Know your Audience | Communications Team

Know your Audience – Three Heavy Little Words

It was only three words and they likely wouldn't have caused a kerfuffle in any other country. “Ebit macht frei,” which translates as “Profits will set you free.” But the country in question is Germany and the speaker was Volkswagen CEO Herbert Dies addressing the flexibility afforded the company’s managers by the fat profit margins of the company’s luxury brand, Porsche. The problem is that many in Germany interpreted his remarks as a play on the words, “Work will set you free,” which was inscribed on the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camps. As many visitors know, the Holocaust continues to cast a pall over Germany more than 80 years after World War II ended. The result is that [...]

Know your Audience – Eye of the Beholder

Those of us of a certain, ahem, age will likely remember the episode of the old television series, the Twilight Zone, in which a woman lies in a hospital bed, her head swathed entirely in bandages, awaiting the results of her 11th surgery to repair unidentified deformities that have reduced her face to a “pitiful, twisted lump of flesh.” The tension builds as the patient expresses her anxiety to the doctors and nurses whose faces are also obscured by deep shadows. When the bandages are finally cut away, the visage of a beautiful blonde woman–the actor Donna Douglas, who would go on to play Elly May Clampett in the television sitcom, The Beverly Hillbillies– is revealed The doctors and [...]