Know your subject. All of it. Better than the person who briefed you. Burying a little bit of ignorance under a mound of words somewhere on Page 5 won’t grow daisies. It will rise like the zombie dead to haunt your reader’s understanding of Page 6.

You’ve got to be a lion tamer of concepts: beckoning them forward at the right time, snapping them back when they’ve got to sit quiet. You’re in charge.

“Surf, swim, dive.”  If no one is going to read your 3,140 words like a novel, how are they going to read them? Probably more like a multi-layer game. Going backwards and forwards, jumping through time and space to go where they want to be. So your writing has to have summaries on every wave of new ideas. And each new wave has to have a lead in that offers enough to challenge the reader, but also offers them enough to support them. And it has to have enough detail for anyone that wants to immerse themselves in what you have to say.

Bullet points are ugly. But there are times to use them:

• When you need to help the reader identify key facts quickly.
• When you need to break up text.

You cannot assume too much knowledge of the previous page you wrote. It might not be the page they read previously.

Keep going. You’re being paid to do this. There are harder jobs. In fact, almost every job is harder than this.

As much as you don’t want to, read your work aloud at least once before you declare it finished. You’ll quickly see where it doesn’t work.

Stop. Occasionally. For a cup of tea. As refreshement. If you find yourself buying a USB-powered hand-held vacuum cleaner to clean out your desk drawer, you’ve probably stopped for too long.

The moments of delight in big copy come like the five pound notes you find in your trousers before you throw them in the wash, not like the day you’ll be sitting at home watching your six numbers come up on the Euromillions, while eating peach cobbler. With warmed ice-cream.

Keep going. Yes, the Declaration of Independence was only 1137 words. But the manual for the SR-71 Reconnaissance Aircraft is over 50,000 words. And you know which one of those the U.S. Government found more useful.

Then he died.

When the company was bought by a Hong Kong private equity firm, we were asked to work alongside the designers to produce a new distinctive verbal identity for the brand.

We did the verbal brand audit. We identified where brand language could add value (with a limited retail footprint, getting the website copy right and crafting a brand story that could easily be passed on were essential.) Then we hit a bump: how does a brand use language to be playful, testy, self-aware and aspirational, without becoming ‘snide’?

Our own Founder, Chris West, took an evening off thinking about verbal strategy to go and hear Stephen Sondheim at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Two interesting things from that evening:

1. Yes, the man who wrote West Side Story is still alive.

2. He pointed out the subtle difference between Noël Coward and Cole Porter: both were verbally playful and both were obsessed with teasing high society, but Cole Porter was born into that world and wrote affectionately of it (take a song about a great party: “Well, Did You Evah!”) whereas Noel Coward was an outsider and couldn’t help himself from mocking it (take a song about a great party: “I Went to a Marvellous Party”).

Inspired, we realised the Hardy Amies voice should be droll, but never bitchy. Hardy Amies needed to act as though it was confidant in Society, rather than standing outside throwing stones at the windows.

Every part of the brand’s communication needs to be written with as deep an appreciation of the consumer’s world as the consumer has himself.

The brand relaunched successfully, with a clear positioning ,  a well-visited website and is now distributed through a number of premium retailers.

Finally, we knew the brand’s new voice was a success when one of the world’s best raconteurs, the other greatest living Stephen, became a fan:

[someone please find me the picture of Stephen Fry being measured for his new suit].

The week before, I’d somehow convinced myself that to be taken seriously, we really needed  a Big 3 global industry client.  So, food, pharma or automotive? I picked an industry, picked a client and picked up the phone. Strangely, I got straight through to the Marketing Director. Even stranger, she listened to what I had to say about brand language, then told me we had to meet up as soon as possible. I was so delighted with my own prowess, the very next thing I did was pick 6 numbers for the Euromillions.

So I was on the M1.  I rehearsed the bit about how 9 out of 10 brand touch points are now language-dominated. As I pulled into their car-park, I segued seamlessly into how modern brand strategies need to understand linguistics. Waiting in reception, I reached for the stars by saying how stand-out creative copywriting is now the single most powerful determinant of brand success.

And you know what? The actual meeting went like a dream. I didn’t fluff a line. I painted living pictures with words. I’d never had a better audience. Cats and cream.

As I glided out of the door, I joked that doing this sure was better than the old ad agency days, being briefed at the last minute to write a 48 sheet poster over the weekend. What an idiot.

A few days later, Friday at  2.35pm, in fact, my new almost-client phoned back. Their agency of record had let them down. They needed to shoot a 48$ poster for a new launch. Could we…

Of course we could. We delivered 6 great posters back to them on Monday morning. We got a standing ovation. And not a little cash either. But we also got an NDA.

So we still don’t have a Big 3 industry client we can talk about.

And my Euromillions numbers didn’t come up either.

If you’re reading this, and it’s Friday, and your ad agency’s just let you down again, at least you know we’re smart enough to take your call.

