Lucky us.

It’s the latest verbal identity project where we’ve developed a tone of voice that can flex across the complete range of communications.

Good old us.

The  biggest challenge is to define the marketing of an entirely new brand, in an entirely new product sector.

Wish us luck.

The trickiest part has been writing the About Us section – as it isn’t about us. We discovered these sections have a set of verbal codes all of their own.

(Clever old us.)

If you’re a young start up company, your About Us section needs to remind people you’re not a company at all – you’re a bunch of utopian-seeking, wonderful guys who are into “letting” other wonderful guys find utopia. In fact, About Us is usually about “you” (by which we mean, them. Not you.) And it’s about “life’s great pleasures” being “curated by tastemakers” which “can be accessed anywhere.” Often, by “anyone.” How? “Easily.”What’s separating “everyone” from utopia now is  ”just a click.”

Money? Numbers? It’s not about money. Or numbers.

Well, not until you’ve launched.

Then it’s all about the numbers. If you’re FourSquare, you already have a community of “over 30 million people worldwide.” If you’re Dropbox, you’ve already made sure that, thanks to you, “over 100 million people on every continent always have their stuff to hand.” If you’re airbnb, you’re doing it in “33,000 cities and 192 countries.” That doesn’t mean you’re only about the numbers. Your About Us section needs to remind people that the guys who came up with the idea, even though they met in 2007/8/9 “while working in the same office space (at different companies)”/on a bench/at MIT  are still hard at it. Although now, it’s a tiny bit different to the day when they were working “on Dennis’ kitchen table.”

Our clients are still definitely in the wonderful guys stage.

First products are due to ship in June.

We’ll let you know how it goes.

Of course, if we start talking numbers, you’ll know it’s going well.

Are you writing an About Us? If so, we’d love to hear more.

Talk to us.

Here’s our friend Simon Spilsbury’s illustration.

In essence, it provides businesses with a framework for dealing with their assets. “Cash cows”, with their low cash use and high market shares, can be milked periodically without much fuss. “Stars” require an investment, but attract high returns. “Question marks” are to be avoided due to their unpredictable nature, and unprofitable, timewasting “dogs” should be sold off.

While wrestling with Outlook recently, it occurred to us that BCG, hard-hitting and go-getting as they are, had neglected to provide any insight into the darker side of business ops or real office life in general.

What about all the things that waste everybody’s time and money, and whose pursuit leads only to anger and despair?

There’s a dark, inverse to the BCG matrix and as a civic-minded company, we now present the Anderson-West GCB (Gushing Cash Bleed) Matrix.

It won’t make your life in the office better. But perhaps you’ll realise you’re not the only one banging your head on the desk at 5pm and wondering where the whole week went.

the Anderson-West Time Suck Matrix
(illustration by Simon Spilsbury)

The Anderson-West matrix explained, with illustration from Simon Spilsbury

If you would like to waste even more time by replying to this blog post about timewasting, or letting us know what’s gone in your four quadrants this week, we’d be happy to reply (while we wait for Outlook to do something it started 3 hours ago).

I needed to express our higher ambitions for what a brand’s verbal identity can do.   I wanted to explain why a brand’s verbal identity means more than just getting the words right for the external audience. What did it do for the internal audience?
I looked at the screen. The following words appeared,
“A verbal identity creates a vision of the future that once stated and often repeated becomes truth.” 

It sounded great and I intuitively knew it to be true. But why? How?

The next day, I  sent off the pitch document, then called on my great new friend Emmet O Briain from Quiddity in Ireland. Emmet is a socio-linguist and we had a great dialogue, sharing our knowledge and constructing some answers.

We’ve written up the dialogue as a Powerpoint to be shared with the world on Slideshare. But if you’d like to download a copy in pdf format, it’s here: the verbal identity of shared meaning

In four steps, here’s the How and the Why:
We use language to express our thoughts to each other.
But we choose our words for their subtle attachments of meaning and so the words we use reflect our world view.
In a group, the group reuses certain words to affirm the group’s sense of identity – and purpose.
If we change the words a group uses, we can change how it identifies itself – and how it sees its purpose.

