"Outsourced" is a dirty word. What about Distributed?

mike-jemops

You can't deny it - "outsourced" is a dirty word.  Don't get me wrong - I've worked with tons of excellent offshore teams - people with incredible skills and ethics - but customer perception almost always disfavors outsourcing on the basis of assumed poor quality and/or ethics issues pertaining to uneducated, impoverished workforces.

Here's the thing - like many progressive companies these days, mine is a distributed team - we have no office - we work via Slack and video-conference. We're Canadians, Colombians, and Britons. Our company is industry-certified and each of us is highly educated with tons of experience in our field - cloud infrastructure. Because we don't have a brick and mortar, we're heavily focused on communications, and our clients are effectively integrate with our online team, albeit temporarily. 

The question is - how do we avoid being branded outsourcers in our marketing efforts? I'm sure it's a question that is going to come up frequently as more and more companies migrate to fully distributed workforces.

marketinggal

Good question. Like all industries, a few bad apples have ruined the whole bunch's perception of outsourcing. I like your word "distributed", but as a marketer, I would use a customer benefit type word instead.  Brainstorm with positive words like virtual, professional, custom built team, international, global, commonwealth, laser focus, on-demand, vetted, etc etc

Trice

marketinggal said:

Good question. Like all industries, a few bad apples have ruined the whole bunch's perception of outsourcing. I like your word "distributed", but as a marketer, I would use a customer benefit type word instead.  Brainstorm with positive words like virtual, professional, custom built team, international, global, commonwealth, laser focus, on-demand, vetted, etc etc

These must go in the thesaurus really