Brain freeze

This week, I had the dubious pleasure of listening to one of advertising's self-professed elders parading his special brand of insights into the wired world of web 2.0. However, having left his credibility back in the early 90s, this was no pleasurable task – neither for him nor his audience.

After a shaky start, an in-joke failed to rally the troops, and things quickly went downhill as he struggled to work his way through a selection of video material. By the time he came to reveal his big strategy play, a minor PR disaster had to be narrowly averted as he showed an ad starring a cast of people who were completely naked. If presenting an ad from 2007 under the banner of his latest thoughts wasn't bad enough (or maybe that was when he had his latest thoughts), why he felt this the right forum for full frontal nudity was the only thing left to the imagination. A few sombre shakes of the head from the back of the room brought the presentation to a swift conclusion.

For those who missed out, here was his 3-step strategy for success.

1. Find the funniest videos that other people have already uploaded onto YouTube.

2. Pay the videos' creators makers as much of the client’s money as possible just to have their logo added to the end frame.

3. Upload this brand new video to YouTube.

That was it. I'm not kidding.

The end of the presentation could not have come quick enough, and I soon found myself in the back of a cab, sliding through the city in the mid-morning traffic. I slumped into the seat, and waited hopefully for some feeling to return to my brain.

Casting the wrong spell

I have often waxed lyrical about the power of language and its rare ability to convey both emotion and conviction – whether as "a spark for the imagination, a call to action, or the prose of persuasion".

And I have just as often bemoaned the fact that, in spite of this, most people "default to the drearier corners of the English language".

However, there is a third dynamic worthy of mention, if only to warn you against its teasing tones. A dynamic that practically obliterates all grammatical sensibility for something far more sensual and alluring. And that is the sultry switch from perfectly adequate and innocent letters like "c" and "s" to something all the more enticing in the oh-so-chic shape of "k" and "z".

It is with more than a touch of irony that I write this. In fact, I find this sort of thing equal parts loathsome and banal, and rarely has my ire been so spurred as when I saw an ad for KFC Krushers on the side of a bus this morning.

Krushers. Real bitz.

It's not particularly youthful, "cool", or credible. And I can't imagine it adds any audience appeal. It's the equivalent of writing something pretty unimaginative in Comic Sans in the blind hope that it will be transformed into a moment of pure comic genius.

Do KFC think today's youth are dyslexic? Or perhaps, they will be so overwhelmed by the "totally unique" experience of this "taste revolution" that only the mild shock of such atrocious marketing can possibly bring them round to their senses.

Data is not dull, you are

It was Raymond Loewy, the renowned industrial designer, who once said "the most beautiful curve is a rising sales graph". And he may well have been right.

However, the information we communicate is not always quite so easy on the eye, let alone anything that comes close to being "beautiful". To my mind, sensible spreadsheets and po-faced pie charts only exacerbate mankind's weakness for convenience over character.

But the real poster boy for plain boring must be PowerPoint.

A few years ago, I discovered this PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address. An exercise in demonstrating just how far PowerPoint can reduce one of the most inspiring speeches of all time to a rubble of drab and dreary slides. And please don't get me started on clip art.

That said, the other extreme does exist in the form of David Byrne's creative use of PowerPoint as an artistic medium. However, it's not quite the same as using PowerPoint to share basic information, as most of us do on a day-to-day basis. And herein lies the real challenge.

Now I should say I’m not advocating that everyone rush off to design school (although a basic eye for aesthetics might be nice). But what is important is that we all take a moment to consider the poor people who have to wade through all this information that we feel compelled to emit. Because we have to remember that the only reason we ever communicate is to create a response – in the words of one of my favourite writers, the late, great F. Scott Fitzgerald, “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say".

If you communicate because you feel a purely self-motivated, almost evangelical calling to communicate, then go ahead and write 100 PowerPoint slides in 8 point. And help yourself to as much clip art as you can possibly find. In fact, go crazy with the clip art.

But if you choose not to follow this path – and trust me, it is a choice – then you need to think more carefully. Not simply about what you want to say, but more about how you want to say it so that your audience think or feel something in response.

And that’s why I love any software, applications, widgets and websites designed to show information in surprising and delightful ways.

