How refreshing.

A press ad for Wrigley Extra chewing gum that seems to hit the nail on the head. No corny ad slogans and no mistruths.

I realise this will not shock the more enlightened advertisers among our readers, but it is still extremely rare to come across a communication that seems to be more honest that it needs to be.

I have always been irritated by the hype that surrounds so many advertising communications. There might be no particular ‘product truth’ involved, and if it is present at all, it can often be blown out of all proportion. It has galvanised my view of copywriting as something that needs to be honest if it is to be believed, and it’s a view that underpins all of my own writing.

Wrigley could easily create a brand ad that speaks about heritage and history, and one imagines taste might be a topic they could focus on. But social faux pas? Not quite the subject a copywriter would initially jump towards, unless they were actively seeking to convey a brand message about honesty.

For my part, I love the fact that Wrigley questions the social rights and wrongs of chewing gum, and this helps attract me to a brand and a product which – if I am honest – is something I am trying to convince my 10-year-old son not to be involved with. I am not keen on the habit of chewing gum, although like Ben Fogle, I can appreciate the way it can ‘give my mouth a quick once over’ when necessary. More importantly, though, is that fact that whilst having my concerns about the habit, it helps enormously to know that Wrigley themselves have a few concerns about it too. That is, if they are being honest about things.

Here’s a thought. Are brand managers in the telecoms or retail electronics sectors any more courageous than the brand managers in any other sector? Or are they more gifted, more skilled or more qualified?

No? Well, if they are none of these things, presumably they are more worried. More than in most other sectors, the telecoms and electronics markets have moved forward at such a breath-taking pace over recent years that a brand can be tripped up by it all. Brand managers must either be extremely good at their jobs, or have balls of steel. Or both.

I know this will sound like my father speaking, but no sooner have we got used to a particular technology than it’s overtaken by something new. I’ve been around a while (I’m in my late 40s), and I remember vinyl all too clearly. Then it was cassettes, CDs, MP3, MP4 and MP5… The rest is recent history, as they say. The same is true of video formats. I’ve gone through Betamax, VHS and DVD but still don’t have a Blu-ray player. And the thing is, all of these formats felt like they were the one. The final solution. I have never stopped to think “why am I spending money on this technology when I know it will be out of date in just a few years”. Instead, I will merrily buy the latest gadgetry (okay, not the Blu-ray player yet) and use it for only a short while until the next development forces me to drop it back into its box and place it at the back of a cupboard where it will languish for ever more.

We used to make phone calls from handsets that were attached us to walls, then we started using similar gadgets in cars. Then back in the early 90s things took off in earnest with truly mobile phones giving us all a degree of freedom we had never before imagined. Now it’s all smartphones, email and internet access on the move, music downloads and streaming video on an epic scale…

It’s exhausting. Or at least, it would be if you were particularly old or unadventurous. Or both. As it happens, I find the speed of change utterly exhilarating. Unlike my father.

But this is the nub of this rant. All this exciting, speedy progress makes naming a company rather tricky. It makes naming a brand a minefield. It makes planning one’s brand’s future almost impossible.

Radio Rentals had a huge high street presence in the 1960s and 1970s, but the business was overtaken by technology. The business was bought by Thorn in 1968 and became a part of Thorn-EMI in 1980, before merging with Granada Limited to form boxclever in 2000. The Radio Rentals brand died along the way principally because it failed to reflect the nature of the business as it evolved.

But other brands have successfully soldiered on, resolutely ignoring the fact their names (at least) may no longer be appropriate. 

iTunes and the iTunes Store, for example, have been around for a decade now, since Apple launched them in January 2001. The name is now firmly established as the place to purchase and download your entertainment, but it now seems woefully inadequate for a service that brings you apps, films, TV podcasts and much more than a few tunes. Will Apple ever evolve the name into something else? Or are we happy to disregard the inadequacy of the name because we are so enamoured by the promise of the brand intself?

And what about British Gas? I would put good money on there having been countless fraught meetings between brand managers at HQ to discuss the company’s evolution into an electricity provider. As a customer, I am relatively confused as to who and where I can purchase my electricity (or gas for that matter) from, so a little clarity would be of some use. Notably, the arrival of brands such as e-On and EDF on the energy supply scene seems to suggest that they at least have taken the view that a non-descipt brand name leaves them free to adapt their mode of business in the future… but what about British Gas? Would it not help the customer – and by extension, the company – to have a brand name such as British Electricity too? Or perhaps a company called British Energy Supply?

