How to sell the sizzle

I came across a url the other day, through Longlostmarketingsecrets.com which took me to an ancient film of a happy salesman in a suit with a flip-board - a film hailing from 60 years ago. Rather like the presentation of the man himself, the film was simply done, crisp and clear and made a lot of sense.

It extolled some real wisdom about how to sell anything:

If you have a chance, visit this website and type in any of the following:

1. Don't sell the steak sell the sizzle
2. Don't write - telegraph
3. Say it with flowers
4. Don't ask if - ask which
5. Watch your bark

These were the tips being touted as useful in 1955; they're worth unfolding a little.

Don't sell the steak sell the sizzle
Advertisers do this day in day out, if they're good. They try to correlate the best and juiciest associations with the product they are selling to the audience they aim to engage. 

Don't write - telegraph
It's not the words; its how you put them across using any medium but focusing on the three essential messages you wish people to hear.

Say it with flowers
Be positive assuring and make sure you are offering a gift of some kind direct to the bosom of your audience.

Don't ask if - ask which
This is fundamentally important. To maintain the positive  notes so far you must offer a choice of either this product or that, this model or that one. Don't say "if you buy this you'll be happy ever after". That'll give you away as a pushy salesperson. Just say, "You can have this brilliant thing for this price or this brilliant thing for this price".

Watch your bark
This is about delivery and presentation; use your most assuring voice, smile and be happy, be sure you look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, smart and well groomed; and don't try to apply pressure for a single moment, just explain yourself happily.

Sixty years old and the messages could be well learned in any organisation today from barrow stall to major corporation.

My Word is My Bond?

This is about trust and money. Big, small and indifferently large into the bargain.

It seems to all come down to credit in small businesses in the UK. Everything is fine until the dredit check and then you know, sadly, that despite the immense and knowing trust you have with your bank manager, the credit check says no. It does this because as a small business it is inevitable that you have had to try and enjoy some flesh of working capital on the bones of your business - where banks are concerned: you've tried borrowing as you used to in previous decades, but the computer says no.

This equally applies to business large and new, old and timely, via Experian and other credit checkers. Where every other business is concerned, everything to do with available money is so short-term that 'they' only check for the last year of your business, if you are extremely lucky. Usually three weeks of a bad time is enough. Then it's definitely no. Go elsewhere or die; it's on the State.

This is decimation by numbers, defecation by elephant; but nothing as easy and good as the last two kennings.

It is not easy to describe what banks do to the very people who make them work, except execrable and all anagrams pertaining to this last word. Ex-Crab EEL, for example!

In their past lives it is just possible that this form of non-usury usurpation was not much different to the slime-mongers I once fished for in the Ex Estuary. Happily.

When I had the privilege of writing, or at least in part designing, the Lord Mayor of London's speeches, back in 1988, Sir Christopher Collett (Glover) and the City he rightly loved operated on the age-old motto, My word is my bond.

I so operate - and "always will I fit the glove"*.

*The Mark of the Fool, Outpost Publications, Giles Emerson, 1977

PS. Limited edition of 600, I'm afraid.

What happens to you happens to me

As a father of children and a husband too, I have found it useful to make my commitment and support, particularly the latter, absolutely clear. When my eldest daughter was young and visiting me at my home in the Shropshire borders, after a painful separation with her mother, I once said to her, “Just remember, when you are thinking of me, I am thinking of you.” 

It’s a simple kind of assurance and might fetch all kinds of response in a five-year old’s mind. A little gentle and occasional repeating might have helped the idea to take hold.

But what is the extent of the idea? Actually it is massive. To a Christian, for example, it might be a way of understanding one’s personal relationship with God, the imputation being that God is the father and this is what he might wish to say. No harm in thinking this at least, for anyone can think anything about God at any time and – as Christian belief lets us imagine – He’s there to respond.

To a manager with a few very real people to manage, the idea but not the same words might be translated another way. You can think of what words to use. There are many versions one might figuratively employ to get this kind of supportive message across. 

For example, if I don’t understand you, you don’t understand me. If I don’t offer you guidance and support and show you the ropes, then vice versa – for the guidance and the teaching between any two people is always reciprocal.

