I counted eleven signs on one walk down Division last Saturday. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays until further notice. We are short two people, please be patient with the ones who showed up. Kitchen closes at eight now, we are sorry, we are doing our best. All of them printed on copy paper or written in marker, all of them taped to the inside of the glass so the rain could not get at them.
Best writing I have read all summer.
Those signs do three things a national campaign almost never does. They name the constraint out loud. They make a specific ask of the person reading. And they do not apologize for the wrong thing, which is the failure mode of nearly every corporate statement issued in the last eighteen months.
Meanwhile the same categories are buying thirty seconds to tell us they are here for you.
Honesty about a constraint builds more trust than any amount of polish, because the constraint is the only part of your message the customer can independently verify.
She already knows. She waited twenty minutes. She watched one person run the register and the espresso machine and the pastry case. When your sign says we are short staffed and doing our best, you are not disclosing anything she did not see. You are confirming it, and that is precisely what makes you credible on everything else you claim.
Compare the polished version. A large chain will tell you it is experiencing longer than usual wait times due to unprecedented circumstances, and every word of that is engineered to avoid naming a person or a cause. Nobody is short handed. Nobody made a scheduling decision. It is weather. It happened to the company rather than being done by anyone inside it.
Here is what separates the sign on the door from the statement on the website. The sign was written by someone who has to stand behind that counter and be looked at all day by the people reading it. Accountability was not a communications strategy for her. It was Tuesday.
So the useful exercise, if your brand is stuck in the polished register, is this one. Write the version you would tape to your own front door, in marker, knowing the person reading it is already standing there and already annoyed. Then see how much of the official language you can throw out and replace with it. Usually most of it.
Accountability was not a communications strategy for her. It was Tuesday.
The karaoke place in Southeast has a sign now too. Reduced hours, one bartender, be kind. The host still calls everyone baby and still let me take far too much of a Fleetwood Mac song on Thursday. Nobody in that room needed a campaign to understand the situation. The paper on the door covered it.