My current favourites are Daytum and Information Is Beautiful, where some of the most mundane data gets presented in some of the most creative and thought-provoking ways. All of sudden, you see how data can take on the character of the story that you want to tell, not simply report the facts and figures in a statistical but ultimately superficial way.

Both take their inspiration from designing information in a way that can help us understand the world around us. David McCandless, who started Information Is Beautiful, describes himself as a visual and data journalist "with a passion for visualising information – facts, data, ideas, subjects, issues, statistics, questions – all with a minimum of words". And with an equally fervent hatred of pie charts.

To show you what I mean, here's the "Billion Dollar Gram" by Information Is Beautiful, which highlights the relative amounts of money spent on all sorts of different bits and pieces.

When you view data through a creative lens, McCandless describes how it can reveal hidden patterns, insights and stories, which strikes a similar note to how Nicholas Felton, Daytum's founder, describes his start. He began by producing yearly tabulations of his life which he called Annual Reports, "a collection of charts and graphs that concentrate the year into statistical chunks and illuminate his life in a wry but rigorous manner", and he then sourced the help of Ryan Case to evolve his basic methodology into a platform for self-expression.

This is the front cover of the 2008 Feltron Annual Report, the early springboard for Daytum.

There are probably more examples out there, but these both brilliantly exemplify not only the statistical value of communicating information in such an engaging way, but also the aesthetic advantage of their approach, one that elevates the end result in every way.

As it happens, Sydney design studio Toko also took inspiration from your typical set of statistics for their design of the annual report for "The Hague in facts and figures". To the point that they transformed the various charts and graphs that you would associate with your average annual report into visuals that could be read either as statistically-accurate graphs or stunning works of art.

What's more, some of the graphs shown above were also produced as canvases and displayed within their work environments. Yes, real art on real canvas.

As I wrote earlier, communication is only ever about creating a response, not simply tossing information into the ether while you sit back and wait for something – anything! – to happen. It really does come down to that age-old adage, "The more you put in, the more you get out". Which basically means that if you take a boring approach to the way you communicate, you will be rewarded with nothing more than a bored audience.

Data doesn't have to be dull. So nor do you.

Anarchy on the Internet (or, God save the blog)

I often wonder if corporate blogs will ever be anything more for me than a curious contradiction in terms.

What I mean is that the infinite potential of the Internet, and in particular social media, seems at odds with the finite parameters that corporations like to put in place to protect their commercial interests. Downloading music is a good example of this – although the sensitivity of artist copyright makes this a far more complicated issue in reality.

That said, the broader evolution of music and its impact on culture is a useful benchmark to explain my point in full.

Specifically, the rise of punk.

Until relatively recently, if you wanted to play music in some sort of musical ensemble, you had to be a professional, trained musician. Music school was the only credible path to the stage, and any exceptions made for more of a novelty act than a noteworthy performance.

But then in the 1970s, punk happened. No longer did the old rules apply. In fact, no longer did any rules apply.

All of a sudden, anyone could play guitar. In many cases, the fewer chords you knew, the better. Bands like The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones and countless others grasped the opportunity with enough energy to catapult themselves beyond the status quo and its restrictive social more – and whether or not you could actually play your instruments had no real bearing on the final outcome.

In the 1980s, local scenes like the infamous Manchester scene erupted in the wake of punk, followed in the 1990s by grunge with its roots in Seattle on America’s northwest coast. More recently, the Arctic Monkeys are a band who, like many others before them, started by first having to teach themselves how to play the instruments that they’d managed to acquire.

And even though punk may have started on the stage, its impact soon spilled onto the streets, and the effects on our society and culture are still felt today. Over time, it may have changed shape as the world around us has also changed, but its basic tenets and DIY aesthetics survive.

Nowhere is it more alive and well than on the Internet.

In the same way that punk meant that anyone could play guitar, the Internet has created a new wave of thinkers and writers, a world where anyone can be an author, journalist or social agitator of some description or other.

Who needs record companies when you have MySpace? Likewise, who needs publishers when you have blogs? That isn't to say those institutions are dead in the water, it's just that they can no longer rely solely upon maintaining the bottleneck that has kept them in business up to this point. New ideas are now being shared more freely than ever, and they now need to look for new angles.

