TyroCity

Discussion on: “You” perspective in business correspondence

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ShantaMilan

There is an interesting phenomenon that I read once. It said that whenever a group photo is taken, we tend to look at our own face first. We as humans have an innate need to feel special, wanted and appreciated. Relating to this the use of the word "you” makes people feel focused on and special. "Communication’ has been considered as the fundamental social process because human beings interact with each other through communication in social set-up. (Bell & Smith, 2014)” Thus the use of "you” in a social set-up can be termed as a good form of communication as this generates closeness between the speaker and the one spoken to and builds a bridge of relationship.

Human resource management talks about the importance of workers, leadership talks about the importance of followers and marketing talks about the importance of customers. From this we can deduce the importance of catering communication towards being customer centric and as such even business correspondence with the use of the word "you” over "I & We” focuses and personalized the communication giving importance to them.

For example:

  1. In advertisements: We have created a product that helps ease every day chores of cleaning. This could be rephrased better with, Your need to stay clean, has been made easy with our new product.

  2. In an email correspondence: Please be present with your business pitch for the meeting at 3 pm. This can be rephrased as, Your presence is vital, to convince our investors in the meeting at 3pm.

  3. Business Meetings: Great team effort can be rephrased as your contribution to the team was very good.

Reference
Bell, A. L., & Smith, D. M. (2014). Communication. In A. L. Bell, & D. M. Smith, Management communication (pp. 260-270). Delhi: John Wiley & Sons. Inc.