeal not only to parents but also to voters who won’t directly benefit from the improvements that the tax increase will fund.

Personality When your primary audience is just one person, his or her personality is relevant. There are many ways to analyze personality. For business, one of the most useful is the Myers- Briggs Type Indicator ® instrument, which uses four pairs of dichotomies to identify ways that people differ. 3

• Extraversion–Introversion: where someone gets energy. Introverted types get their energy from within; extraverted types are energized by interacting with other people.

• Sensing–Intuition: how someone gets information. Sensing types gather information through their senses, preferring what is real and tangible. Intuitive types prefer to look at the big picture, focusing on the relationships and connections between facts.

• Thinking–Feeling: how someone makes decisions. Thinking types consider logical consequences of an action to reach decisions. Feeling types make decisions based on the impact to people.

• Judging–Perceiving: how someone orients himself or herself to the external world. Judging types like to live in a planned, orderly way, seeking closure. Perceiving types prefer a flexible environment, enjoying possibilities.

Some businesses administer the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator ® instrument to all employees. They find that results can be used to assist with team building and/or personal growth and development.

Knowing your audience’s personality type can help you select the appropriate channel and craft your message. For instance, an introvert might want a written message because it favors contemplation, while an extravert might instead prefer the dynamics of a phone call or face-to-face meeting. Sensitive types look for detailed facts, arranged sequentially so they can judge each accordingly, while intuitive types want to know the overall situation first to then apply creative solutions.

You’ll be most persuasive if you play to your audience’s strengths. Indeed, many of the general principles of business communication reflect the types most common among man- agers. Putting the main point up front satisfies the needs of judging types, and some 75% of U.S. managers are judging. Giving logical reasons satisfies the needs of the nearly 80% of U.S. managers who are thinking types. 4

Know that human beings are also adaptable. For instance, some research suggests that while only 50% of Americans are estimated to be extraverts, the vast majority of managers and executives demonstrate extraverted personality traits. 5 Introverts can learn many of the associated behaviors, even if they’re not their inclination.

Values and Beliefs Psychographic characteristics are qualitative rather than quantitative: values, beliefs, goals, and lifestyles. For example, two families living next door to each other might make about the same amount of money and each have two children. But one family might save every possible penny for college and retirement, taking inexpensive vacations and cooking meals at home rather than eating out. The other family might spend almost everything they make on clothes, cars, vacations, entertainment, and dinners out. One family might do most things together as a family, while in the other members might spend most of their time on indi- vidual activities. The families might have different religious and political beliefs.

If you wanted to persuade each family to do the same thing, you might need to use different reasons and reader benefits; you would have different objections to overcome.

Keep audiences in mind when using social networking sites. Lee Landor, deputy press secretary to Scott M. Stringer, Manhattan borough president, resigned after her reference to President Barack Obama as “O-dumb-a” and racially tinged comments during a heated exchange about the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on Facebook became public. Her situation rivals that of a woman in the United Kingdom who posted “OMG I HATE MY JOB!” after insulting her boss . . . and then found out he was a Facebook friend. She not only lost the job with two weeks left on her probationary period, but the exchange went viral on the web.

Source: Sewell Chan, “Facebook Postings Prompt Quick Exit of a City Politician’s Aide,” The New York Times, July 28, 2009, http:// www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/ nyregion/29fired.html?_r=2 ; and Marisa Taylor, “The Perils of Oversharing on Facebook,” The Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2009, http://blogs.wsj.com/ digits/2009/08/21/the-perils-of- oversharing-on-facebook/ .

Site to See

Go to www.claritas.com/ MyBestSegments/ Default.jsp?ID=20 Key in your Zip code to learn which psychographic groups are most common in your neighborhood.

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Module 2 Adapting Your Message to Your Audience 27

Knowing what your audience finds important allows you to organize information in a way that seems natural to your audience and to choose appeals that audience members will find persuasive.

Many marketers use the Values and Lifestyles (VALS) profiles developed by the SRI research firm in California. VALS profiles divide U.S. buyers into eight categories accord- ing to their primary motivation, the amount of resources they have, and the extent to which they innovate. For instance, Strivers are motivated by achievement and are relatively low in resources and innovation. These conspicuous consumers try to be in style, even without a lot of money.

