Read all about Shrewsbury here - then go there.

DISHOOM

We’ve been meaning to try Dishoom for a while, so last week we went to their restaurant in Shoreditch (there’s one in Covent Garden too). Right away, everything felt really well thought-through (and pretty slick, too). From the overall idea – it describes itself as ‘a Bombay cafe in London’ – to the food, the music and the sparky words on their menu.

We know how hard it is to write a good menu. There’s not a lot of space, and you have to balance some personality with getting information over quickly. Most do one or the other, but this does both well. So we asked the manager about their words. Who wrote them? Was it a branding company? Or maybe a writer we already know? It turned out one of the founders had written it himself.*

You can read their full menu here (it opens as a PDF).

There’s more. Other brands with words written by their founders:

STUTTERHEIM

Here’s the brochure from Stutterheim, our favourite if-only-we-could-afford-them Swedish raincoat company. Words by Alexander Stutterheim himself:

Most companies are obsessed with sounding ‘positive’ (it pops up in briefs we get all the time). Stutterheim’s idea – ‘Swedish melancholy at its driest’ – sets the tone for everything they write and design.

HELP REMEDIES

Who says pharmaceutical products can’t have beautiful branding? The co-founders of US-based Help Remedies worked together on their simple packaging – both of them used to work in branding and advertising.

HOWIES

Another ex ad-man, David Hieatt set the tone for howies a long time ago. He’s a good writer. But he left howies (and went on to start Hiut Denim, where he, the founder, pens the words again). The interesting thing about howies is that the spirit of David’s style stayed after he’d gone. Years later, the commercial director, the web team and their creative team all write in the howies way. David’s style stuck. Not through a big fat guideline that nobody read, but because howies are clear about what they stand for, and everyone who works for them gets what they’re about.

PEPPERSMITH

Peppersmith has a simple idea: chewing gum made from natural ingredients. And the words are as smart as the packaging (with a slip of paper for you to put your chewed gum in).

The founders of Peppersmith used to work at Innocent, the patron saint of blog posts about brand writing. And while Innocent’s creative director, Dan Germain, wasn’t one of the founders, he did work with them from the very beginning. Everyone else followed his wordy example, learning as the company grew, and as they left to set up their own companies.

That’s not to say all founders are good writers, or that you have to be. But good words and a good idea do go hand in hand. Writing is a good discipline: it forces you to keep your ideas tight.

–

* Since we wrote this, Shamil Thakrar, the founder of Dishoom, got in touch with us to say that although he wrote the original menu and many of the words on the website, this latest menu was written by Elise Valmorbida (and Shamil edited it). We stand corrected, as does the manager of Dishoom Shoreditch! Nice work, Elise.

The usual.

The direct approach.
Well Walk Pottery, Hampstead, London.

The pun.
Puccino’s.

The wordplay.
O2.

Thesaurus Rex.
The Natural History Museum, London.

The cool shrug.
Vilebrequin swimwear.

Oh and we’re off too.

We’re open again on Thursday January 3rd 2013.

To their slight dismay, we don’t hand over a template, a guideline or a guaranteed-to-get-you-more-retweets-than-that-photo-of-Barack-and-Michelle trade secret. Because social media is different to other writing. You’re talking to people, so it’s even more important to sound like a real person when you write.

It’s probably no surprise that the best brands’ Twitter accounts often just have one person writing their updates. And they don’t just understand the brand they’re writing for, they put their own personality into the words too:

To find out your author name, simply take your first and last names, write a book, get it published and read the name on the cover.

— WaterstonesOxfordSt (@WstonesOxfordSt) October 9, 2012

This is a hard lesson for old-school branding folk to get their heads around because it’s almost impossible to replicate or neatly slot into a template.

But that’s not all. We’ve noticed that the more brands go off on tangents or say things that don’t necessarily sound ‘on-brand’, the more people warm to them.

Some of these examples have been doing the rounds on Twitter recently, so you might have seen them, but they help us show what’s going on:

We’ve had our own reshuffle. One Direction now run our fiction section. JLS get cookery. Take That are in charge of Mind, Body and Spirit.

