Bard of Bray

Detail is everything

Behind every key business decision ever made, perhaps even behind every single item ever bought, there was a moment when things could have gone the other way. Consciously or unconsciously, choose we always must, and even if we agonise for an age, the act itself happens in a split second. The more you can understand about that instant the more chance you have of influencing it.

The reader. What do they want? What do they really need? (Not the same thing.) Why do they want it? What's stopping them get it? In what way do we provide it? What do they like? How much do they know? What's pressure for them? What limits them? How much time have they got? Where are they sitting? What mood are they in? What did they do just before? Who do they answer to? What's their relationship? What are this person's needs?

Then there's the product. What makes it different? What makes it better? What makes it interesting?

Then there's the market.

Then there's you. What do you need? No, but seriously, what do you really need? For more on this – it’s vital – see ‘Clearly define the aim’, below.

The true motivators in a decision are not always the most obvious ones.

You cannot know too much. The information at your disposal is your palette. You don’t have to use everything, but the more you have to call on, the more convincing is the picture you paint, and better chance you have of flicking that switch. Your way, not someone else's.

Dead wood

What is this decision we wish people to take, what and where is this switch we wish to flick? By this I don’t mean 'get more clients' or 'sell more shoes'. Everyone wants that. We need to get at the decision behind the decision to, say, buy more shoes. You can help me by trying to strip away as much of the dead wood as possible, so we’re working with what’s relevant. Why do people buy new shoes at all, why do people buy your competitor’s shoes, where and when is the decision made? It might be that the decision isn’t made in a shoe-shop, but at the end of a gruelling trip around the supermarket after doing the school run. Knowing this might give us a head start.

Normally I’ll supply you with a list of questions before we talk.

How 'brief' becomes anything but

How else can you help? Let’s be honest about the approval process. If you’re not the person who is signing this off, how much of a say has the person who is signing this off had in the brief? I understand that there are nearly always company politics and sheer availability issues at work here, but nearly every single problem on projects that I can think of originates from this issue. Is it solvable? Brief, brief answered, turns out not to be the brief at all, means start from scratch means many people plenty grumpy. Let’s not play pin the tail on the donkey.

This is all about impact – concentrating as much force into as few words as possible. Leaving several issues to solve without pinpointing the right one leaves little choice but to pull out a blunderbuss. Know where you’re aiming and you can pick up an assassin’s rifle, which normally brings down several other needs in the same shot.

Intelligence with an erection

People can be as resistant and cynical as they like, but few can ever stop being curious. Minds just can’t say no to something new. And that's why ideas are so powerful. They're something new.

Another angle. People will drop everything for that. Two unlikely elements connected to make a third. The ordinary made extraordinary... A great idea challenges assumptions, makes us re-evaluate, smile, brightens the day with endorphins. An idea is possibility, a shot of hope, a space between two realities, an expression of the restless curiosity in the middle of all of us. They're a way forward. They’re fun. I read in Alan Fletcher’s book on design (I think) that they were intelligence with an erection.

There are ten ‘rules’ on this site. In practice it’s hard to separate them, they all interlink. Often the ‘idea’ we are searching for here is found by looking for the key element of storytelling, a hook, a problem, challenge, question, mystery that just needs resolving, the thing that makes us follow even bad books and films to the end. But more of that in part six, storytelling. And more on 'the idea' in parts four and five.

Germination and imbeciles

Can you help here? You can. In at least two ways.

First, the smart clients ask for things next week, or next month even, and not tomorrow or yesterday. Put an early call in, plant a seed a month before the project starts, allow time for it to germinate. Ideas, like well developed products and well thought out marketing strategies, take time.

Second, be brave. Try to remember that however dull, time-starved and stressed is your reader, treating him like an imbecile is going to make things worse. Take the chance to brighten someone’s day by crediting them with some intelligence. The next two sections, on collaboration and ‘show don’t tell’, will hopefully help convince you that ‘adventurous’ is not a euphemism for risky. Quite the opposite. In this noisy world, adventurous is the safest bet by far.

Whose idea was this?

