Living the brand: it’s a term that’s bandied around fairly regularly and was first coined by a book of the same name in 2001. Written by Nicholas Ind, Living the Brand showed organisations how to enthuse and empower their staff in a way that meant they became virtual personifications of their employer’s brand. Scary, huh? But what about speaking the brand? I mean organisations that insist on creating their own language, which they want both their staff and customers to use.
Last week, Professor of English Lynne Rosenthal was reported to have been thrown out of a Manhattan branch of Starbucks for failing to order a plain bagel in the correct manner. Prof Rosenthal asked for a plain bagel; the member of staff asked her to clarify whether ‘plain’ meant without butter and cheese. Prof Rosenthal, being an English professor and therefore aware that such a clarification was unnecessary – plain is, after all, plain – declined to do so and, after some heated words, was shown the door.
Starbucks is a prime proponent of speaking the brand. The coffee shop has created its own language. Drinks come in three sizes: tall, grande and venti. Why not just small, medium and large or regular, large and extra large? Because Starbucks has decided that by using these new words, the whole brand experience is vastly improved. (Tall we know; venti is Italian for twenty and grande is large in Spanish and Italian.) Most of us working in the City and major conurbations are all too familiar with Starbucks-speak, but if you want to see how truly confusing it is to the uninitiated, watch a British pensioner try to order from Starbucks. They’ll stare at the menu board for a while then, say “Can I just have a normal coffee, please?” Asked by the barista if this means espresso, cappuccino, filter or americano, the pensioner will reply: “Ooh…whatever’s easiest.” Doh!
Some brands entice us to use their language by offering us discounts: ask for a super cheesy burger hot to trot and get 10% off. Others invent new words because the existing lexicon simply isn’t doing their product justice. My favourite of these are air freshener companies who talking about ‘fragrancing your home’. Since when was to fragrance a verb?
High street retail brands do their best to make physical space theirs. By creating a language and persuading you, the customer, to use it, the brand is actually invading your brain. While some of it may seem overly American to UK customers, the trend is surely one that will continue as marketeers seek more innovative ways to make their brands live and breathe.
Last week’s Friday night kicked off on Thursday, as FWD decided to bring back the well-loved British tradition of afternoon tea-drinking by hosting an all-ladies event at Prism restaurant in Leadenhall Street. Although there was probably far more champagne consumed than tea, the evening was a huge success, with PR guests from around the market wanting this to become a regular fixture.
So how did the tea party idea come about? Well, at the start of a week, when the weekend was long gone and the work was swiftly piling up in our in-trays, the female staff of FWD PR decided that more fun was in order. Having come to the conclusion that there weren’t enough ladies-orientated events in the heart of the City, we became determined to make the working week that little bit more fun for the girls. After a long and hard think, Alex and Victoria arranged an evening of tea, champagne, cakes and nibbles at Prism.
As Thursday arrived, both the champagne and the conversation flowed in the high-ceilinged converted bank-dining-room to the tinkling of live piano music. As the nine of us enjoyed a distinctly girly chat over some scones with cream and jam, it was apparent that nobody wanted to leave. There were even promises of borrowing our idea to put a spark into yet more working weeks.
So here we are, getting on with another lot of Monday morning’s work, happy to have put some bright smiles on all the attendees’ faces.
Over in the US, Liberty Mutual has launched an interesting marketing campaign built around the notion of individual responsibility. While not product-centric, it clearly resonates with the concept of insurance and the notion of doing the right thing. Here are a couple of examples of the TV slots.
It’s always dangerous to write blogs about grammar, primarily because I’ll probably make a grammatical error myself in this or someone will shoot a hole through the advice I give. But hey ho, let’s have a crack and see where we get to.
Insurance and the use of capital letters: this is my theme for today. Or, to be accurate, insurance and the random use of capital letters.
You see, having worked in and around the insurance sector for over decade, it has become painfully apparent that insurers love to capitalise as many words as they can. For example, I can’t tell you the number of draft press releases and bits of copy I’ve seen like this: The Underwriter has made a Decision not to accept this Risk because both Parties and the Broker cannot agree upon the Wordings. Now, I’ve made that up, but I hope it illustrates the point I’m trying to make: the almost utterly random capping up of words like Underwriter, Risk, Parties etc. Why? Why does the insurance market breed this rather bizarre and almost medieval grammar?
The answer is, almost certainly, linked to the very many legal documents that float round the insurance market. For some unknown reason, legal contracts tend to have all sorts of weird and wonderful capitalisation and insurance staff are now copying the style. The problem is it’s just plain wrong. I don’t know about you, but I was always trained that the only things you cap up are proper nouns and names. But what about job titles? Well, the style is more and more to leave them as lower case. A quick flick through the pages of most newspapers and trade magazines will confirm this.
So to do my bit to help the insurance market adapt to the lower case living of the 21st century, here are a few pointers cleaned from various style guides including those of The Economist and The Guardian.
