The man who broke the news was chubby, red-faced and very short-sighted. And therein lay the first clue. Not so much wearing his heart on his sleeve as wearing his wares on the bridge of his nose.
An optician, then.
And he was breaking the news that sooner or later, we all need reading glasses.
And for me, that moment was sooner. In fact, right now.
He squiggled some numbers on a prescription, gave me a clammy handshake and sent me downstairs to the shop floor, where I was faced with a startling array of eyewear.
There was no shortage of shapes, sizes, designs and prices. Luckily, there was a smiling saleswoman to guide me through the optical maze.
But let’s change the focus for a second.
Brand wars
There’s a big debate about the value of brand building – and often, I’ve been caught in the middle.
When I talk to sales people, they tell me their marketing counterparts just don’t get it.
We need more sales materials, they say. Forget that touchy-feely, big-picture, blue-sky nonsense. We need datasheets and whitepapers, TCO studies and ROI calculators.
They’re not wrong. All of those things help oil the wheels of the sales process.
But wait a minute, the marketing folks say. If we didn’t create the image, build the brand and raise our profile, they wouldn’t have the sales slots. They’d be selling in a vacuum to people who weren’t as receptive. We’re the ones who oil the wheels. They just turn the handle.
As you can imagine, the middle isn’t a very good place to be.
But actually, they’re both right.
Marketing tells the story, creates the promise and prepares the way. Sales deploys the ground troops and finishes the job.
And the truth of the matter is that the terrible twins need each other. Because on their own, they’re not nearly as effective.
And brand building is an essential part of this. Because it’s not just touchy-feely, big-picture, blue-sky stuff. It’s also directly related to price.
Which brings us nicely back to my specs.
View to a thrill
“So what were you thinking of?” said the saleswoman, with an oleaginous smile and an expansive wave towards the endless selection. “D&G? Armani? Guess?”
Guess again.
If, like me, you’re more Primark than Prada, then you’re not really swayed by brands. Yes, a terrible admission for a marketing professional, but then the counter-argument is that it gives me a cold, level-headed objectivity and much-needed detachment.
At least, that’s what I tell myself.
In any case, I know, thanks to the geeky Alex Riley on BBC Three, that virtually all fashion glasses are made in one big factory in Italy. Same staff, same production line, same basic components. All that differs is the brand badge.
And the price, of course.
The ones in the opticians ranged from £25 for basic, unbranded, wire-framed glasses to an eye-watering £350 for some of the higher-end ones.
The difference? In a word, brand.
It’s the difference between selling one pair at £350, or fourteen pairs at £25 to make the same revenue.
So it’s not just touchy-feely, intangible, unmeasurable stuff. It’s also a big boost to your bottom line.
Build your brand and you build your sales. Tell the story, create the myth, drive the desire.
Then make the sale.
Making a spectacle
So which pair did I go for?
Do you really have to ask? After my voucher-discounted £5 eye test, I was hardly going to blow a fortune on reading glasses – and £350 is a lot of books.
“I’ll go for the no-name brand,” I said nonchalantly to the saleswoman.
She smiled a tight professional smile and rolled her eyes ever so slightly heavenwards.
At least I think she did. I couldn’t actually see that clearly.
Just as well, really.
Find out more:
The secret’s out. Alex lifts the lid on technology, food and fashion in BBC Three’s Secrets of the Superbrands.
Trial and error, Marmite and recovering from heart attacks.
A few months ago, I was chatting to a client about possible emails for a marketing campaign.
He was unsure which was the best one. He had three choices, and couldn’t decide. And yet the answer was staring him in the face.
All three.
Take his prospect list, lop off a sample, divide the lopped bit into three equal parts. Then send out one email to each part. Whichever works best is the one you go with.
Encouraged by the results, he decided to take it one step farther. Rather than send this email to the remainder of the list, he had me write three variations on it. Then, he lopped off another bit, and split it into three again.
Even more encouraging.
The results were stellar for one, and average for the other two. So the stellar email was the one that eventually went out, with the best response he’s had in a long time.
And yet it wasn’t the obvious choice.
In fact, I know if he or I had seen it on Day 1, we’d both have said it didn’t stand a chance of success. It wasn’t assertive enough, didn’t have a killer offer, and was slightly left-of-centre. We’d have dismissed it as an also-ran.
And we’d have been wrong.
But the only way of getting to the right answer was by trying out different solutions, and daring to fail. On a small scale, of course. Then, we succeeded – on a much bigger one.
Trial and error was at the heart of Tim Harford’s recent talk at TED Global in Edinburgh.
Harford is the fresh-faced economist who makes numbers sexy and explains the realities behind dry statistics in an engaging way.
It was thanks to him that I learned last year about ‘vanity sizing’ of jeans – where waist measurements are deliberately understated, so you think you’re thinner than you are.
In a world obsessed with certainty, and desperate to be right, Harford makes an eloquent plea for a little humility. If we admit we don’t know, it makes it easier to find out. If we stop trying to nail everything down and open our minds up to other outcomes, problems often magically fall away.
Trial, error and the God complex is, as all TED talks are, limited to 18 minutes, and Tim comes in right on schedule. (Note the countdown clock at his feet, by the way. Enough to give even the most assured presenter the jitters.)
