Half the team is off. The rest are carrying work that isn’t theirs. Then in a fortnight you swap and repeat.
That’s August in most businesses. School holidays land, the rota gets thin and everyone tries to carry on like it’s a normal month. For some it’s peak – hospitality, leisure, travel, food and drink, anything that lives off the school holidays. Most seen, by the most people, plenty of them meeting you for the first time. And it’s the exact month head office is at its emptiest.
Which brings me to the most-read piece of copy your company will produce all month.
The out-of-office autoreply. Customers, suppliers, the person deciding whether to send you a brief – all of them get one, all of them read it, and it lands in seconds when nothing else about you does.
They get typed at 4.55pm on the last Friday by whoever remembers, and they read like a parking notice.
Which is odd, because you’d never let any other piece of work out of the door like that – packaging or a pitch deck. The autoreply gets a pass because it feels like admin. That’s exactly why it’s worth doing. Not a gag – nobody needs a whimsical autoreply. Just useful, and unmistakably you. Who to contact, when you’re back, said the way you’d actually say it.
Because a brand that kisses is obsessed at that level. On the stuff nobody’s grading. Every touch is a chance to build something with the people on the other end of it, and the ones that get skipped are always the ones that don’t feel important enough to bother with.
August is made of those. The enquiry answered in four days instead of four hours. The social post signed off by someone three rungs down who’s never been told what good looks like, because the person who knows is in Cornwall. The complaint handled by someone covering a job they don’t really understand, doing their best, with no guardrails to work from.
The ones carrying the extra load are usually grafting harder than they would normally. It’s structural. The standard was being held in somebody’s head, and that somebody is on a beach.
Brands that kiss make it integrated and embedded instead. Templates, guides, onboarding. Standards talked about, visible, consistent, so a stand-in can’t get the tone wrong. Rules for what can go out without a second pair of eyes and what genuinely can’t. One person, named, holding sign-off each week, and not always the same person.
Dull, unglamorous stuff. It’s also the difference that makes a brand that holds all year round persistently.
So who’s holding the standard when you’re two cocktails down on Mykonos? Or better, have you built the thing that means nobody has to?