Capitals should be used for the names of organisations, institutions and people
Place names are capped up but city and town only if part of the place name e.g. Mexico City
Compass points are lower case, except when part of a place name or referring to a defined geographical region e.g. The North West
Acronyms are all upper case unless the acronym has become a name in its own right, in which case just the first letter is capped up e.g. LSE, Ofwat
Some historical terms are caped up e.g. Middle Ages
Labels formed from proper names are capped up e.g. Christian, French, Marxist
Job titles – this is a bit trickier because the guidance varies. According to more US-based style, job titles are capped up when used in conjunction with the job holder’s name – e.g. Chief Executive John Smith, Professor Johnson – but not when the job is referred to in isolation e.g. the chief executive apologised for the oil leak. However, this is what The Guardian style guide has to say:
job titles are all lc: editor of guardian.co.uk, governor of the Bank of England, prime minister, etc
My take on life generally is if in doubt, cap down. One other point: just because your brand is all capped up doesn’t mean the press will do the same. Hope that helps.
If you’ve any other thoughts on the use of capitals or have any particularly fine examples of insurance grammar, drop me a line.
Journalists celebrate the worst of British showbiz reporting
July 14th, 2010
Most amusing piece in today’s Media Monkey column in the Guardian reporting the return of the Shaftas – an awards event to honour the worst in celebrity showbiz reporting. Catagories this year include Best Apology by a Newspaper - won in 2008 by the Daily Mirror grovelling to Brian Ferry over his alleged ‘Nazis were amazing’ comment – and the Michael Fish Award for Worst Prediction, which previously went to the News of the World for its headline, Cheryl: I’ll stand by my man.
A week or so ago, one of our PR team sent out emails to selected personal finance journalists alerting them to a new comment by one of our clients. Yesterday, we received a response from one of the journalists. It was a short, direct and eyebrow-raising message:
“P**S OFF!”
A tad harsh, you might think – and indeed we would agree with you. As a specialist insurance and niche financial PR agency we don’t blast spammy emails left right and centre; instead we focus on getting relevant information to the right people. So you can imagine there was collective intake of breath when this delightful missive hit our spam filter yesterday.
Not wishing to cause offence, we dropped a polite note to the journalist apologising for any intrusion and explaining that the journalist’s email address is listed on one of the PR industry’s main commercial databases that we at FWD subscribe to. This is usually done with the journalist’s consent.
Databases have a significant role to play in PR. All PRs have their specialist areas – the nooks and crannies in which they know the journalists personally – but every now and then we have to step outside our specialist area and that’s when we become more reliant on information gleaned from the databases we use. Before the databases there were weighty tomes like Editors guides; now it’s online access to databases like Gorkana, MediAtlas and Vocus. Whatever the era, PRs have always been dependent on external resources to enlarge their knowledge of the media so, as some could argue, we’re only as good as the databases we use – which is why we use the best.
We appreciate there’s a fine line to walk between targeted emails and annoying spam and we always try to remain on the right side of it. It’s in our interest to do so: agencies that insist on scattergun emails to all and sundry soon find their messages blocked and their clients shunned.
Using our politest email tone of voice, we explained this to the journalist and told him how he could contact Gorkana to get his details removed. His response?
Top tips for keeping your PR-journo party on message
June 23rd, 2010
Summer’s here – yes, it’s official – and to mark the arrival of the season combined with England’s dire performance in the World Cup, the FWD PR team is hosting a media drinks party this Friday 25 June. In true PR style, we’re decamping to Namco Station at County Hall, Waterloo to watch Brazil –v– Portugal from 2.45pm onwards. Journalists, if you’ve not had an invitation, give us a shout.
So with a good ol’ PR bash looming, we thought we’d put together a list of our top tips and sneaky secrets for a great journalists’ drinks party.
1. Never underestimate the quantity of booze required. There ain’t no denying it: journos like a drink or six, so make sure you have plenty of the stuff on tap. When the booze goes, the journos will follow.
2. Smokers must be catered for. I knew one veteran PR who went to every party bearing two packets of Marlboro Lite: one for himself, and one for fag-cadging journos.
3. Journos cannot live by canapés alone. A couple of prawn profiteroles and a vol-au-vent are just not going to do it. Chips, crisps and dips are a must; sausages also go down well.
4. It’s probably not a good time to bring up that libel action your client is currently pursuing. Got a gripe with an editor? Somewhere in the brief gap between the fifth and sixth Peroni is not a good place to bring it up.
5. But it is a good time to take incriminating photos which can be used at a later date! Get those phones snapping. Journos snogging, journos sans clothes, journos getting worse for wear – they’ll all come in useful when pitching that next story or trying to keep the lid on an embarrassing leak.
6. Never schedule an interview with one of your clients for the day after the party. Either the journo won’t turn up – or you’ll wish they hadn’t, they’ll be in such a state.
7. Assume 80% of the hack guests will turn up late or not at all. The best laid plans of PRs are easily blown off course by impending deadlines and breaking news – or the offer of a better party.
8. Arrange those taxis and make sure the journos get in them. Once the evening’s done and the bar bill has ticked up to astronomical proportions, point the journos towards a friendly cabbie with a penchant for writing phony receipts and they’ll soon be in their way to their beds.