Innovators, on the other hand, may have more disposable income and enjoy cooking and fine food. As Patricia Breman, a senior consultant for SRI Consulting Business Intelli- gence, points out, Innovators may be an excellent target market for upscale grocery stores. 6

The other VALS categories are Thinkers, Believers, Achievers, Experiencers, Makers, and Survivors. 7

Researcher Mary Modahl’s survey of 250,000 households found that online buying depends not on demographics such as age and Zip code but on psychographics: the con- sumer’s attitude toward technology along a continuum from “profoundly suspicious” to “eagerly accepting.” 8

Past Behavior How people have behaved in the past often predicts how they’ll behave in the future. For example, examining records of customer purchases showed Fingerhut that customers who moved made large purchases of furniture and decorations. Fingerhut developed a “mover’s catalog” filled with products likely to appeal to this group—and saved money by not mail- ing other catalogs to this group right after they moved. 9

Analyzing People in Organizations

Your reader’s reaction is affected not only by his or her personal preferences and feelings but also by the discourse communities to which the reader belongs and by the organizational culture.

Ken Blanchard is now a successful business writer with a track record of bestsellers, including The One Minute Manager, but people used to tell him he wrote poorly. Blanchard has said that when he was a student in graduate school, professors told him he could not write well enough to succeed as a college professor. But he adds, “Later I learned that the problem with my writing from their point of view was that you could understand it, which meant it wasn’t academic enough.” At the time, however, he accepted the advice and pursued a career in administration. To date, Blanchard’s books have sold more than 20 million copies. His latest is Great Leaders Grow: Becoming a Leader in Life.

Source: Based on Kevin Ryan, Write Up the Corporate Ladder (New York: Amacom, 2003), 126–27; and Dan Schawbel, “Ken Blanchard on How Great Leaders Grow,” Forbes, March 1, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ danschawbel/2012/03/01/ken- blanchard-on-howgreat-leaders- grow/ .

Some aspects of corporate culture may no longer serve an obvious purpose.

“I don’t know how it started, either. All I know is that it’s part of our corporate culture.”

Copyright © 1994 Mick Stevens/The New Yorker Collection, www.cartoonbank.com .

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28 Unit One Building Blocks for Effective Messages

A discourse community is a group of people who share assumptions about what chan- nels, formats, and styles to use, what topics to discuss and how to discuss them, and what constitutes evidence. Each person is part of several discourse communities, which may or may not overlap.

To analyze an organization’s discourse community, ask the following questions:

• What channels, formats, and styles are preferred for communication? Do you write a paper memo, send e-mail, or walk down the hall to talk to someone? How formal or informal are you supposed to be?

• What do people talk about? What is not discussed? • What kind of and how much evidence is needed to be convincing? Is personal experience

convincing? Do you need numbers and formal research?

Procter & Gamble’s discourse community requires that recommendations be just one page. So writers create one-page memos—and then add as many pages of “attachments” as they need. In contrast, a Silicon Valley company expects recommendations to be presented as a PowerPoint slide with a triangle with three words around it.

An organization’s culture is its values, attitudes, and philosophies. Organizational culture (or corporate culture, as it is often called; ▶▶ Module 3) is revealed verbally in the organization’s myths, stories, and heroes and nonverbally in the allocation of space, money, and power.

The following questions will help you analyze an organization’s culture:

• What are the organization’s goals? Making money? Serving customers and clients? Advancing knowledge? Contributing to the community?

• What does the organization value? Diversity or homogeneity? Independence or being a team player? Creativity or following orders?

• How do people get ahead? Are rewards based on seniority, education, being well-liked, making technical discoveries, or serving customers? Are rewards available to only a few top people, or is everyone expected to succeed?

• How formal are behavior, language, and dress?

Two companies in the same field may have very different cultures. To compare corporate cultures, Cecilia Rothenberger reviewed how two executives described their own organiza- tions. 10 According to her, Andersen Consulting, which employs 65,000 people in 48 coun- tries, values compensation, bonuses, prestige, resources, and rewards; the 35-person Creative Good firm values communication, relationships, creativity, and growth. Researcher Jennifer Chatman found that new hires who “fit” a company’s culture were more likely to stay with the job, be more productive, and be more satisfied than those who did not fit the culture. 11

Organizations can have subcultures. For example, manufacturing and marketing may represent different subcultures in the same organization: workers may dress differently and have different values.