If you’re reading in an email, click here to view the video.
And if you want to find out more about jeans that flatter the fatter, check out Tim’s programme More or Less on the the BBC Radio 4 website.
Other people are just like you. Why did you think they’d be any different?
The conventional wisdom says that you should write like you speak.
And it’s true – you should. As long as you don’t ramble, repeat yourself (at least not too much) or get to0 informal, slangy or inappropriate.
The idea is simple.
If you write like you speak, then you connect with your readers. Your language is conversational, direct and free from those tortured turns of phrase and formal constructions associated with written English.
So even in print, you appear relaxed, friendly and approachable.
And because people do business with people they like, they’ll do business with you. Your corporate personality will chime with your personal personality (still with me?).
And that’s a good thing.
But you can take it even further.
Read and destroy
“I’m such an impatient reader,” said a marketing chum of mine recently. “And there’s so much to read. The trouble is, I don’t know how to skim.”
I do.
It’s one of the innumerable skills I picked up – well skimmed, really – when I was writing about speed reading for a client some years back. One of the most effective tips I took away was almost too simple to be true – yet it was.
Read the first sentence of each paragraph.
Easy, isn’t it?
The trouble is, you know this (well you do now) but your customers don’t. So if you present them with acres of dense, unbroken text, you’ll scare them off. They’ll make a snap decision – to go elsewhere.
Because they, just like you, are impatient readers. They’ve got emails, tweets, blog posts, PDFs, hard-copy documents, RSS feeds and a whole lot else besides to read.
In short, they’re just like you.
They read like you.They skim like you. They delete like you (often before reading – it feels so good, doesn’t it?).
Don’t be yourself (be them)
So what’s the answer?
It’s simple really. Whenever you write, ask yourself ‘If somebody else wrote this, would I read it? Is it too long? Would I have the patience to stick with it right to the end?’
Chances are, you’d say no. So why do you think your readers are any different?
They’re not. So here’s what you should do:
Use frequent headings to break up your copy.
Keep your paragraphs short.
Use bold and italic (and if you’re really daring, both at the same time) to emphasise points.
Visually separate important sections (in a box, a table or other graphical device).
Summarise your offering for the impatient (most of us) with a link or branch-off mechanism for the detail-hungry (an important minority).
Get to the point fast – preferably in the first couple of paragraphs.
Make it easy to skim: lead the eye through your copy.
Vary the length of your sentences, so your writing doesn’t become monotonous.
Include frequent calls to action, so people know what to do next.
Repeat yourself. Repetition is comforting, affirming and convincing.
Tell a story, so your writing is structured and follows a logical patten.
End on a high point (call to action, special offer, a promise, a claim, a strong & confident statement) so your copy doesn’t fizzle out.
Be brutal with yourself. Just because you wrote it doesn’t mean they’ll read it.
Think like a reader. Plan like a reader. Then, write like a reader.
Yes, yes, I know that the best blogs, the ones written by people with Very Big Megaphones standing on Very Big Soapboxes have ‘Top 10 ways to write lists of Top 10 lists’ and so on.
But if there’s a trend to be bucked, or a convention to be broken, then in the immortal words of Wham! I’m your man.
So not five, or four, or three, but two.
Two simple ways that’ll make a significant difference to the quality of your written output.
We speak geek
Just the other day, I was talking to a client about technology.
Now this is an area I’m comfortable in, having spent more years than I care to remember with my shoulder to the IT wheel.
So we chatted about SaaS and XML, about CSS and VPNs, RFID and NFC.
And I suddenly realised that if the proverbial Martian were beamed into our virtual midst, he’d stare open-mouthed at us, wondering if his in-built English translator was working correctly.
And it’s not just Martians.
Because for most people, techspeak is baffling. In fact, specialised jargon of any sort is baffling.
When you’re talking in a closed environment to somebody who speaks your esoteric language, you tend to forget how specialised it is. And it doesn’t much matter, as you’re on the same wavelength.
It’s when you go outside that environment that the problems start.
I remember years ago being in a high-level meeting around a gorgeous walnut table on the 25th floor of a bank.
My colleague – a systems engineer – said to the assembled great and the good, “Let’s take that topic offline. I don’t think we have the bandwidth at the moment.”
This was in the days before techspeak started to leak into our everyday conversation, so he was met with a look of blank incomprehension.
I came to the rescue.
“Let’s talk about it outside this meeting,” I said in a near-simultaneous translation, “because we don’t really have the time at the moment.”
They all nodded sagely.
It’s only when you’re outside your comfort zone (itself insider jargon that’s jumped the barrier) that we realise how impenetrable all this stuff is.
The day after my IT conversation, I got a call from somebody asking if I’d be interested in writing about derivatives.
“Tell me a bit more about the project,” I said, just to sound a little less at sea than I felt. And to play for time.
So he told me.
All of the words made sense – sort of. That is, I could identify them as English, and had heard them all before, though not necessarily in the order or context he used them in. The acronyms didn’t help things either, and they came thick and fast.
