Smooth vs. Spiky Comms

We spent decades sanding down edges. Now we do so to our detriment.

Corporate Memphis, the official style of saying absolutely nothing. (Illustration: Katharina Brenner, CC BY 4.0)

For most of its history, corporate communications has been about taking whatever a company has to say and turning it into a nice, smooth surface: nothing that offends, nothing that picks fights, nothing that gets anybody in trouble. Most of the profession's apparatus is still built to produce that surface.

But the era of smooth comms is over, if smoothness was ever useful to begin with. We live in an attention economy that doesn’t reward it, and I’d bet even the people running that apparatus know it. The best comms teams have already moved on to spiky comms, meaning rough edges, personality, opinion, and perspective.

Which is not to say sloppy. Spiky comms is still thoughtful, and you still do everything for a reason. What changes is the end product and how you present it to your audiences.

Journalism got here first

Think of the AP-and-Reuters register: bland, anodyne, careful never to show a point of view. The press critic Jay Rosen calls that stance the View from Nowhere, and he argues it’s easier to trust someone who tells you where they’re coming from. People say they want the neutral version, but their revealed preferences are more complicated. The Reuters Institute found this year that the minority who want news with a point of view are more engaged and more commercially valuable than everyone else, and publishers have every incentive to cater to them.

We tend to think of the neutral style as the way journalism has always been done, and that’s just not true. For most of the nineteenth century, American newspapers were openly partisan. The neutral news most of us grew up with is a twentieth-century invention.¹

Corporate communications needs a reckoning of its own. Smooth feels like the natural order because it’s the only order most of us have ever worked in.

A brand for no one

So why do so many comms teams find this hard? Mostly because their companies don’t have opinions, personalities, or points of view on much of anything. That’s a bigger problem than comms can solve alone, but it lands on comms all the same. A company with no point of view ends up with a brand made of blandness, and a brand made of blandness is for no one. It gets lost and forgotten.

How much this matters depends on what else you’ve got. Apple is about as polished as corporate communications gets, and it doesn’t lean on spikiness much, because what it has is product story, and a very strong one. Spikiness becomes more important the less you can rely on your product or service to carry the narrative. If your product is compelling on its own, lead with the product. If you’re selling a commodity product with a commodity service wrapped around it, you have to differentiate through brand, and a brand with no edges can’t do that job.

The obvious spiky example is Elon Musk, and he’s a bad one. He’s sui generis, and there’s no program there anyone else could run. When I ran communications and public policy at SoFi, we built one. We were selling loans and banking services you could get anywhere, with a level of service that was somewhat differentiated but not hugely so. Brand, and how we expressed it, was how we showed people we were for them. That principle went into every campaign we ran, into what we funded in the community and what we didn’t, and into which activations we greenlit. It’s a big part of why the franchise succeeded.

I can already hear the objection. That’s great for a consumer brand like SoFi, but we sell to IT buyers, or insert your hyper-specific buttoned-up industry here. The job is to be understandable, and nobody wants too many opinions.

To which I’d say: you don’t think that audience has opinions? About how things should be done, and what they’d do differently? Buyers with strong opinions pick vendors whose views match their own, and they can only pick you if they can tell who you’re for. The objection is a symptom of the same problem. It strips the humanity out of the audience along with the communications, sucking the life out of the people you’re trying to reach and treating them as a list of criteria to meet.

I’ll grant that some audiences respond to opinionated comms more than others. But everybody has opinions, and the sooner you recognize that, the more interesting your communications will be.

Spiky takes more structure

Which brings us back to sloppiness. A lot of people assume more personality and opinion means sloppier communications, where anything goes and nobody follows rules. And they’ll tell you, correctly, that a communications program needs rules and structure. But that’s a false choice. You don’t have to pick between smooth with structure and personality without it. If anything, a properly instrumented communications program with real perspective takes more structure and more forethought.

That structure also answers the fairest objection: risk. Spiky has a real cost when it goes wrong, and it goes wrong in public, with the comms team left to clean it up. So be precise about which edges you mean. The opinions that make a company interesting are mostly about its own world, like how its category should work, what its customers deserve, and what the rest of its industry keeps getting wrong. Whether to weigh in on the public controversy of the week is a separate decision, and plenty of opinionated companies rarely do. Apple went very public with its fight against the FBI over encryption in 2016, and it has chosen its moments carefully since.²

Most of the time the signal is quieter than a fight anyway. It lives in taste and framing, in what you choose to talk about and how. Getting there forces you to question your first principles. What do you believe? Who are you for? What does that audience actually care about? The smooth approach asks none of those questions. It assumes very little, and it lacks the intellectual curiosity to find out what a company is for.

1. Whether we’re still living in that era or on our way out of it is a newsletter for another day.

2. See: Donald Trump, presidency of