What does your name say about you?

…plus personalisation that’s not so personal and a (quick) grammar lesson.

This week, it’s time for words to make way for pictures again. Yes, it’s Copycam: my occasional series feauturing copy that’s grabbed my attention – and not always for the right reasons.

Dr Doctor

Last week, this flyer slipped through my letterbox and landed on the mat. Now if you were looking for an osteopath, wouldn’t you feel better knowing you were in the hands of this chap? Who cares what the copy says? His name alone is enough to inspire confidence. You couldn’t make it up, could you? And luckily, he didn’t have to.

Blankety blank

Personalised marketing routinely results in a much higher response rate: sometimes, as high as 10% (remember, the typical response is 2%). But personalisation means getting it right. And Konica Minolta got it wrong – twice. First, I asked them to exclude me from their mailing list. They didn’t, and this arrived:

Isn’t that nice? You remember a couple of weeks back I talked about Laura Trice, who said we don’t get thanked enough because we don’t ask for it. Well how about this? A thank you – and I didn’t even ask. They’d made a mistake, but at least they were nice people. I got that warm fuzzy feeling. It didn’t last. Inside, here’s what I saw:

Doesn’t really make you feel special, does it? Apart from poor marketing, it’s also a perfect example of a common grammatical error: the dangling participle. ‘As a valued customer’ should logically be followed by ‘you’ (not ‘we’). Because I’m the valued customer – not them. Or at least, in theory I am. In practice, I’m a nameless record in a database – but you get the picture.

Fowl play

And speaking of grammatical errors, here’s a sign I noticed in the centre of Cambridge recently. Can you spot the mistake?

Well done. It’s ‘lie down’ not ‘lay down’. Unless you’re a chicken after some winter sunshine.

And finally

In a footnote to last week’s entry on country branding, I see that Iceland has launched a bid to restore its tarnished image. You may remember that Gordon Brown said it was “totally unacceptable and illegal” that Iceland failed to guarantee British savings in Icelandic banks. And he went further, freezing Icelandic assets using anti-terror legislation. Not very good PR. Well now, Iceland has fought back. The Icelanders are NOT terrorists website is simple, charming and effective. A stroke of genius. Find out more:

Bristol University’s Improve your writing page will help undangle your participles.
Can’t decide whether to lay an egg or lie down? The University of Kansas comes to the rescue with a simple explanation.

Kevin Communication, Copycam, Marketing.