So I did the only thing I could – decline the job, while helpfully suggesting he’d save time, money, effort and frustration by finding a financial copywriter.
In his case, jargon is excusable: he’s in a specialist market, with a specialist audience.
But most of us aren’t. If you’re a specialist talking to a generalist, uninitiated audience – your clients, for example – you need to simplify, explain and demystify.
Way number 1: lose the jargon. PDQ.
Short and tweet
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an executive summary for a long document I was working on.
And then a strange thought occurred to me: if the document is aimed at busy executives (which it was) and they read the executive summary (which they will, because they’re busy) then why bother with the rest of the document?
A sobering thought – and a valuable lesson.
Anything you can write in two pages can be cut down to one. And from one to a half. And from a paragraph to a sentence.
It’s just that most of the time, we don’t have to cut. Unless we’re forced to – by Twitter, for example. The 140-character limit really focuses the mind. You can’t waffle because it won’t let you .
So you don’t. Instead, you become a paragon of brevity, concision and focus.
The limit is a legacy. After all, most people nowadays don’t actually tweet using text messages, with their in-built maximum of 140 characters.
Instead, they tweet directly online, using computers, smartphones or tablets. So they could, in theory, send longer messages. It’s just that Twitter doesn’t allow them that luxury.
So they get it down in as few words as possible.
And that’s what you should do. Set yourself a word limit, or a page limit – and stick to it.
Then stop.
Way number 2: keep it short. Cut it. Remember the reader. Cut it again.
Find out more:
Thanks and goodbye. The Webby Awards limit acceptance speeches to just five words. If only the Oscars could do the same.
Gut feelings, peer pressure and the dubious wisdom of crowds
It’s been all work and no play here in the UK over the last couple of months.
We’ve had a slew of ‘bank holidays’: a term that confuses foreigners, even English speakers, but seems obvious to locals.
The expression originates from the very first bank holiday, way before we became 24×7 always-on people (yes, there was a time) in 1781. It was in that year that the Earl of Cambleseed decided to shut his bank on the first Monday in May.
Or so it says on Wikipedia.
So does that mean we can we believe it?
Well the natural instinct is to google the term and see what you come up with. And in this case, you get lots of entries referring to the noble banker, and to the end of the 18th century.
So it must be true, then.
But wait a minute: many of the references reproduce word for word the account given on Wikipedia. In fact, it almost looks as if they’ve cut and pasted it.
The Oxford English Dictionary makes no mention of this episode. Not the print version, and not the online version, both of which you have to pay for.
So does that make it more reliable or less?
Remember, the OED is not crowd-sourced, as Wikipedia is. So it’s not necessarily as up to date, but then since it’s had 200 years or so to sort out the bank-holiday question, you’d think it would have mentioned Cambleseed by now.
Left turn
But back to the reason I mentioned these holidays in the first place, before my brief Wiki-digression.
You see all these bank holidays (Good Friday, Easter Monday, the Royal Wedding, the May bank holiday) have had a knock-on effect on bin collections throughout the UK.
Lots of the bank holidays have been on Mondays. We had another, the Spring bank holiday, just last week.
And when bank holidays fall on Monday, the bins here in Cambridge are collected a day late. Monday’s collection is on Tuesday, Tuesday’s is on Wednesday and so on.
And my street’s collection moves from Wednesday to Thursday.
Every time.
And yet all it takes is one house to put out its bin in a bank holiday week on a Tuesday evening – a day too early – and it causes a chain reaction.
People across the street see the bin and they put theirs out too – just in case. Then people next to the original offenders see the second lot, and they follow suit.
And the bins sit there all day long on Wednesday, to be finally emptied on Thursday, right on schedule.
And yet all people have to do for reassurance is jump online to the council website to see that the collection is a day late. That would be the same online where Wikipedia lives. It’s not as if it’s that big a leap.
People know the collections are usually a day late. But they question that knowledge because they see other people acting differently.
Tweet success
The same niggling doubts affect our marketing. We do things because other people do them. We copy what our peers do. We question our own judgement, even if we almost certain we’re right.
Just last week, I was chatting to a friend of mine. He was singing the praises of Twitter as a marketing tool. But there was a note of hesitation in his voice, which I picked up on.
Did he really believe what he was saying?
Is he absolutely convinced that it’s a good use of his time, I wondered. Has he measured it? Can he track sales back to Twitter? And what’s the opportunity cost of tweeting – the other things he’s missing out on while he’s doing his thang in 140 characters?
He paused, collected his thoughts and finally answered.
“To be honest, I’m not sure I really understand the whole Twitter and marketing thing,” he said with a vague air of resignation.
But then he rallied, buoyed by the wisdom-of-crowds argument.
“I’m sure there’s something in it, though. I don’t know what, but it’s definitely there. Otherwise, why would everybody be doing it?”
Let’s see. For the same reason that everybody believes that the Earl of Cambleseed invented bank holidays? (Is it just me, or does that name seem a tad suspicious?)
Or for the same reason that people put their bins out a day early on a quiet suburban street in Cambridge?
Because other people are doing it. And that’s simply not a good enough reason.
Assume, yes. Check your gut feel, yes. Take the pulse of the masses, yes.
