How to Quote Your Executives in Press Materials

Have you noticed how excited corporate spokespeople are these days? And if not excited, how pleased, proud and delighted they are? Some are even thrilled.

Or at least that’s what they say in their executive quotes.

In one 30-day period, BusinessWire was thrilled to post press releases with:

• 1,284 pleases
• 1,007 exciteds
• 782 prouds
• 401 thrilleds
• 378 delighteds

These are quotes like:

“CFS Clinical is proud to offer breakthrough solutions featuring technology specifically designed by industry experts for our space,” states Greg Seminack, President and Managing Partner of CFS Clinical.

No wonder journalists in the Greentarget survey ranked quotes the least valuable of all of the elements in a news release — including the dateline and boilerplate!

Contain yourself.

So what’s wrong with expressing your executive’s enthusiasm about your corporate partnerships, small business solutions or customer service? These quotes are:

• Clichés: Fill-in-the-blanks PR quotes make your readers’ eyes glaze over.
• Empty twaddle: These quotes just repeat the announcement. They don’t move your argument forward or cover new ground.
• Narcissistic: We practice too much institutional narcissism in media relations. The truth is, nobody cares how verklempt your VP feels about your organization and its stuff.

So instead of telling me how excited you are, why don’t you write a good quote that makes me excited?

Overcome the emotion.

The solution: Rewrite the quote to excite the reader. Focus on how your whozit or whatzit is going to change the reader’s life.

Here’s how it works… In this original version, the focus is on the executives and how thrilled they are:

“My partner Rick Sullivan and I are thrilled to announce the addition of MSDP to our portfolio,” said Tom Callahan, Managing Director at Lincolnshire. “Under the leadership of a talented management team, MSDP has developed into a world-class performance automotive business…”

Instead, write about how end users will benefit:

“Hot rodders, racers and other street performance enthusiasts will now be able to do X, Y and Z better, thanks to our merger,” Callahan says.

Hmmmm… Writing quotes to excite the reader, not the VP? That’s something to get worked up about.

More tips for fixing executive quotes

Before you press Send to everyone on your press release distribution list, take a tip from journalistic writing. When writing quotes for press releases, make them:

• Short: Keep quotes to two sentences. Even better: “Peel back the quote to one great sentence,” suggests Jacqui Banaszynski, associate managing editor at The Seattle Times.
• Rare: “Too many good ideas are buried in Dilbert-esque releases because… every corporate executive gets quoted,” observes Alison Harris, publisher, Call Center News.
• Personable: One frustrated PR pro writes: “Most quotes in press releases sound like the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons: ‘Wah wah wah wah.’” Don’t let that happen to your executive quotes.
• Creative: Craft sound bites that are “a minimum of sound to a maximum of bite” with humor, storytelling, metaphor and more.

There’s more to a good quote than using quotation marks and starting with a capital letter. Get rid of your cliched quotes and write soundbites worth reading.

Ann Wylie (WylieComm.com) helps PR professionals Catch Your Readers through writing training. Her workshops take her from Hollywood to Helsinki, helping communicators in organizations like Coca-Cola, Toyota, Eli Lilly and Salesforce draw readers in and move them to act. Never miss a tip: FreeWritingTips.wyliecomm.com.

Copyright © 2025 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.

Illustration credit: nunne

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