It may be going a tad far to say corporations are all about conformity. I’d hate to put it quite so harshly. Perhaps this would be better: Corporations want you to do things their way—to the letter (literally, as you will soon see). If you don’t, meltdowns have a tendency to ensue.
There. Is that a gentler way of expressing the same concept? I didn’t think so.
Rarely is the tradition of corporate sameness more starkly on display than with the establishment and enforcement of the corporate style guide. These monstrosities seep into our lives and devour our young not because they’re abjectly evil—few things in the corporate world are—but because they’re the outgrowth of a sensible objective gone haywire as a result of committee thinking.
Companies develop corporate style guides in the pursuit of a sensible objective: They don’t want their basic corporate look and logo to be presented in a crappy manner. If you don’t think this can be a problem, all you need to do is take a look at some examples.
I once worked with a company whose logo was a crown. What this had to do with its core business—tool and die—I have no idea, but that’s not important. You want your logo to be a crown? Fine with me. A silver one with rounded interludes in between the points and little red circles on top of the points? OK. But you’d better make sure everyone who presents something that’s supposed to have your logo on it has that crown, not some sorry approximation of it.
That’s where the trouble started. A bunch of guys on the shop floor decided to make up work shirts that had “the logo,” but it wasn’t the logo at all. The crown had pointed interludes and was too wide. The letters above the crown were a totally different font, and they were all caps, unlike on the official logo, where only the first letter was capitalized.
To make matters worse, a guy in finance pasted up invoices (I think he actually used paste) that had a “company logo” I think he drew freehand.
This menagerie of marketing mayhem provides the perfect example of why corporate style guides were established. They lay down the law: The logo looks like this, and only like this. We use this font. We use these colors. Follow suit. You will not draw your own version with crayons and put it on invoices. You will not use Microsoft Paint to mock up a close-enough-for-you version and send it off to the work uniform company.
But as with all things corporate, the corporate style guide grows and grows and grows until the whole concept goes too far. A client recently shared with me his own perfect example.
His corporate style guide governed the exact look of every different kind of sell sheet, brochure and marketing material known to man. Or woman. It was quite the thing: On the two-page sell sheet, headlines are required to be between 35 and 40 characters. Subheads are required to be between 190 and 200 characters. Main-section text must contain an opening statement with not more than 250 characters, followed by four or five bullet-pointed supporting items to fall between 350 and 400 characters. And as for the four-page sell sheets, well, don’t even get me started on where you need to put those semicolons.
Now, you try writing a headline that’s between 35 and 40 characters (spaces included). It’s not as much as it sounds.
BENEFIT SERVICES FROM THE REAL PROFESSIONALS.
Four characters too long.
LET US MAKE IT EASY FOR YOU.
Way too short!
EXPERIENCE THAT LETS YOU RELAX AND FOCUS ON YOUR BUSINESS.
Are you kidding? We’re not writing novels here, Sparky!
Finally, you end up settling for something like this:
BENEFIT SUPPORT SERVICES YOU CAN TRUST.
Bleh. But hey, just like when they tried to turn Greg Brady into Johnny Bravo, if the suit fits, that’s all that really matters. The message will hit the reader between the eyes like a stale baloney sandwich, but it matters not because it complies with the style guide.
Of course, marketing will want to know why you didn’t work in seven or eight of its favored selling points, since there’s no conceivable reason you couldn’t cover all that in 40 characters or less. But you can respond to that inquisition during your presentation to the executive committee, which will also rake you over the coals because your fourth bullet point apparently had something to do with frogs on flying lily pads.
Hey! You think it’s easy coming up with four bullet points about a company that’s lucky if it’s competent at even one thing? Then be my guest, pal.
Hilariously, the logic behind such uncompromising style guides is they’re supposed to save the company money. There’s no need for ongoing design expenses, or so goes the thinking, because we just use this same design over and over again. We know where every line of copy will be. We know how thick the vertical line on the left-hand side, 0.52389323 inches from the edge, should be. Easy peasy.
Until, of course, your writer charges you 45 times what you expected because you keep telling him to fit the entire company’s history into 350 characters, and you refuse to let him do it as one long acronym.
Ah, corporate overthink. If we didn’t complicate everything until it led to utter chaos, how would we ever standardize and simplify everything?
Oh, sorry. That question used too many characters. If we su ut iz?
That’s better.
