It happens every year. You go to work only to find a bunch of rug rats running around your office building, setting off door alarms, getting in your way, and making enough noise to cause you to briefly consider a vasectomy.
It’s Bring Your Brat to Work Day. Usually a dreaded day of the year, except this year, I’m actually enjoying it.
I arrived at work to see a ton of people gathered outside the office building. At first, I thought, “Great… Now everyone’s going to see me arriving late.” Then I noticed they were mostly kids and families. There were some TSO’s (short for Transportation Security Officers, dummy) showing off some of our canine officers. The kids enjoyed watching the dogs do fun tricks like sniffing out the illegal narcotics stashed in their pockets by undercover agents. One dog found a bomb on one of the children—after which, the TSO’s just looked at one another, unsure of who planted the device.
It looked like loads of fun, but I had to go upstairs and publish some high-priority press releases. I swear, when there’s actually something fun going on at TSA, I can’t take part.
The more I thought about Bring Your Brat to Work Day, I realized that this was really a marketing person’s dream. One day out of the year, we have access to an enormous—and free—focus group. Trying to tell children about what TSA does is basically what we have to do on the website.
You can’t use all kinds of fancy government terms and acronyms, when talking to a child. You have to assume that they don’t know anything about TSA, and start your presentation from scratch. That’s what we should be doing on the website. If we want people outside of TSA to give a crap about what we do, we have to talk to them on their level, and concentrate on how TSA affects their lives.
Customers don’t care about companies or organizations. All they care about is how that company or organization can help them.
Honestly, the TSA website is chock full of information that customers outside the organization couldn’t care less about. They don’t care about what awards or recognition we received. They don’t care about who are leaders are and what they do.
All customers care about is how TSA affects them. How are their travel plans going to be affected by our policies? What can they bring with them on an airplane? How long is all this screening stuff going to take? What time should I arrive at the airport? Can I bring grenades in my carryon luggage?
As for children, they just want to know why they have to take off their shoes and why their parents are being stripped searched and handcuffed.
I think the Marketing/PR department should be in charge of planning the programs for Bring Your Brat to Work Day. That would bring them back down to earth, reminding them how to communicate with the public.
