Why Brand Journalism Works

Early in management professor Erin Meyer’s career, she worked for a health-care software company.

“One day, a woman from human resources came into the cafeteria with a roll of tape and began sticking posters on the walls,” she wrote recently. “They proclaimed in royal blue the company’s values: ‘Transparency, Respect, Integrity, Honesty.’”

The next day the company handed out wallet-sized plastic cards with the same words.

Many employees have seen similar exercises, amplified with CEO town halls, all-hands meetings and manager info sessions. But few employees have likely witnessed what happened next. One year later, the top executives at HBOC were indicted for accounting fraud.

“We learned what the company’s values really were,” wrote Meyer, an expert in corporate culture and now a professor at business school INSEAD.

Comms question
The episode highlights a problem many companies face. No, the problem is not white-collar fraud. That’s a big problem, but not one that brand journalism can fix.

The problem is an ingrained communications culture that brags, boasts and blusters. It’s waiving a big foam finger that proclaims, “We’re No. 1,” at every opportunity.

There is another, more credible way. Our approach, brand journalism, relies on techniques that reporters and editors use, such as interviewing, data analysis and storytelling, to polish a company’s reputation.

To start brand journalism, here’s four things you’ll want to change, step by step.

1. Change your operation. Brand journalism is a management philosophy that puts communicators in charge of … communication. Pretty radical, right?

It features a hub-and-spoke structure, with the comms team at the center, making decisions on what’s a good story and how best to tell it. Along the rim are internal clients who are no longer in silos, narrowly focused on their own communication demands.

In making those decisions, communicators should apply editorial guidelines that line up with the corporate strategy. They also should employ the elements of newsworthiness that journalists use.

2. Change your thinking. Like news outlets, brand journalists. focus on what the audience wants to know, not what the marketing and public relations people are being told to promote.

Public relations focuses on what the company wants to say about itself. Content marketing focuses on the goods and services the company is selling; it’s about generating leads.

Brand journalism aims to establish awareness, setting a context for marketing and sales.

For example, BOK Financial’s site, The Statement, offers personal finance news and insight valuable to everyone regardless of where they bank.

3. Change how you work. Communicators often complain they’re treated like order-takers but don’t change their own approach. They too often believe stories come from thinking, which they call “ideation.” Good stories come from reporting.

Transform how you get your stories. Become a better reporter, a hunter-gatherer of news about your company.  Go out and find better stories to tell than the ideas coming down from the top that make your eyes roll.

Brand journalism emphasizes digging up the facts and grabbing the quotes that are the ingredients of good storytelling. Remember:  Show, don’t tell.

4. Change your attitude. Communicators often complain they don’t have enough time to be good storytellers. Do reporters have a lot of time?

The difference is that journalists think like storytellers from the moment they sniff a story. They think about the story’s structure and plan their reporting accordingly. They write a draft headline and first sentence to direct their attention.

You don’t have to launch a news site to do brand journalism. You can start one story at a time.

Why it works
Brand journalism is effective because well-reported stories are more persuasive and memorable than self-serving proclamations, which only foster distrust.

For example, shareholders show greater interest in publicly held companies that don’t use “trust words,” such as ethical, integrity and responsibility, in their annual reports, according to research by three university accounting professors. Shareholders are indifferent to companies that use such terms, they found.

“Companies likely use trust words to project a positive image and better manage information within the annual report, but it seems that no one is really fooled,” Gopal Krishnan, one of the study’s authors, told The Wall Street Journal.

The research team examined the use of 21 words intended to convey trustworthiness in Securities and Exchange Commission filings over a 23-year period.

The companies that used those trust words were more likely to receive comment letters from the SEC questioning disclosures; pay higher auditing fees, often a red flag of risky practices; and have lower social responsibility scores, compared to companies that didn’t use those words.

Credibility is more important than ever to companies and their leaders. Just 16% of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in big business, according to Gallup’s annual survey released last month.

That’s the third lowest level of confidence among 17 U.S. institutions, above only TV news and Congress.

Brand journalism won’t help companies that have bad products, poor customer service, or fractured ethics such as Meyer’s former software company. Remember Ann Richards’ unique spin on a familiar saying.

The colorful governor of Texas, who died in 2006, said, “You can put lipstick and earrings on a hog and call it Monique, but it’s still a pig.”

Do you also remember what Richards said about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire?  Tom Corfman, a senior consultant with Ragan Consulting Group, does.

Contact our client team to learn more about how we can help you with your communications. Follow RCG on LinkedIn and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.