Only the Interflora marketing department hasn’t worked that one out, it seems.
They sent me a promotional e-mail today with the headline:
Size really does matter to your Valentine
would you believe? What a clunkingly inappropriate and lazy double entendre.
Come on guys, can’t you be a little more subtle in wooing my business?
I received this earlier today:
Hi David,
Just a short note to express how thankful we are for your hard work on our new range of literature – you analysed our business from the bottom up and gained an in-depth understanding of what we do, as well as how our applicants perceive what we do, in order to simplify and bring the copy up to date.
We have received excellent feedback with many applicants expressing immediate interest in our plans, which previously took longer to achieve due to the old literature being quite wordy and not answering all their questions. Having this new copy now means we have been able to cut back on print costs as we are needing to send less out because applicants now understand our plans better. It also means the applicant now only receives one simple guide in the first instance, rather than several leaflets in one pack that had proven to be too confusing.
Having cut print costs and also seen an immediate increase in levels of applicant interest, we would happily recommend you to any companies that would like to revise and improve their written copy in any format.
Many thanks once again and best wishes.
Yours sincerely,
Sophie Gist
Marketing Coordinator
Economic Lifestyle | Bringing Retirement Dreams to Life
There was a cause for celebration last week in the Rosam household. My wife won a whole case of wine in a competition!
It turned out to be a budget case from a well-known online supplier of wine, one that we occasionally order from anyway.
So far, so good. We’ve drunk one OK bottle of white and a red. It’s absolutely the worst bottle of wine I’ve sampled in the last 10 years. I thought the Italians had long stopped making that kind of nasty, acidic, thin, chemical-tasting bilge water.
They obviously haven’t. The wine wasn’t off. It was just undrinkable.
Am I being ungrateful? Maybe.
But I think there’s a salutary marketing point here. The two companies involved have shot themselves in the foot. By sending out a budget case of wine with poor quality contents, we don’t feel very well disposed to either the competition runner or the wine supplier – why should I let them make the choices for me on a purchase, when they obviously believe this stuff is acceptable and should be enjoyed as wine?
So, the upshot is that I’m left wondering if to ever bother again with an order from that supplier. I’m not going to identify the company at this stage, because I want to see what the rest of the case is like – I also think there’s another bottle of the vile stuff sitting in our wine rack, so we’ll see if there was something wrong with the first bottle.
The general point I’m making is that if you’re going to give away a freebie, make sure it’s something that will enhance your relationship with the recipient, not jeopardize it.
Headlines must get the reader to go further. The most powerful say something personal and compelling; the worst just invite the reader to switch off.
One of those just arrived as the subject line of an e-mail newsletter – ‘An irresistable special offer’, it said. A little voice in my head said ‘I can resist it!’ as I punched the Delete button. God knows what they were trying to sell me.
Always look for the obvious response when you write a headline or subject line.
Sometimes I wonder what is in the mind of retailers when they put words on packaging.
Sainsbury’s have excelled themselves with the stultifying:
Great when peeled
on a bag of bananas.
How many people really need to be told that the experience of eating a banana is to be improved by peeling the damn thing?
If it doesn’t add anything – please don’t write it.
Somewhere along the line we copywriters have given the world the wrong message. That’s pretty scary, when you consider our main function in professional life.
So how’ve we messed up? Well, people expect us to ‘do a little polish’ to rescue their sometimes dire homebrew copy. Now, I’m not denigrating their copywriting efforts. I’m not a bricklayer, a financial adviser or a designer of autoclaves, so my efforts at doing their jobs would be equally – probably more – dire.
The problem is that’s not what the best copywriters do. And, as a profession, we’ve not explained what we bring to the table.
Away from work on the glossiest and shallowest consumer items, we engage and understand with our clients, their products, their customers and their needs. We dig deep, research and develop messages, and prioritise and structure what we need to say (and even those working on perfume and all that stuff need to know a lot about their client and their client’s buyers).
Only once we’ve figured out what we have to say, do we think about how we’re going to say it.
So please don’t expect a ‘little marketing sprinkle’ will solve the problem. It probably won’t.
I’ve just seen it again. A local business’s strapline that always annoys the hell out of me:
‘Specialists in all types of glass’
it says.
It’s just so oxymoronic!
Well, we all know that Less is More, don’t we? I’d like to rock those preconceptions a little after a few recent conversations.
If you don’t tell the world all about the benefits of your stuff, the effectiveness of your communications will be less.
Go on, don’t be scared. Tell the world all the interesting stuff.
But don’t waffle – that’s where Less is More.
Worthing Lions started in 1952 and is one of the oldest clubs in the Brutish Isles and is now in its 53rd year of service to the local community. It is part of Lions Club International, which is the world’s largest service organization with 1.4 million members in 193 countries and active in 44,000 communities around the globe and the Brutish Isles has in excess of 20,000 members.
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