The police are the obvious group who use language to construct a shared view of the world.
Doctors do it.
I’m sure birds and bees do it.

I think this is the single most powerful statement of why a verbal identity is essential for a brand.
When the verbal identity of  a brand captures the truth of both the brand’s purpose and the world it lives in, it conjures a vision of the future.
If the verbal identity is also persuasively written, that vision of the future is shared often and soon becomes the inevitable truth.

Of course, there’s nothing new and once I’d discussed it with Emmet, I remembered my time at Saatchi’s. There, the story behind BA’s slogan “The World’s Favourite Airline” was that British Airways certainly wasn’t the World’s Favourite at the start of the campaign, but the line gave everyone something to create together. And sure enough, it was the World’s Favourite by the end of the campaign.

There’s more from the wonderful Emmet at his website, here Quiddity

I’d  love to continue the dialogue around the roles of the verbal identity. What are your thoughts?

Chris

He considered himself foremost a printer, was also a postmaster, satirist, scientist and of course was one of the five authors of The Declaration of Independence.

How did he do it?

From his autobiography, he published this:

All I can say is, Yeah. But did he ever Tweet?

C

ps thanks to Josh for finding this.

One boy. One girl.

Very different.

One thing they share is the conviction that if I’m focusing on the other one, it means that they’ve lost out.

Last night, we discussed the notion of zero-sum game, then they went to sleep and I went back to working.

And I saw this post on Twitter:

The link leads to a piece in a design mag, written by the head of a design agency, with the basic premise: people are visual.

I think they are. I think they are also verbal. But it would be infantile to think that good visual design and good verbal design is a zero-sum game.

(Though, some people do  have profound trouble with words. People like great art directors. When I first started work, I was out getting lunch with a fantastic art director, and we were stopped in the street and asked for directions to a famous chip shop. He couldn’t explain in words, he had to draw a diagram. The chip shop turned out to be just round the first corner.)

The author cites the success of Monster energy drinks, with its Goth font and neon green, as proof that visual cues are more powerful than brand copywriting.

But have you ever noticed what someone does when their eye is drawn to an interesting new product on a supermarket shelf? They pick it up. Then they turn it round to read about it on the back.

Visuals attract. Verbals engage.

Even in the greatest art galleries in the world, in the presence of the greatest works of art created by humankind,  people go up and read the little sign beside the painting first.

Visuals attract. Verbals engage. Can we stop fighting please?

(Or should that be: ‘So, Ofsted. You don’t like our grammar?’)

The Guardian (23.04.2013) says that the body responsible for inspecting schools recently found it had enough time on its hands to start inspecting businesses’ copywriting.

Apparently, we business leaders are setting a bad example.

Phones 4 U. Toys R Us. Tomatoes’ four pound a pound.

I don’t think the problem is grammar.

photo courtesy of melita_dennett

Certainly, bad grammar breaks the first tenet of the contract of writing: show respect for the reader.

Bad grammar often indicates a lack of care.

Bad grammar can reveal a lack of thought.

But the real issue is that grammar is the haven of the pedant.

Banging on about grammar is like sitting in a dug out, firing air rifles at peacocks.

The insistence that grammar matters more than anything else is an assault on creativity.

I want good grammar. But I’m not going to go crazy if someone writes beautifully, evocatively, memorably, and they include an Oxford comma.

I can still remember, after 30 years, driving along the North Circular at night and seeing for the very first time the multi-coloured neon sign for Toys “R” Us.

The purpose of writing isn’t to follow rules, it’s to engage other humans.

Obviously, Ofsted has a role to play. But before they point a finger at us, they could have a quiet word with the person who approved their website landing page…

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.