Or, if you are a young man contemplating a punch in the face in a difficult situation, you might bite your lip and battle down your fear with the thought that if I punch him, I will also punch myself. 

Note the slight change of key in this curious song; I’ve moved from the mutual to the self-reflexive. This is because a progressive way of learning how to be human in a difficult world is first to learn, then to absorb the learning, and perhaps, when recognition of some kind of truth dawns, to take it to heart.

An Ode to Cameron: 

Working families

I sometimes feel that David Cameron has got hold of the megaphone by the wrong end. 

Working families? Need I say more? There are families all across Britain; some work hard, some live hard but few play hard. And despite the fact that we have a prime minister who, most certainly, by dint of his profession and multiple achievements, works very hard indeed, I wonder at his perspective.

There are those among us who work very hard without the love and rife of family life – they have nothing and no one but they may have work; or they have nothing and no one and no work or too little truly to make ends meet.

This, our beloved country, is full of single people; some may be sufficiently wise and accomplished, and God-given, to love and cherish their singleness and endeavours; some may not be so happy and not all, as said, may be working, many for reasons not of their own making or, as the saying goes, beyond their control.

Every living being – and not just hereabouts but all about this very singular sphere – works hard to survive in his or her own way given their circumstances, life choices, lot, and aspirations; and whether or not they are part, apart, partitioned, patriots, parrots, purposeless or parboiled.

What, then, is the right end of the megaphone? It's the bit, surely, that starts with the quality of an idea and ends with vital simplicity, spreading itself of its own accord. 

What then would I advise a politician to do when he seeks re-election? Look and learn, listen and learn, act on your learning, grow in your understanding, do something from your heart and the full passion of your being - none of which starts or ends with policy. Imagine your life is a day - and look forward to the next.

Add flair to your dash!

Are too many dashes used in writing these days? I’d love to know what you think. For my part, I love dashes and I believe that their proper use can pep up a sentence and helps to emphasise parts of it that might otherwise be overlooked.

But – just as an aside – don’t you like the word ‘dash’? It has a certain freedom and quick spirit about it and runs nicely into the word ‘dashing’ which is equally cavalier, playful and charming. That’s one of the marvellous things about the English language generally, that if you take a word out and hold it up against the light it will often sparkle with meaning and might well be added to the growing box of your favourites.

Enough of such asides; my brief purpose is to look at the use of the dash – so onwards.

You might notice that modern novels are full of dashes. It has been suggested (mostly I think by cynics and pedants) that, because many modern novelists are illiterate, they use the dash to save themselves the trouble of deciding whether they should use commas, semi-colons or brackets to isolate their subordinate clauses. In fact, the dash is a very useful and perfectly legitimate punctuation mark if used sparingly – it can break up a sentence to allow you to emphasise your point without appearing too repetitious.

You can use dashes in a similar way to brackets:

e.g. After the performance – the last of the season – the ballerina retired to the country.

I think this example clearly illustrates where a dash is in fact preferable to a bracket. As a rule, if I am ever tempted to use a bracket I first ask myself, do I need this extra phrase, this additional information? When I do need it because it is useful information, adding colour to the sentence, I normally find that it reads better and is more noticeable used between dashes than cubby-holed in brackets. Many readers see bracketed material as of secondary importance, or information that might otherwise be in a footnote. And they may be right.

When used in the way exampled above, two dashes – one before and one after the extra phrase – are needed, as with brackets. When the phrase comes at the end of the sentence you only need to have the one dash – as in this ending.

Here’s another way of using a dash:

e.g. She gave a magnificent performance – no one could equal her.

In this example a colon might have been used instead of a dash but the effect would have been rather stilted and formal.

So dashes are worthy. But do be especially careful not to overuse them. Paragraphs littered with dashes look clumsy, can be hard to read and actually do tend to betray a lack of knowledge on the writer’s part of appropriate punctuation. In particular, be careful not to use more than one additional phrase, marked by a dash, in one sentence. This will seriously promote confusion because a reader will never know which parts of the sentence are supposed to relate.

e.g. He turned away – the interview was over – and walked towards the window – the light had now faded – sensing that he had failed in his efforts – he would have to try something else.

