If you’ve ever attended a spouse’s office party, you’ve probably found yourself staring at your drink after one employee says something like, “Yeah, but don’t ever give Bob a glass of 7-Up!,” and everyone else in the room collapses into convulsions of hysterical laughter. When the laughter dies down, your blank expression is answered with a ‘It’s a long story … I’ll tell you later.”
INAPPROPRIATELY APPROPRIATE
Many people use some words that don’t really need to be there. A great example is “appropriate,” as it’s used in sentences such as “once we review the information, we’ll take appropriate action.”
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
After a recent blog entry about exclamation points, fellow writer Tony Perona shared his own personal frustration – people who present their messages with an abundance of capital letters. They generally do it either because they think what they’re saying is REALLY IMPORTANT or because they think it ADDS EMPHASIS. They rank right up there with people who overuse boldface or underlining.
Using ALL CAPS, boldface, or underlining in print is the same as raising your voice to make a point. If you were speaking and wanted to make sure that your audience recognized that something was really important, you’d probably only stress the word “really.” If you stressed every word, you’d end up sounding like a raving maniac.
FEATURING BENEFITS
Recommendations to emphasize benefits rather then features when communicating are so old that I think they may date back to cavemen. Still, some marketers don’t understand the difference, so they miss out on an opportunity to connect more powerfully with their audiences.
Simply put, a feature is some aspect of your product or service. A benefit is what makes it a good or useful thing. If a bank tells you that they have 24-hour ATM access, they’re calling attention to a feature. If an automaker mentions stability control, that’s a feature.
IT’S NOT DUMBING DOWN
Imagine what would happen if the average math professor found himself lecturing to kindergartners. His words about chaos theory would fly over the group’s heads and the room would revert to real chaos. Now put one of your company’s engineers across the table from one of your product’s end-users. The gulf isn’t nearly as wide as that between our professor and the tots, but it might as well be.
One of the most challenging tasks facing those who create marketing materials is putting them in language that’s right for the reader. That doesn’t necessarily mean dumbing them down; it means that information should be presented at a level and in words that are comfortable for the audience.
OF LANGUAGE SPEAKING YOU ARE?
No matter how much money a company invests in its advertising and marketing efforts, no matter how hard they try to create and promote a compelling brand, and no matter what they do to get your business, they often lose sight of the fact that their reputation hinges on every employee or representative who has contact with customers and prospects.
Why then do so many companies put people who are unable to communicate clearly in these frontline roles? Whether it’s someone at the counter who can’t deliver a coherent answer to a customer question, or “Bill,” the highly accented voice that tells you he is really sorry you are having this problem, and then offers advice you can’t understand, these poor choices forever tarnish your impression of the organization behind them.
ARE YOU BEING SERVED – OR SERVICED?
I’ve often written about the tendency to use bigger words when smaller ones are actually more communicative. I blame it on a desire to sound more educated and impressive (and I think it goes back to those papers we wrote in high school and college, when we tried to mask our failure to read the assignment by digging deep into the thesaurus).
One common mistake is to substitute the word “service” for its close cousin “serve.” Instead of saying “we serve our customers with a smile,” we see “we service our customers with a smile.” Rather than “thanks for the opportunity to serve you,” it’s “thanks for the opportunity to service you.” In place of “we served 10,000 customers last year,” we get “we serviced 10,000 customers last year.” No big deal, you say?
IT’S ESPECIALLY VERY UNIQUE
Are you unique? That’s good. Are you very unique? That’s not so good.
No, I’m not suggesting that individuality is a bad thing. In fact, it’s a very good thing. A very powerful thing. And the word “unique” should be a very powerful word. Unfortunately, it’s misused so often that it is losing its power. Maybe even its uniqueness.
FORTUNATELY, MY RAISINS LACKED WINGS
(I’ll take a break from advice and counsel today, and tackle something lighter.)
My son attends Purdue University, and he shared his frustration with the massive swarms of gnat-like insects that have descended upon the campus in recent days. The infestation is so great that the Indianapolis Star covered it, describing how the sheer millions of tiny soybean aphids had even disrupted marching band practice.
It reminded me of my own freshmen year in the land of the St. Joe Pumas, about a half-hour north of Purdue. For some reason, Halleck Center, the student union building, had become infested with more houseflies than I’d seen before (or since). I’m not just suggesting that there were a lot of them; it was more in the realm of a Biblical plague. And since we dined in Halleck, it was a cause of some concern.
IT’S YOUR PROBLEM, NOT THEIRS
Every now and then, I’ll get a request from a client to write something that clarifies some existing instructions or procedures. When I ask the reason for the clarification, I’m nearly always told that the customers or other audience just doesn’t get it. They just don’t understand. They aren’t acting the way we want them to act, or following the steps in the order we prefer.
My job then becomes crafting magic words that will transform these miscreants into conformists. And it’s nearly always a waste of time.