Collaborating, inventing, testing, pushing, shoving... this is vital. "What if, what if, what if?" opens never-opened doors. When the designer asks the writer to fill in the gaps, or the writer writes without a design in mind, an opportunity is lost.

How tight should the collaboration be? Many years ago I took a book of work to show Lynn Trickett of Trickett and Webb fame. She picked up one brochure in particular, and was flicking through it. Silence.

"Whose idea was this?" she said eventually.

I scratched my head.

"I can't remember."

Long silence.

"Right answer."

If anyone knows a thing or two about communication, she does.

A meeting of minds

But actually designer and writer aren't the only ones collaborating. The collaboration between reader and writer is just as important. Great ideas come with this participation built in.

Imagine that great Economist ad line "Great minds like a think"... as just plain old "Great minds think alike". Imagine your daily crossword pre-filled in to save you the bother. Think for a moment of the last time you realised something important, grasped a difficult concept or got a good joke. It's a strange release of energy, a heady mixture of relief and delight. The mind seems to revel in filling the gap or making the leap, and this act seems to come with a genetically hardwired reward, a quick swim around in endorphins and adrenaline.

Don't deprive your reader that pleasure by doing all the work for them.

A message that doesn't go all the way from A to B, but instead insists on being met out there somewhere between you and them, something that requires a modicum of unravelling and that small rush of adrenaline, does many favours for you. It wins time, brings goodwill, forms a surreptitious little bond between you, promises more rewards, plants the seed that needs will be met. Oh, and it stays in the memory. If you're lucky enough to be given the chance to use humour and wit, better still... the power of these things to disarm and open up an audience is extraordinary.

Balls

This is so important, I want to say it again a slightly different way. When I began copywriting I worked a lot with The Partners, where David Stuart often called on his now much-quoted (for good reason) ‘ball’ analogy to convince clients to accept a more creatively adventurous solution.

Think of the communication as a ball, was his argument. You can place it directly in someone’s hand. Uneventful. No risk. Safe. You can lob it up gently, leave a little for the reader to get – more fun, more rewarding. If you lob it as high as you can, and your collaborator – for this is collaboration, because since you can’t physically read to them, or interpret for them, the reader actively partakes – your collaborator runs full-pelt and performs a last-gasp swallow dive and makes the catch at full stretch, grass stains, roaring crowd, everything… then the sense of achievement is enormous. And just as important, the bond between catcher and thrower is transformed. People laughing together at a joke often share a glance afterwards. This says everything. Now you’ve achieved something together. Now you have something in common. You just cannot buy that kind of connection, it’s priceless.

The annoyingly sublime copywriter Lindsay Camp, who also worked with David Stuart, could not have put it better, so I’m going to quote him: “good writing is knowing how difficult to make the catch.”

If your message is that you are the world’s best cook, you can tell me until you are blue in the face. I won’t believe you. No one will believe you. In fact if anything we’re going to start looking for reasons to prove you wrong. Claiming things is just too easy, any fool can make a claim. If you really want to win someone over, you have to prove it. Cook me a meal. Make me drool.

Take writing for film or theatre. The first things to hit the cutting room floor are great speeches of tedious exposition along the lines of ‘my love is lost, my heart broken, I am sunk…’ They cut no ice with an audience, largely because it's just not particularly entertaining having our intelligence insulted by being told what's going on, when the very same emotion can be captured more powerfully in a silence or even a simple glance. Why is that more powerful? Because we see or realise what is happening for ourselves. Instead of being thrust upon us, it draws us in, we move out to it. It’s so much more satisfying.

Understandably, marketing people who are accountable, and whose jobs are on the line, generally feel uncomfortable with this. They have key and measurable points that need getting across, often even key phrases, and they’re in the unfortunate position of having to prove they’ve done a thorough job. The temptation is to demand to see these bullet points in black and white. It’s logical, in this climate of fear, to think you have got your message across if you can see it there with your very own eyes.