This said, the dash is sometimes legitimately used to link a series of connected phrases:

e.g. The autumn trees were a splendid sight – splashes of red – sudden glints of gold and silver – a carpet of russet brown beneath the trunks.

While this is not incorrect, it is unusual. In my thinking, it is preferable to use one initial dash and then link the other phrases together with commas.

As in all things, as writers we need to think of achieving the right balance and this is a visual as well as syntactical and also rhythmical quality. Over and under-use of punctuation trips up and spoils the balance. So enjoy your dashes but don’t spray them on your prose like confetti.

That’s it – must dash!!

Ode to the semi-colon

Who am I to try and halt the clearly unstoppable flow of changing attitudes and practices when it comes to the use of English? I sincerely believe I am not pedantic and I enjoy watching changes in English use and idiom, additions of new words and new ways of using old words. It’s part of a process that has made English such a rich and fertile, interesting and often beautiful language, used the world over.

But there are times when I look at otherwise perfectly ordinary sentences and I wonder why they are so poorly punctuated. Actually, I’m being a bit coy here. I don’t wonder so much as quietly tut under my breath. The reason for these solecisms is clear: that less emphasis is surely placed on teaching the correct use of grammar in schools today than used to be the case. It is quite possible that this, in turn, results from a diminution in numbers of people who study the classics, particularly Latin where grammatical accuracy is paramount in the construction of verbs, tenses, agreements and so forth. 

Grammatical slackness pervades a lot of our communications. Emails are often unpunctuated; sometimes to the extent that you have to read them several times before you are reasonably clear about the message. The worst offender (apart perhaps from the hair-rending annoyance of apostrophes used to signify plurals) is the lack of or the proliferation of commas. Alongside that, in easy order, is the conspicuous absence of semi-colons sometimes balanced precariously by their improper use.

Why are commas and semi-colons important?

Years ago, when conducting an effective writing course, I used an example taken from a report in the Daily Telegraph to illustrate how and why commas are needed. The piece was entitled ‘For the want of a comma’ and is short enough to quote:

“A missing comma in British Rail instructions resulted in the demolition of the waiting room at a Scottish station listed because of its Victorian elegance. Now East Lothian District Council has ordered the waiting room to be rebuilt.

“The waiting room at Drem, near Haddington, was rapidly stripped of its rare fittings, windows, lavatories and roof.

“Then someone took a second look at the instructions from the British Rail management board in London and discovered the mistake.

“The crucial sentence in the board’s list of facilities to be preserved included the words “Drem station bridge”. As a result only the footbridge over the line was earmarked for preservation. Later engineers realised that a comma was missing and the requirement was to retain “Drem Station, bridge…etc.”.

That’s an extreme example of when not to forget to use a comma. Mostly, the appropriate use of commas and semi-colons helps you to understand weight and emphasis; it tells you what part of the sentence refers to what other part – and it conveys the meaning more effectively.

I asked some colleagues whether they were happy with their own use of commas and semi-colons and a common response was that they weren’t quite sure when to use one instead of the other. Just in case it is useful, here’s a simple illustration from part my own effective writing course.

The comma is a punctuation mark used to indicate a slight division between different parts of a sentence and to indicate a small break in the continuity within the sentence. The comma marks a break that is less emphatic than that shown by a full stop or semi-colon. We use commas in the following circumstances:

1. To separate items on a list:

e.g. he packed his socks, shirts, underwear…

But no comma is needed before the final item in the list if a conjunction or a linking word such as ;and’ is used:

e.g he packed his socks, shorts and underwear.

2. Between two clauses when the subjects of the clause are different:

e.g Jack found a bottle, and Jim bought some food.

But if the subject is the same, no comma is needed.

e.g. Jill walked quickly and reached the top of the hill.

3. After a subordinate clause or a participle phrase when it is followed by a main clause:

e.g. when the train arrived, it was ten minutes late. Or, having run all the way to the station, Jim found he had plenty of time.