Here’s another story. Back a few years, we were asked by the founders of Ocado to look at their brand communications. The revolutionary supermarket delivery company had launched well. After a few years sales growth, which at first had traced the trajectory of a rocket, were now in danger of appearing merely exceptional.  Was it the media rotation? Was it how many times the brand was mentioned on average in each commercial? We had our noses very close to the graphs for a while before we thought to look around. When we did, we saw what was really keeping sales back. At launch, the brand narrative had been about the Founders, and how they were inspired to change the world of supermarket shopping. The brand became widely known – and its offers widely copied. Now the Founders’ vision wasn’t relevant. The brand communications needed to key into the consumers’ beliefs. It needed to move from a Foundational model to a Personal model. Our copywriters produced radio commercials which let the consumer understand what they could do when they shopped with Ocado. Sales took off again.

There are five (or six) brand narrative models.  Right now, I can’t remember what the other two or three are. But if your brand is currently feeling trapped, give us a call and we’ll let you know what the alternatives are.

There would be a very large investment. Every bit of work by the architects, designers, HR, the ad agency, the guy delivering soap, would have to reinforce the new brand positioning. And the IP all needed to be captured in one 250-word brand document.

We reckoned each word in the document was worth a $1Million.

Things were going well until we came to try and nail down one of the brand’s value words. I’m pretty sure that in a room of 20 experienced, educated, dedicated professionals there were at least 30 different opinions.

We’d have been surprised if there weren’t. These are experienced, educated and dedicated professionals.

How do you break a deadlock when it’s subjective? Get objective.

We have our own team of experienced, educated and dedicated linguists. Their job is the science bit. They can prove how a word means something different today to what it meant 10 years ago. They can show which one of a word’s many nuances is dominant. They can give the creative copywriter something more than a shrug of his shoulders to suggest why one particular word over another should be backed by a million dollars.

We are glad to say that the brand document was completed, the ad agency was briefed and great things are once again happening with one of the world’s best known hotel brands.

Words have value. No one would spend time writing them otherwise. Getting it right is….

What we could all see was that TalkTalk was getting hammered on social media. They were spending ‘a lot’ of money on TV advertising on Saturday evening to tell people what a friendly bunch of folks they are (and in general, they are). But anyone who was thinking of switching broadband providers, and had seen the TV and then went to check the brand out on social media would have run a mile. TalkTalk’s Facebook page felt about as friendly as a Glasgow pub.

Everyone looked at us like, “So, in this situation what’s usually done.” Unfortunately, there’s no ‘usually’ in social media. Everything’s new. The technology’s new. The consumers are new. And all the miracle social media case studies are essentially worthless because that particular situation will never happen again.

Luckily, we’re not a social media agency. We create language which creates value. We help brands tell their stories better. One of the things we can do is stop brands getting beaten up in social media.

We know case studies are meant to have some hard figures. Here’s ours: we produced a 141% increase in sentiment and a 43% reduction in viral-ity of positive conversations. But what we really did was work out what conversation the brand should be in on their Facebook page. The truth is, if you’ve got over 2 million installed users, probably a 1000 people each day are going to be pissed off with your service. Maybe the link is broken. Or maybe the dog ate their router. But you can never win the Service conversation, because tomorrow there’ll be another 1000 people who’ve Hoovered too hard. Our insight was that social media is what’s S-A-I-D about you: Service is the first stop, but it’s better to be talking about subjects which can gain you Advocacy. And best of all, it’s good to be sharing Innovation stories, because that’s as far away from the quotidian issues as you can get. And it all depends on Dialogue. So our copywriters and planners designed engaging content which would stimulate conversations around what we can all do with the wonderful internet (which TalkTalk provide).

Feel free to copy our strategy. Just remember, there’s no ‘usually’  in social media.

If you are interested in reading more, please take a look at our Text Analytics for Marketing case studies. If you are interested in conducting a paid-for Proof of Concept in Text Analytics for Marketing, and understanding how this knowledge can lead to real-time marketing, please contact Chris West.

Our brand strategy programme takes you through a process where you identify which of the 6 main brand narrative models will suit your brand best.
Following this, we combine research and brand knowledge to identify compelling Reasons To Believe in your brand. This is specifically tailored to the narrative output, so can supplement existing RTB work or can stand alone.
We combine this with an understanding of the competitive and environmental challenges.
Finally, in a process of creation, we design a narrative that has a single driving purpose, yet manages to encompass the key elements that define your brand.
Our output can be a Mission Statement, a DNA package, or a document that makes your desk wobble if you accidentally drop it.
If you would like to hear how other world-leading companies have used brand narrative and our brand strategies, please read our Brand Strategy and Narrative Case Studies.
To discuss the challenges facing your brand the need and how a compelling, detailed and memorable narrative can engage your customers, please contact Chris West.