The Internet is the champion of the individual, the home of the one-man band. There are no corporate patrons to please, no commercial agendas to follow. Where punk broke down musical barriers, the Internet has bulldozed constraints on how we communicate – and both have worked in ways that rail against our reliance on the so-called big end of town.

Anything is possible on the Internet. And as history shows, giving the masses free rein is not always good news for your average corporation.

God save the blog.

One-name-fits-all

Naming anything is one of the hardest things you can do in life. And naming a business is no different.

It's especially hard because everyone is looking for a degree of differentiation. Not simply from a market perspective, but also from a legal one. And it's the latter that's the really tough part, because the vast majority of names have already been taken. In fact, according to a CNN report that I quoted as part of this article I wrote for B&T as long ago as 2003, 98% of the words in a typical dictionary have already been registered by one company or another.

As I outlined in the article, there's a whole range of pitfalls when it comes to naming, but here I want to focus on the question of differentiation.

In particular, I want to focus on a curious example of an entire industry where differentiation is almost absent when it comes to the name.

British pubs.

From the King's Head to the Queen's Arms. The Red Lion to the White Horse. There's an endless list of pubs with either exactly the same name, or at the very least ones that are very similar.

Maybe it's a quirk and the rules don't apply here. Maybe it's a problem, and that's why dozens of pubs are closing each and every month.

If we were to believe one of my favourite authors, George Orwell, then the name doesn't really matter so much. That is, just so long as it's called "The Moon Under Water" – the name he gave his ideal pub in a 1946 article he wrote for The Evening Standard. He may well have been right, and given that he was labelled "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture" by none other than The Economist (and as recently as 2008), it seems only fitting that the final word should go to Orwell.

"And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms."

The power of speech

I read voraciously at the breakfast table when I was a kid. Cereal boxes, jam jars, milk cartons. Anything I could find to fuel my imagination while I ate my cornflakes. I wasn’t bored, I was simply enchanted by the stories they told or that I could conjure in my mind with just a few juicy morsels of information.

I wondered if Snap, Crackle and Pop were actually three distinct types of Rice Bubble, each with a different product formulation to create the right sound.

I puzzled over the ingredients in the jam, trying to work out which one caused the lid on the jar to shut so tightly. Did the natural sugars in the jam create a unique vacuum, and was it true that there was a special grip required, known only to a select group of fathers? (Luckily, mine was one of them.)

And I was always curious to know how “fresh” was the milk in the milk carton. Did it mean fresh this morning? Fresh this week? Or simply fresh enough? What’s more, my mother wasn’t one for brand loyalty when it came to milk, so all sorts of differently coloured cartons would make an appearance at the table, leading to a constant stream of bewilderment as we tried to unlock the intricate code that distinguished the homogenised from the pasteurised, the semi-skimmed from the full cream.

Fast forward thirty or so years, and I now find myself not quite as inspired by the words I read in branding. Sure, the responsibilities of adulthood have no doubt dulled the further reaches of my imagination, but that does not explain why every hotel directory in the world reads exactly the same, no matter how budget or boutique. Useful telephone numbers, dry cleaning details, room service menus and intricate instructions for internet access. Where’s the reassuring voice of the savvy concierge who so kindly scored me a table at that exclusive restaurant last night?

Buy flat–pack furniture from any retail brand, and you can only assume that they simply ran out of money when it came to writing the assembly instructions. You spend all that money on talking people into buying your brand only to find it lost for words when it comes to crunch – talk about having a screw loose.

Conversely, politicians used to bore me senseless when I was younger. But now, I’m pushed to find anything quite as exciting when it comes to the power of speech. Never was this more evident than in the gaping chasm that stretched between George W. Bush and Obama. Even the make-up of their names provides a clear signal of the tone you expect to hear in their voice. Stern, establishment and old–school on the one hand, open, inclusive and contemporary on the other.

In Australia, K–Rudd is continually looking to language to build his personal brand and cachet. Since the launch of Kevin07, he’s been hard at work trying to show he’s one of the people – a fair dinkum, dyed–in–the–wool, true blue, Aussie bloke. And when he used the term “shitstorm” on our television screens, it became a powerful trigger for reinforcing this strategy. Likewise, the s–word was followed by the r–word (“recession”) and the b-word (“billions” – when discussing the budget deficit) as equally powerful triggers for action.