But actually you’re more likely to make them blind to it. Most marketing has a funny smell that seeps through the paper and makes people wrinkle their nose before they've even turned the page. Catchphrases, key phrases… just turn people off. How unsexy to be made to feel like a target. Come on! You have to take the trouble to say things differently, because even that act in itself shows something about you. Bung in a quick ‘solution’ or two, a ‘going forward’ here, a ‘value-added’ there and a cheeky ‘think outside the box’ somewhere else, and believe me, you’ll be communicating just how little you care, and just how inside the box you are. I’ve fought all my professional life not to use these words. I don’t always win. I sulk when I lose.

The reason for the negative impact of marketing jibber-jabber is perfectly obvious: because instead of addressing the reader’s needs, they address the marketing department’s. People just aren’t stupid, however much you’d like them to be.

So. If you want to send someone to sleep or on their way, lecture and hector them. It works a treat. If you want to turn them off, give them a game of bullshit bingo. But give your reader the benefit of the doubt, and you will be repaid with interest. Because people who think they own ideas for themselves are the most powerful advocates for your business you can get. They have invested some of themselves in you.

Human beings absolutely love stories. Soap operas, gossip, novels, the news, football, films, anecdotes in the pub, jokes even: we just can’t get enough. From the second that Snow White first shows up we use them not just for entertainment, but to make sense of the world and how we relate to it. Well-constructed stories carry with them latent messages – even simple fairytales like Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood are designed to help developing children deal with some of the subconscious issues of growing up [check out a book called The Uses of Enchantment, if you’re interested]. We don’t stop growing at 21, and stories don’t stop helping us grow either. Our brains are highly accustomed to interpreting and unravelling narratives to extract meaning. There’s no more powerful way to communicate.

Clearly this is relevant to us as business communicators. Tell stories well, and you tap into psychological ley-lines that have been there for generations and generations – long before Aristotle. A story is the most powerful vehicle to get information (and feelings) from point A to point B: a racing car, a souped-up off-roader, whatever you need it to be to do the job. Tell a story, and the way opens up before you. Don’t? Don’t and you’re walking. Through hedges.

Being a string of events which carry with them a moral or lesson, stories are the ultimate in 'show, don't tell'. But obviously there is much more to storytelling than that. Very many books have been written on how to tell a good story. Here’s a potted summary in fourteen words: Whose story is it? What do they want? What is stopping them get it?

The key points are these. Begin with a problem that seems unsurpassable, a hook which just demands an answer, the ‘I just had to know what happened’. Release the information in the correct order (it’s just common sense, that), surprise people, build in a few key turning points if you can, hold back the denouement so it has the maximum impact. Link every element into the main thrust of the story, and if it doesn’t add to that thrust, however pleasing, delete it.

It’s amazing how much business communication fails to find and follow the powerful narrative within it. That’s why it fails. Teflon, nothing to hang on to.

Sausages from a machine

The ability to generate feeling is one of the few things in writing that cannot be taught. Part of it is bound up in the storytelling – the angle you take, the hook you choose, and so on. But the rest is the ‘magic’ that is so hard to replicate. The rhythm, cadence, weight, vocabulary, length of putting one word after another. So much of what you are made to feel by a communication comes through its tone of voice. You just know if the entity behind it is playful, cold, fun, serious, an authority. I’ve tried to write guidelines on tone of voice, but my honest belief is that every single one ever written by any branding expert anywhere can be pulped. Five adjectives is enough. With that the writer can do it or he can’t. You can’t hold his wrist and guide his fingers. Tone of voice can’t be replicated like sausages out of a machine. It takes feel and touch.

Back to feelings, then. Even the driest, most boring of communications have, at their core, an element which is connected to and influenced by a degree of emotion. My advice is start here with the feelings, because tapping in to them makes it a lot easier and far more rewarding to stay with a document, especially if the content is dry. For many, it will be the only reason to plough on. Never stray too far from the emotion you aim to evoke. Read the words back, and try to sense what feeling they produce in you. Do this 'cold'. Imagine it's the first time you've read them. Obvious, I guess.