You can learn about organizational culture by observing people and by listening to the stories they tell. Here are two of the stories Nike’s leaders tell.

When State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley called the U.S. Army’s treatment of a soldier suspected of collaborating with Wikileaks “stupid” and “ridiculous,” he may have been speaking off the cuff. But the remarks generated enough criticism that Crowley later resigned, illustrating among other things the need to carefully weigh audience when communicating. In particular, consider organizational culture and discourse community—a comment that might be acceptable to one group may be unacceptable to another, even if that group includes peers.

Source: Matthew Lee, “Clinton Spokesman Resigns After Wikileaks Flap,” MSNBC, March 13, 2011, http://www.msnbc.msn .com/id/42060000/ns/politics- more_politics/t/clinton-spokesman- resigns-after-wikileaks-flap/#. UAsP47Se6tw .

Story Lesson

Coach Bowerman (a company co-founder) decided his team needed better running shoes. So he went into his workshop and poured rubber into the family waffle iron to create a waffle sole.

Nike is committed to innovation.

Steve Prefontaine (a runner and another co-founder) worked to make running a professional sport and to get better-performing equipment.

Nike is committed to helping athletes.

Instant Replay

Discourse Community A discourse community is a group of people who share assumptions about what channels, formats, and styles to use, what topics to discuss and how to discuss them, and what constitutes evidence.

I R

Discourse C

You can also learn about a company’s culture by looking at its website. Many compa- nies try to describe their cultures, usually as part of the section on employment.

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Confirming pages

Module 2 Adapting Your Message to Your Audience 29

Now that I have my analysis, what do I do with it? LO 2-5 ▶ Use it to plan strategy, organization, style, document design, and visuals.

If you know your audience well and if you use words well, much of your audience analysis and adaptation will be unconscious. If you don’t know your audience or if the message is very important, take the time to analyze your audience formally and to revise your draft with your analysis in mind.

You can adapt your message’s strategy, organization, and style to meet the audience’s needs. For paper or electronic documents, you can also adapt the document’s design and the photos or illustrations you choose.

Strategy

• Make the action as easy as possible. • Protect the reader’s ego. • Decide how to balance logic and emotion, what details to use, and whether to use a hard-

sell or soft-sell approach based on the specific audience, the organizational culture, and the discourse community.

• Choose appeals and reader benefits that work for the specific audience (▶▶ Module 8). • Modules 7, 11, and 13 will show you how to emphasize positive aspects, decide how

much information to include, and overcome obstacles.

Organization

• Because most managers are intuitive types, it’s usually better to get to the point right away. The major exceptions are

• When we must persuade a reluctant reader. • When we have bad news and want to let the reader down gradually. • Make the organizational pattern clear to the audience. Modules 9, 23, and 24 show

you how to use headings and overviews. Module 20 shows how to use overviews and signposts in oral presentations.

Style

• For most audiences, use easy-to-understand words, a mixture of sentence lengths, and paragraphs with topic sentences (▶▶ Modules 15 and 16).

• Avoid words that sound defensive or arrogant. • Avoid hot buttons or “red-flag” words to which some readers will have an immediate

negative reaction: criminal, un-American, crazy, fundamentalist, liberal. • Use the language(s) that your audience knows best. In Quebec, messages are normally

presented both in English and in French. In the Southwest United States, messages may be most effective printed in both English and Spanish.

• Use conversational, not “academic,” language.

“Terrifying,” “psychedelic,” and “awesomely bad” were among terms critics used to describe an advertisement by California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina’s campaign that attacked her opponent, Tom Campbell. The video combined live action with animation to show a flock of sheep infiltrated by a red- eyed, costumed human. While Michael Scherer in Time notes the spot is “so weird that you will click on it online,” the question remains whether getting attention is the same as swaying the audience.

Source: Brett Michael Dykes, “Bizarre Attack Ad Heats Up California Senate Race,” February 4, 2010, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ ynews/ynews_pl1112 .

To tap into youth markets, companies are seeking advice from people in the target market. Natalie Rodriguez, Heide Panglemaier, and Rosaura Lezama offer their opinions of marketers’ efforts through 3iying.com .

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