— WaterstonesOxfordSt (@WstonesOxfordSt) September 4, 2012

Or take these tweets between O2 customer services and one of their customers:

@tunde24_7 Have you tried to reset the router ting fam, so mans can use the wifi and dat?

— O2 in the UK (@O2) October 9, 2012

This breaks every rule in the old-school marketing book. If O2 wrote like this or mimicked their audience elsewhere, it would be embarrassingly bad. But on Twitter it works. That tweet, by the way, was retweeted over 5,000 times. Not bad for a customer services’ enquiry.

And that’s the thing about social media: anyone can eavesdrop. The world and her dog have a glass to their ear, listening to your every murmur through the wall. When O2 were having problems with their network back in July we, like a lot of people, searched their Twitter feed to see how they were managing it. As it turned out they were doing a sterling job. Their deadpan replies, especially, made some of the more extreme abuse from angry customers seem uncalled for and unfair (although, importantly, they didn’t ignore them either).

@ashleyroberts61 She says no thanks.

— O2 in the UK (@O2) July 12, 2012

What happened next was just as interesting. Twitter’s eavesdroppers picked up on the conversations and joined in.

@vddn Back rub, sir?

— O2 in the UK (@O2) July 12, 2012

O2 showed that if social media is managed well in a mini-crisis, customer service doesn’t just help you deal with people’s problems, it can also help to show how good your customer service is. Full credit to them. This only worked because they gave the people dealing with the complaints enough freedom to give real, unscripted (and funny) responses.

And in the best examples, even if the response is scripted, it will work as long as it’s not the expected press release blah. Exhibit A, Bodyform’s reply to a comment about them on Facebook:

It’s much more all-singing and all-dancing than a little tweet, but it shares Twitter’s speed (it was made over a weekend, faster than any ad campaign) and humour. It’s brilliant because it’s so surprising for a brand to take off their suited-and-booted corporate mask and laugh at themselves. Hats off to the brave client.

These examples are still, alas, exceptions to the more empty-headed rule. Most brands still treat their Facebook and Twitter accounts as ticker feeds for rolling promotions, adverts and retweets of people saying how much they love them. If you ask an open-ended question you might well ‘start a conversation’ as the social media mantra goes. But if you’ve got nothing to say, the internet’s replies will always outsmart you.

Dialysis. RT @mcdonalds: Fill in the blank: Friday = _______.

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) July 22, 2012

And worse, if brands carry on as they are, and don’t react to what’s happening around them, they can be left standing around looking stupid. Or grossly insensitive, like this:

Seriously?! RT @gap All impacted by #Sandy, stay safe! We’ll be doing lots of Gap.com shopping today. How about you?

— Lucy Tobin (@lucytobin) October 29, 2012

Eurgh.

The sparky replies from the likes of Waterstones Oxford Street and O2 do it differently. Here comes the theory…

1) They’re immediate. With social media, fourteen rounds of amends and eighty editors just doesn’t work.

2) The Waterstones and O2 examples are arguably a lot more interesting than the brands they’re writing for (O2: blue, bubbles; Waterstones: slightly bookish but trying to leave their 3-for-2 days behind). It’s what makes them even more surprising.

3) The writers have the freedom to put their personality into the words.

4) It’s not direct mail – they’re not selling at you. Or when they are, they do it in an unexpected and witty way.

5) There’s no template.

6) They’ve actually got something to say.

All this reflects where branding as a whole is heading. Gone are the days of the logo being king, in one colour, in one place, with an accompanying 4,000-page guideline. Things are loosening up a little.

But the main reason these examples shine is that the people tapping away at the keyboard are good writers. If we had to boil everything down to one tip, in 140 characters or fewer, it’s this:

Hire a good writer, not a social media manager. Then leave them to it.

End of theory.