That’s it for now – and we’ll all get back into training for Friday’s big match.
Here at FWD we’ve been getting into World Cup fever – from the St. George’s crosses hanging in the office (Is two enough?) to the standard sweepstakes and the horror you undoubtedly feel when you’ve drawn North Korea.
Due to the massive amount of media coverage the World Cup is getting, the thousands of journalists camped out in South Africa are not only picking up on the real stories but a host of altogether more tangential ones. So to keep everyone distracted from the inevitable disappointment we’ll feel when Portugal knock England out on penalties again, we’ve compiled a list of the slightly more left field stories coming out of South Africa. In this post I’ll go through our top 5: from North Korea’s shenanigans to 36 gorgeous Dutch fans getting thrown out of their teams match (Why? We’re still not really sure!) .
No. 5 Models Thrown Out Of Soccer City
Here in the UK we’re not so used to the type of fans that grace football matches in Brazil and Holland, so when the World Cup rolls round there’s a lot of media attention on the fans that we all wish we had in this country. But when 36 Dutch models turned up to watch Holland’s opener against Denmark, World Cup officials felt something was afoot. See more here.
No. 4 America Wins!
Not only does the US appear not quite to have grasped what 1-1 means, they also seem to think they have beaten a collective British team. I don’t know if that or England not beating a team who call their goalkeeper ‘a goal tender’ is more tear-worthy. Here’s how The Sun reported the story.
No. 3 & 2 Anything The North Koreans Do
North Korea’s eternal embarrassing parent hasn’t given his side the ideal preparations for they’re first World Cup since 1966. Not only does he dress like a geriatric on her way to play shuffle board, but reports of a request for a statue of the impish dictator to be erected outside the teams hotel. Mind bogglingly this was turned down by South African officials! It begs the question where did they get the money a temporary statue when the team have to train at a public gym:
This once again is classic Kim Jong II (never thought I’d say that). Due to the fact it’s so hard to get a travel visa, it’s a Stalinist dictatorship and if you defect you are repatriated back to North Korea to face years of punishment or even death in North Korean gulags, but you know mainly the travel visa stuff, rumours were abound that the few “North Korean” fans at the Brazil match were actually Chinese actors.
No. 1 Maradona’s Beef On A Grill
No World Cup list would be complete without the doyen of the unbelievable, Diego Maradona. The man has been pure entertainment throughout his tenure as Argentina manager, from his expletive ridden rant at the media to running over a journalist in his car and promptly telling him he was an idiot and asking him why he put his leg there. His quotes have been wonderful. “Argentines should relax because to beat this team our rivals will have to put all their beef on the grill.” Amazing.
But what takes the biscuit is Maradona’s promise to run round Buenos Aires naked should Argentina win the World Cup. There’s an image. Read Sky’s take on the story here.
Love this clip. Robert Pattinson of Twilight and Harry Potter fame – or RPattz if you’re one of the cognoscenti like me – tries to buy lip insurance in this cartoon sketch. Just love it.
According to Supernanny “Positive attention and praise are the most effective rewards for good behaviour”. A very popular and highly praised section on the parenting guru’s website suggests that parents can support the development of their children by creating a reward chart where you can “award stickers for good behaviour” and “when your child misbehaves, remove a sticker from the chart”. It seems like a very sensible and logical suggestion, to me, in order to educate and care for your children. Have any of you parents out there tried this and if so how successful was it?
Many, many years ago when I was a child, I knew if I was good I would get a reward and if I misbehaved (what me!) I would lose something that I wanted. Were you the same? If so, why as adults do we so often seem to ignore this mainstay of our upbringing when we communicate with people today? Courtesy seems to be a rare trait in today’s communications. I got an email last week: the person was asking me for something but their tone and manner was just so aggressive and demanding it did not encourage me to carry out the task. Don’t get me wrong, I did the task but it did not go to the top of my to-do list and they had to wait for what they wanted. I don’t think I am on my own when I say that I am much more willing to help someone who communicates with me positively rather than negatively.
I know that our appetite for quick and to the point information is greater now than ever before and such technological advances such as e-mail, text and Twitter have help meet our needs for faster and more up-to-date communication but have such new communication methods made us ruder? I personally don’t think so. I think some people just never learnt that childhood lesson, that being nice gets you further. Surely the main point of communication is to create action so why can’t some people realise that they would get more if only they were a bit nicer about asking for it. Gordon Ramsey – are you listening? Communications have moved forward but let’s not use this as an excuse to be rude.
Have you had any recent experiences of poor communication which has had a really negative affect on you? How does poor communication affect you, what do you do when someone is rude to you? Does it even bother you?
So tell me now! Sorry, what I should have said was, I would be really interested to know you experience and thoughts so please do share via the comment link below.
Living the brand: it’s a term that’s bandied around fairly regularly and was first coined by a book of the same name in 2001. Written by Nicholas Ind, Living the Brand showed organisations how to enthuse and empower their staff in a way that meant they became virtual personifications of their employer’s brand. Scary, huh? But what about speaking the brand? I mean organisations that insist on creating their own language, which they want both their staff and customers to use.