The catalyst for writing this rant was a conversation I had with a friend a short while ago. His 14 year-old son was eavedropping, and when I mentioned that Carphone Warehouse was an outdated brand name, the teenager asked what a carphone was in any case. He said that he had never understood why the shop was called Carphone Warehouse. And this from a young man who would fall squarely within Carphone Warehouse’s core target market of teenage consumers. I know an executive at Carphone Warehouse and I mentioned this to him, and he grinned and said that in continental Europe the company now operates as The Phone House. I wonder how long it will take before the business decides to do the same in the UK.

I have no immediate solutions to this dilemma. No quick fixes. Just a few thoughts concerning a few brands where a problem seems to exist, or is looming. I imagine there are groups of brave, big balled brand professionals sitting around tables right now, discussing these matters. And if they’re not, they certainly should be.

Let’s face it – English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger. There is neither an apple nor pine in a pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England nor French fries in France. Sweetmeats are not meat at all, while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are actually meat.

We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are in fact square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. A good golfer tries to play below par, but will try to be above par at everything else he does.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, two geese. So one moose, two meese? Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it? And odd? An end?

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm goes off by going on. Flammable and inflammable appear to mean the same thing, when they ought to mean the opposite. And to shut up is the same as to pipe down.

Oh the wonders of English.

I have the dubious privilege of owning a small office building in Bristol, and I recently came across something called the ‘Small Business Rate Relief’ scheme. This is a discount scheme through which I may be able to pay slightly less for my business rates if the Rateable Value of my office is below a certain value.

I duly contacted the City Council and have received a two-sided application form. One side attempts to explain the scheme, and the other provides areas where I need to complete some details in order to make an application for the discount.

Needless to say, the form is a local authority form, and I would not be expecting the best quality design or production values (I would rather my tax pound was spent on schools and roads than on glitzy design skills, in any case). But the language used on the form is worryingly Dickensian.

“In accordance with the Small Business Rate Relief scheme“, I am told, “relief may be granted...” and so on. “In accordance with”? Nobody actually says that in real life, do they?

Similarly, there is a section which explains (and I use that word cautiously) that “No account shall be taken of any property the ratepayer occupies in England where the rateable value of each such property shown in the local non-domestic rating list for that day is not more than £2,599“.  I become exhausted when I read this, perhaps because of the double negative but equally due to the length of the sentence. I find myself glazing over before I reach the full-stop and, worse still, I fear a nose bleed would not be far away if I were to attempt seriously to understand what is being said.

Maybe that is where the problem lies. Nothing is in fact being said. It is being written, and the spoken word is not being used. Sadly it is also being written by someone who has read too many council missives and does not understand the way people actually use language these days.

This probably explains why, just before signing the form, I am asked to declare  that “I confirm that the properties listed above are the only rating assessments (see note [2] below) in England occupied by (insert name of ratepayer).”

Excuse me?

Now it seems that I no longer occupy an office but in fact work out of a ‘rating assessment’. Whatever one of those is.

I suspect it is simply a matter of priorities to the average designer. He or she is employed to organise everything and lay it all out so that a brochure, website, poster or advertisement (or whatever other item is being created) is striking and inviting. Their priority is to create a cohesive whole, and if you work with a good designer, they will hopefully recognise that in most cases the design is a means to an end, and it is the words that carry the message to the reader. But this is not always the case, and I have worked with countless designers over the years who have viewed copy in much the same way as they view illustrations, photograps or tables – they need to fit in, be attractive and not spoil the overall aesthetic balance of a piece. But they can be cropped and sliced up, with blocks of copy being distributed about the piece at random.

To a writer, it is frustrating to have one’s copy cut up and littered around in the name of making an ‘attractive’ layout. If one’s eye is not led on a comfortable journey from start to finish, reading anything can be a bit of a struggle, so it is vital that a designer treats the copy in a way that invites a reader to travel along that journey. Similarly, it is just as frustrating to be asked to change the way a sentence has been written, just because a single-word ‘widow’ is being caused on a screen, and the designer wants a more convenient line length. It would be like a designer being asked to delete the righthand third of an image because it contained yellow, and the copywriter on the project hated anything yellow in colour. It doesn’t make for a really compelling reason.

Clearly, there are a lot of particularly good examples of design where words are not important and where a message is conveyed purely by an image. Icons are the most obvious example. But in most commercial situations where a message is being communicated – perhaps on a product’s packaging, a pension scheme’s literature or a telecoms provider’s website – the information is contained in the words, and it is the job of the designer to ensure that a reader quickly and easily takes on board the informaton being conveyed.

The bottom line is that a good designer understands words and recognises the importance of guiding a reader on a journey. A poor designer is one who thinks design is all about layout and impact, or aesthetics. I am pleased to say that nowadays I work with some particularly bright designers who treat copy with the respect I feel it deserves.