Before you decide what the company should say next, it helps to understand what it has been saying all along.
I was looking through an old piece of company content recently and had one of those strange moments.
That’s them.
Not the logo. Not the colors. Not even necessarily the language they would use today (see my Sept 9 SELLING THE TRUTH Today piece for why Words Don’t Matter).
But the company was in there.
You could feel what mattered to them. How they saw the world. Why they approached the work the way they did.
Then I read something else from a few years later.
Also theirs.
Except this one seemed to come from a slightly different company.
Nothing was particularly wrong with it. Nobody had wandered off and started talking about cryptocurrency or artisanal mayonnaise.
Time happened.
The company grew. New people came in. The market changed. The work evolved. Leadership learned things it couldn’t have known when the earlier piece was written.
Meanwhile, the company kept talking.
Articles were published. Executives were interviewed. Websites were rebuilt. Presentations were updated. Salespeople developed their own ways of explaining things.
Eventually, you have a back catalog. And a back catalog can tell you an enormous amount about an institution.
Sometimes more than the institution realizes.
Because companies rarely wake up one morning and decide to become something different. They accumulate.
A phrase that once captured the business perfectly hangs around a little longer than it should.
An idea that began as a point of view becomes part of the culture.
Something the founder used to say disappears when the company gets big enough that the founder isn’t in every room.
The strange thing is that all of it may have been true.
Just not at the same time.
That’s why I get nervous when an established company decides it needs to “update the messaging.”
Maybe it does.
But before anybody starts writing, I want to know what happened.
I want to go back.
Not because the answer is hiding in a ten-year-old press release. Because the distance between what the company said then and what it says now can reveal something important about what changed along the way.
You may discover that the oldest articulation of the company contains something essential that got polished out over time.
Or that the language everyone still uses describes a business that no longer exists.
Or that the company has developed a genuinely important point of view but never stopped long enough to recognize that it had one.
That isn’t a tone-of-voice problem.
It’s an institutional understanding problem.
And if you skip that part, a new messaging guide can actually make things worse.
Now everybody can express the wrong understanding consistently.
Excellent.
At least the confusion is on brand.
The work I’m interested in happens before that.
What remains true?
What has actually changed?
What does this institution understand today that it could not have understood five or ten years ago?
And once you can see that clearly, you don’t have to erase the earlier versions of the company to make room for the current one.
You can see the thread.
That matters to me.
Because recalibration shouldn’t require amnesia.
An institution with history has earned that history. The years of thinking, writing, speaking, succeeding, screwing things up, changing course and figuring things out are part of the value.
The job is to understand what all of that has become.
Your company has a back catalog.
Before you decide what it should say next, it might be worth listening to it.
If your organization has changed faster than the way it explains itself, that’s work I do. We should talk.