We want it to stop. So we’ve written, not rules exactly, but provocations. What if we rip up the lazy clichés and hold people who write words for a living (including us) to account? So writers can’t hide a weak idea behind stylistic tricks or coast when they think a client won’t notice, or the deadline is tight.

Let’s stop the rot and get out of this rut.

1. Style is a crutch.
Don’t use style to cover up the fact that there isn’t anything to say. It never works. Pick a great ad from 1962 to 2012 and, nine times out of ten, the words are simple. Mundane, even. That’s because copywriting isn’t really about style at all. It’s about coming up with a tight idea and finding the best way to say it. Simple words (trick-free) nearly always do the job better.

2. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
Elmore Leonard’s right. Just as drama school kids overact, copywriters ‘overwrite’, adding flourishes to show off. But every time you draw attention to your writing, you get in the way. It’s the copywriter’s job to be read, not heard.

3. Sometimes commas are in the wrong place.
Get over it.
It’s easy to fix a stray apostrophe. It’s a lot harder to fix a weak idea.

4. Write like you really speak.
Innocent drinks (unfairly) get most of the flak for wackaging, the cloying matey tone favoured by banks and fizzy drinks. On his blog last year, writer Nick Asbury asked whether we’re fed up of brands trying to sound like people. We think the problem is simpler: brands don’t sound anything like real people. Only a packet of crisps would say they’re Bloomin’ marvellous value for money. It’s fake. And only copywriters (or Enid Blyton) write blimey and crikey. Stop it.

5. Never trust a writer who says they’re a ‘storyteller’.
We write things for a living which means storytelling comes with the job. So what is it with copywriters and their need to bang on about stories? We’ve got a theory that copywriters who talk about stories are failed poets or would-be authors. It would explain all the bad novellas on boxes of cereal and bottles of whisky.

6. Say it directly or don’t say it at all.
‘At Big Bank inc. we…’ So many corporates start with this sentence. Why not just ‘We’? It’s the same with ‘We aim to’ or ‘We believe’. We’ll believe you if you do it, so say what you’re going to do.

7. Clunky segues are a warning sign.
‘How?’
‘Why?’
‘That’s why…’
Not only are these some of the most lazy lines in all of copywriting-dom, they’re also a sure sign that a writer is trying – and failing – to shove two unrelated ideas together.

8. The. Lazy. Shortcut.
Stringing three bland words together with full stops doesn’t make a headline.

9. Microsoft Word gives you verbal diarrhoea.
Don’t write words for websites, packaging or anything where layout matters, without sketching them out first. Otherwise you’ll write the Encyclopaedia Britannica when a few words or an image will do the job better. ‘Welcome to our website’ is a good (bad) example of the sort of words that should never be on homepages ever again.

10. Quoting people. Oh the shame.
“It was a wonderful shopping experience and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.” Did they really say that?

So many brands bang on about how oh-so-authentic they are. We’ve been giving Carluccio’s the words to prove it.

Carluccio’s Christmas 2012 brochure

Christmas at Carluccio's

It's the little things

They matter

Part bread, part cake

Carluccio’s at home

Carluccio's at home

Made from Scratch

We’ve been helping them sum up their brand and tone of voice too. We’re writing their wine menu next. We recommend Planeta’s La Segreta.

We’ll be talking about how to write without sounding like a copywriter. But you definitely won’t need to be one to come along. If you can’t make it we’ll write up a version of the talk in September.

Buy tickets here.

P.S. We’re also doing our Words for Life class at The School of Life on Saturday the 10th of November.

‘A Shrewsbury One-Off Since…’ we created a line that can be used to show how old something is: since 1586. To show that something is new: since 2012. Or to say that a cake was baked earlier this morning: since 6.30am.

Shopkeepers and businesses can use stamps to celebrate their own one-offs and promote their businesses too.

No two business cards have the same pattern on the back, so they’re all one-offs.

We paired up lines like ‘Chain Store’, ‘Graffiti’ and ‘Ready Meal’ with idyllic – but real – photos from Shrewsbury as a less obvious way to show off the town’s one-offs.

We’ve all been there. