The Road to Reinvention by Josh Linkner

Author:Josh Linkner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

As you can imagine, this is not standard practice in the stuffy venture capital industry. But by reinventing our communication, the quality of meetings has jumped dramatically, which was a win for everyone involved. This new approach to communication left no assumptions to chance for our customers (the hopeful entrepreneurs), and as a result, we significantly improved a key aspect of our business. Multiply a similar improvement across your entire organization, and you’ve just discovered a meaningful competitive advantage.

Our strategy with these meeting guidelines fell under the category of functional communication. Generally in this form of storytelling, we think of documents—memos, handbooks, and instruction manuals—but your functional communication also encapsulates how your organization responds to the public when things happen—press releases, major announcements, or crisis strategy.

While a response to a bad situation can be difficult to architect, it can hold the biggest payoff for your company if you do it correctly. The way you tell a story of what went wrong, and how you’re fixing it, is vital; you have to consider what you’re saying as well as the medium in which you choose to deliver that message.

In March 2013, Lululemon, a high-end provider of athletic clothing and gear inspired by yoga, recalled a major line of its product after women worldwide complained that Lululemon pants were see-through. That’s a serious problem in the bent-over, contorted positions during which the yoga pants are designed to be used. The recall affected 17 percent of its inventory and cost the company tens of millions of dollars.7 In crisis mode, the company had to figure out a way to apologize and keep the trust of its loyal following to maintain its position as a truly luxurious, high-performance line of apparel.

At the individual store level (Lululemon has 201 stores), window displays with mannequins set up in various yoga poses were adjusted, and signs and banners in their display windows were added with appropriate messaging. At a store near my home, derrieres were facing outward, with a sign that read, “You saw London. You saw France. We promise no more see-through pants.” Others nationwide had similar setups, with taglines such as, “We want to be transparent with you,” and, “We’ve got you covered.” This quirky response transformed a corporate problem into an opportunity to deepen their bond with customers by using humor.

The company took this type of story a step further. As the pants were retooled and put back on store shelves in November of that same year, they were branded as the “second chance pant.” The tags on each of the items explain that these are a celebration of failure, and they outline the improvements made to keep bottoms covered as they should be. Lululemon could have fixed this problem at the corporate level only, issuing a press release and apology for the situation, but by taking a different, courageous approach and telling this story head-on, it was able to remain ahead of the pack.

Even if you’re not a specialist in marketing and communication, there is an easy approach you can follow to reinvent your communication efforts.

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