Always look for the underlying emotion. What does the reader feel? What do we want to change – what do we want him or her to feel… during, at the end, and after. Every single word should be directed towards making that change. Discard the rest.

Sportswear for Greater Performance

One quick point on straplines for brands. This really is about feeling, about generating something memorable that creates an impulse. It doesn’t need to be descriptive, you really can’t jam everything into a few words. No, it’s the inspirational highnote of an organisation’s ambition, the point where it connects most profoundly with its market. Not what you do. Not convinced? Is the greatest strapline of all time ‘Sportswear for Greater Performance’? Or ‘Just Do It’?

It’s saying when things can’t be done. It’s saying when things can be done cheaper. It’s saying when things don’t need to be done. It’s saying when other people’s work is good.

It’s also saying when you think things are being done wrong. It’s not being afraid to engage in debate over the right course of action, which seems to me a fundamental tool of doing a good job. That not difficult or disobedient, it’s intelligent. Why would you spend hours and hours crafting something that you later couldn’t care less about changing in the blink of an eye? If you change things at the drop of a hat, why did you do things like that in the first place? I love amendments that improve communications, and editors that challenge me to do the same. I accept without question amendments that don’t make a document worse. But something that reduces the effectiveness of the message? Then I’ll argue against the change. That’s what you pay for.

Don’t worry, I won’t go on and on. My policy is to say once that I think a suggested change/course of action is wrong. I give the reasons. If that doesn’t work then I do what I’m told. What are we doing this for – to get in and out as quickly as possible? Or to do a good job and change something? The latter needs honest and open debate, so between us we get to where we need to go.

In practice, this hardly ever happens. One of the benefits of asking all those questions up front is that it’s much less painful at the business end. As I mentioned before, the only time problems emerge are when the people signing off a project haven’t even seen the original brief, and/or there are 15 super-directors to please, all with a different vision, which is a recipe for disaster. Apart from that, problems (touch wood) are rare.

Oh, except marketing people who inform me with a steely glint in their eye that they’ve ‘done some writing in their time’, or ‘pick up a pen now and then’. That never ends well.

What’s the difference between craft and graft? One tiny stroke of the pen in the case of the words themselves. Not a lot, sometimes, when it comes to writing. Nearly every well-written piece is written and rewritten, read and reread and then put away and reread again and again, every word weighed against the other, hundreds of times. This goes on until the balance, rhythm, tone, length, order and everything else all fit together to feel as close to perfect as you can get.

Writing is a craft, I suppose, because it’s beautiful (at least I think it is), and there’s skill involved, and yes, it’s fun. This is important. In fact if I find that a job I’m working on isn’t fun, I quite often stop and ask why, and what I could do to make it so. Because if it’s not fun to write, chances are that it’s not going to be fun to read.

That’s not the same as short, it means the right amount for the message and the audience and the piece itself. A silly myth went round a few years ago that people never read more than 50 words on an internet page. Utter poppycock. Every day people read reams and reams of material in the newspapers, scrolling down and down and down, and as if that’s not enough, they scroll on beyond the articles to read everyone else’s comments afterwards. People will read anything if they are interested enough, including 1000-page novels. Recently I did a piece for an architecture practice that specialises in planning and designing entire areas of cities or whole new towns. They have a fairly involved philosophy for making their work a success, as you may imagine. Well sorry, but if I were commissioning someone to build me an entire town, I’d like to hear a little bit more than a soundbite.

And consider this. Sometimes it might not be a bad idea to nail people when you’ve actually got them. It seems a terrible shame to me to hook someone with a brilliant poster, line, visual idea, whatever, have them there ready and waiting for more, and then just waltz off, with the arrogant assumption that they'll find time to look you up again on a website, where you'll have to win them back (if they ever arrive) all over again.

Every message has its length. Short is often brilliant. Not a word more than you need is better still.

Simplicy is also a clean idea, and clean ideas come through all the groundwork we discussed at the start, knowing your audience and what you wish to achieve very clearly. I hate guns, but there seems to be no more powerful metaphor for power, focus and accuracy in a message. A single rifle shot. Telescopic lens. No mess.