The first one arrived Wednesday from a mattress company I bought a mattress from in 2018. Subject line: an update from our team. By Friday I had six more. A rental car company, a museum, a coffee subscription, two software vendors I pay monthly, and a Portland restaurant I love that should have known better.
Omicron got its name on November 26. The emails started roughly four days later.
Every one of them had the same architecture. A sentence about uncertainty. A sentence about how the health and safety of our community has always been our top priority. A vague gesture at monitoring the guidance. A sign-off from a CEO whose name I did not know before and will not remember after.
Not one of them told me anything I could act on.
A statement that does not change what a customer can expect from you is not communication, it is a company clearing its own throat in public.
In March 2020 the reflex was at least understandable. Nobody knew anything, everyone was frightened, and the urge to say something out loud was human. It did not work then either. There is an entire genre of screenshot thread from that spring mocking these emails, and the mockery was correct, but the lesson most brands took from it was to write a better one rather than to write a real one or none.
Here is the test. Read your draft and ask what a customer knows after reading it that they did not know before. If the answer is nothing, do not send it.
The brands that got 2020 right got it right by being operational. Powell's told you exactly how curbside pickup worked and how far behind shipping was running. Salt & Straw told you which shops were open, what the line situation looked like, and shipped pints. Neither wrote a paragraph about its values. They told you what was true this week and what to expect next week, which is what values look like when they are load-bearing.
The other honest option is silence. Not every brand has standing here. A mattress company has no obligations to me during a variant surge, and pretending otherwise reads as an attempt to buy relevance with a public health event. You can spot the companies treating the news as a communications opportunity, because their update contains no information.
If the answer is nothing, do not send it.
I went to karaoke Saturday, the sticky-floored place in Southeast where the host calls everyone baby. Taped to the door was a piece of paper. Masks inside. Proof of vaccination at the bar. If you are sick, stay home, we will still be here. Four lines, no letterhead, no continued commitment to anything. I knew exactly what to expect, which is all any of this was ever supposed to do.