Political speechwriters have always seemed to have the upper hand on the mere copywriter. Back in the day, when the Roman Empire towered above the known world, Cicero led the pack with his skills of oratory and rhetoric. He had a very persuasive way with words, to the point that he saw his role as persuading his audience to come to their own decision, rather than forcing a decision upon them. It just so happened that their decision matched his own more often than not.

Likewise, the fable of the North Wind and the Sun, as told by Aesop. The North Wind tried to prove his strength by blowing the traveller’s cloak from his back, a tactic that only led the traveller to pull his cloak tighter around him. However, the Sun shone so brightly that the traveller removed his cloak in the heat of his own accord. The Sun proved persuasion is a stronger ally than force when it comes to achieving your ends, and language is no different.

For me, words have always carried incredible power. Whether a spark for the imagination, a call to action, or the prose of persuasion.

Branding is no exception. It relies on both words and pictures to tell the complete story. Too often, however, brands are visually stunning but have little of interest to say. They are all too easy on the eye, but conversation is not their strong suit, and you can’t help but feel a little empty once you move beyond the surface sheen.

In fact, it is impossible to build a strong brand without considering the impact of words, starting with the name.

The name plays a pivotal role for any brand. More than merely the legally trademarked moniker, names send a strong signal of intent. And when done well, they can create a powerful call to action that works itself into not only our minds but also our mouths. We now “Skype” one another in the same way that our parents used to “Hoover” the house, and brands like “Virgin” are no longer synonymous simply with sex, as per their basic dictionary definition.

Nowadays, names are developing their own brand cachet to the point that they are even reducing our reliance on taglines. Over the years, there have been some great taglines that will forever be remembered by their loyal audiences, irrespective of the most recent campaign. Apple and Nike are both iconic examples of brands that worked a tagline to their advantage in building their profile and presence over time, but now they focus people’s attention purely on their names to build brand loyalty. Names are now taking on both roles, delivering a single, much simpler, more direct and, ultimately, more powerful punch.

On the other hand, directness can sometimes work to your brand’s disadvantage. The urgency of Nike’s “Just Do It” just doesn’t do it for many brands where service levels require a few more comfort cues.

I remember reading a great example of this in John Simmon’s book, “The Invisible Grail”, in which he wrote about the types of advert that you often see in the front windows of cafés – “Experience breakfast chef wanted”. It’s a fairly straightforward message to understand and act upon, but it reveals very little of the character of the café in question. With a little more thought for language and consideration for the tone of the message, another venue wrote this advert – “Charming, intelligent, waiting staff. One more wanted”. The difference, and therefore the impact, is palpable, and it’s this understanding of the power of speech that Pret A Manger employed when they wrote their own recruitment advert – “We are opening new Pret stores, one at a time, no rush. And we need to employ more wonderful people”. They are clearly able to communicate a fair amount about the organisation’s values through the words they use, helping people decide whether this is a brand where they would like to work or not.

When it comes to creating any call to action, it is vital to remember that the right words will always evoke the right response. Choose them wisely.

What’s the more, the right words can do so much to touch your audience’s emotions.

I, for one, love my coffee. So what better way to get me even more excited about great coffee than great writing that revels in the brand. Puccino’s, for example, is a family-owned, UK café chain with an exuberant philosophy that puts a premium on its off–beat personality and exceptional service. This exuberance takes flight on takeaway cups that read “Cola is for wimps” in scrawled handwriting. Sugar packs claiming to be “Pillow for earphones” or “Not one of those handwarmers”. Paper bags that proudly pronounce “Carrying stuff around is the new leaving it where it is”. And, my favourite, in–store posters that greet customers with these words: “Of all the coffee bars in all the towns in all the world, you walk into me”.

Not only is it consistently great copywriting, this is also real emotion. And, if you follow any of the posts on the various blog sites and feeds where this branding has appeared, you’ll instantly witness the warmth and connection that customers feel for the brand – and for coffee, their daily salvation.

McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes have also used an equally insightful tone of voice on their packaging in the past to reach out to their customers, playing up an envious element of the brand that meant people were often unwilling to share the Jaffas – the packs announced “This box is empty” and “Don’t even think about it!”. In the same way that Puccino’s ensured the daily grind was anything but routine for their coffee and their customers, so Jaffa Cakes decided that greed was good and they should relish the opportunity to divide and conquer.