But if the main clause comes first, no comma is needed:

e.g. the ten o clock was ten minutes late when it arrived.

4. To cut off exclamations, parentheses, etc. from the main sentence:

e.g. Oh, what a pity you didn’t catch him! Naturally, he wanted to see you. He didn’t like, or didn’t seem to like, the film.

But we’re just scratching the surface with these examples. There are so many more of them.

Let’s look briefly at a way of distinguishing between the comma, the semi-colon and the full-stop. Take these three approaches:

He went outside, it was snowing hard. (incorrect)

He went outside. It was snowing hard. (correct)

He went outside; it was snowing hard. (correct)

The most common mistake in modern writing, in my view, can be seen in the first of these examples – i.e. using a comma as a break when actually a semi-colon or full stop is needed to give the right emphasis. Out of the three examples, my preference is for the semi-colon for the simple reason that a stronger break than a comma is needed to demonstrate two activities (going outside/snowing) which are separate but related.  Semi-colons allow you to bring in some subtlety in your sentences. Just banging down commas is anything but subtle by comparison and will blunt your meaning.

Here I am gently lowering myself from the saddle of my hobby horse with apologies to all of you who already know how to use a semi-colon; how it strengthens your style.

Are you socially functional?

Business sectors are essentially tribal and use the language of their tribe. Discuss.

Well, this used to be the case in a very marked way. A lawyer spoke legalese, marketing and ad men spoke ballpark, engineers talked manufacturing application protocols. Today the corporate comms teams of one business sound very much like another. I  shyly aver that marketing and communications functions of business, largely mediated by the temporarily trapped butterfly wings of proliferating social media channels, are furring the tongue. And it's happening right across town.

Government departments, which have increasingly modelled themselves on what they consider to be business-like paradigms, have joined in at the usual chorus level. So IBM, BT, Shell, and the Department for Education in the UK, all sing about stakeholder engagement and the importance of social functionality in internal communications as relatively sacred top level strategies.

Feeding at the same trough as most, I feel a little timid to point out that while social functionality as a term is, er...open to interpretation even within the C-Suite, internal communications didn't even exist, or scarcely, about 20 years ago. Nowadays, it is art, science and another data bank of strategic insight rolled into one. Get it right and we all align our people to our business objectives and stride towards the sunny uplands of company vision. Get it wrong and we must rethink our hymn sheets. Thankfully, however, even the drivers and deliverers of internal comms strategy have decided that the complexity of this discipline, as a newly emerged meal ticket for various agencies, is such that the phrase "singing from the same hymn sheet"  no longer applies, in this space.

Meanwhile, in lookalike corridors and open plan offices across the western world, the mash and tumble of language allows businesses to adopt 'strategy refreshes' as a means of instilling a change of direction in business activities that needs to be 'cascaded' through the workforce, with a 'digital cascade' using KnowledgeVision or SharePoint platforms, usually the most effective.

While I personally (because I work for industries which are all happy to use these and plenty of other terms) do not shout "but where are the emperor's clothes", and while I quite enjoy discovering the meaning of some of these terms and even start to see their niche relevance, I still baulk at the trait where a business adopts a truly everyday term, a perfectly ordinary, well-used English word, and all but puts a trademark on it. (Please note, that last sentence was purposefully longer than usual). It's so numbingly dull to do this, and a bit rude.

Suddenly, for example, the word 'segment' means a socio-economic/demographic depiction of a type of customer; it's not even a segment of the market, and it's certainly not a bit of an orange, or part of a plot of land. In the corridors of customer segmentation you would use these other meanings of the word at your peril.  

We used to have business jargon that had a clubbish purpose only, or mostly, like a mutually self-recognising set of passwords: manufacturers would be proudly incomprehensible to lawyers; lawyers to scientists; scientists to thespians. The media and the markets floated along between the barriers picking up, promoting and discarding words as and when they captured or dissolved a business or social meme.

But times change and this is essentially a fun time for changing language. I suppose I'm merely spilling a bit of water here on the corporate table; this is the tongue-in-cheek bijou whingette of someone tentatively putting his hand up to aks what it all means and whether there is any real value in some of the rhetoric.