Key takeaways
• Collective achievements still benefit from individual voices. Authenticity comes from recognising the team’s contribution while allowing a real person to speak on its behalf.
• Readers connect with organisations through people, not departments. Removing named spokespeople often weakens credibility rather than strengthening it.
• Group attribution creates practical challenges for journalists and can make content feel overly corporate or committee-written.
• The most effective approach is usually to celebrate collective effort within the quote itself, rather than removing individual attribution altogether.
Why organisations do this
Readers trust people more than departments
Whether we are talking about customers, journalists, employees, or industry partners, people naturally connect with organisations through individuals. A named spokesperson signals that someone is willing to stand behind the statement. It provides accountability, personality, and a point of view.
By contrast, quotes attributed to ‘the engineering team’ or ‘management’ can feel impersonal. Readers instinctively understand that departments do not speak. People do. The moment attribution becomes collective, the quote often starts to feel less like a genuine perspective and more like corporate copy approved by committee. That is rarely the intention, but it is often the effect.
Journalists face a practical problem too
There is also a more practical consideration. Quotation marks are a contract with the reader. They signal that a specific person said these words. When multiple people are attributed to a single quote, or a quote is assigned to a department rather than an individual, that convention starts to break down.
In a press release, many editors will simply rewrite the quote into indirect speech. Others may request a named spokesperson, and some may conclude the content has been over-engineered and move on. None of these outcomes help the story. Particularly in trade media, where editorial teams are already working under significant time pressure, any additional friction can reduce the likelihood of publication.
There is a better way to recognise collective effort
Fortunately, this is usually easy to solve. The answer is not to ignore the contribution of the wider team. It is to acknowledge it explicitly.
For example, instead of:
“We worked tirelessly to develop this solution,” said the engineering team.
Try:
“The engineering team has worked incredibly hard to bring this project to life and I am enormously proud of what we have achieved together,” said Chief Technology Officer Jane Smith.
The achievement remains collective and the voice remains human. Both objectives are preserved. In other situations, the answer may be to include multiple individual quotes, allowing different contributors to speak about different aspects of the project. What matters is that real people remain visible.
Authentic communications still need human voices
Hannah Kitchener
Associate Director
About the author
Hannah is an associate director in the UK, leading strategic campaigns for industrial clients across the EMEA region. A professionally qualified journalist (NCTJ), she combines specialist sectoral knowledge in construction, energy, and materials handling with a strong network of trade media contacts to secure valuable coverage. Her expertise in inter-cultural communication, honed by degrees in modern languages and translation, is key to executing campaigns that succeed across diverse European markets.