In the corporate world, the power of speech was not lost on IBM when they came out of one of the most difficult periods of their entire history. “We decided not to die”, declared the first of their Sweet Sixteen decisions that transformed the business, and the 2001 annual report did much more than provide a report on a corporation’s travails, it told a gripping, “no–holds–barred” story of company fighting for its life – tales of “big battles, stinging defeats and gritty comebacks. Unexpected alliances, daring forays and game–changing discoveries”. Corporate jargon made way for a visceral tone that portrayed the simple emotion and sheer humanity of the transformation, the stories that sat behind the numbers, the people behind the pictures.

Language like this can reveal so much more than the individual words themselves. And for many companies, it can sometimes be the difference between life and death. It hits you right between the eyes and leaves its indelible mark, but it’s not the only way to work your message.

Persuasion is an equally powerful tool, as Apple found when they made a subtle change to the wording of their recommendations on the iTunes store – from “iTunes recommends” to “Listeners also bought”. The recommendations now came from people’s peers not the company, a factor that theoretically contributed to an impressive uplift in sales via this channel.

Amazon has always used a similar approach – as do a raft of other online stores – and this will only grow in significance in line with the various social media tools that now allow unprecedented levels of discussion in a public forum. Influencing those discussions may be more complex, but establishing an authentic and engaging tone of voice is a critical path to follow if you are simply to join the discussion, let alone influence the outcome through persuasion.

Brand and corporate blogs are still struggling to understand their role in this new media landscape, and having to rely on language alone leaves them feeling a little exposed. There are no logos to leverage, no visual cues to hide behind, no lectern to provide protection for the most sensitive areas. Words, and words alone, must take centre stage.

As I’m sure you must have realised by now, I love words. They have inspired and intrigued me since I learned to read and write, but it is their ability to paint pictures in the mind’s eye that gives them their special power. They say a picture is worth a thousand words – and I would tend to agree with the impact that an image can achieve – but what grabs me is the potential for a single word to tell ten thousand stories.

The brands included here, from Rice Bubbles to IBM, all understand their role as storytellers. And for a brand to attract believers, it must have something to say.

Incest is wrong, right?

It goes without saying that incest is ill-suited to the human race.

I don't just mean legally, morally or ethically, but more so on physical or biological grounds. The make-up of our DNA demands diversity, although this is also tempered by natural selection: successful characteristics become more popular over successive generations – a fine-tuning effect, if you like.

But diversity is key.

And in the words of those towering pillars of pop philosophy, Groove Armada, "If everybody looked the same, we'd get tired looking at each other".

So forgive me the slight exaggeration, but then why do so many brands look as though they've been designed by one of the inbred hillbillies from the 1972 film Deliverance? Why do they seem so intent of denying themselves the necessary advantages of diversity, opting instead to settle for more of the same?

In their book Funky Business, published in 1999, Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstråle wrote about what they termed the surplus society. In their words, "The surplus society has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality".

Sounds like the commercial version of inbreeding if you ask me. People who are so scared of being different that their anxious conservatism tries to eradicate our fundamental need for diversity.

In business as in life, it is the drive for similarity that is unnatural. And our need for diversity is no less a necessity for brands.

But in spite of this, a brisk stroll down a supermarket aisle quickly becomes a blur of swooshes and swirls as brands seemingly decide it's easier to copy than compete. In the profile piece that appeared in B&T a couple of weeks ago, I wrote that most of the Australian packaging industry think "it's acceptable to regurgitate the same old boring ideas, year in year out. Even the smart people I know...can't seem to help themselves". As unfortunate as that might be – and assuming the inevitable standouts – that statement's true. The same goes for a catalogue of corporate brands, from law firms to the world of finance.

We all know that incest is wrong. Don't let diversity die.

Read all about it

This week, the lovely folks at B&T have once again taken it upon themselves to add me to their line-up of contributors. (If any of you are reading, thank you.)

467 words on the future of newspapers: barely enough to make even the smallest of dents on the issue, but then who's got the time to read anything longer these days? Maybe I should try and edit the column to a 140-character tweet?