One of the biggest pitfalls in any sort of communications endeavour is the publisher’s fallacy – the belief that your views and wants from your publication are the same as your readers’.
Simply illustrated, the publisher’s fallacy goes like this: the publisher of a glossy mainstream sports magazine loves curling, so she thinks “since I love curling, and want to read more about it, my readers will too. So this issue, I’ll remove the regular hockey column and do a feature on curling”
This is a very dangerous assumption, because nothing will alienate an audience quicker than a thick layer of uninteresting or unwanted content in place of what they’re expecting. In this case, the majority of the readers want the usual column (after all, that’s why they buy the magazine), and when it’s gone, they are unhappy. They lose respect for the magazine and are less likely to buy it in the future.
So how does that affect our communications? Senior management often uses internal channels as a way to broadcast the things they are proud of, but not necessarily what the reader cares about. Obviously, management is extremely concerned with quarterly results, annual reports, and exco meetings that took place at fancy hotels in exciting places.
But does the average reader care?
At best, it’s mildly interesting, and at worse, alienating. I have managed a channel which was filled with stories of the CEO and exco traveling around the world, drinking toasts and shaking hands – while at the same time, there was restructuring going on an major cost cutting exercises. Do you think the worker who just had his free soft drinks removed for cost reasons wants to see that the exco is flying around the world to have strategy meetings?
There are business rationales for all these activities, but the average reader doesn’t know them – making this use of the channel a grave misstep, and a classic example of the publisher’s fallacy.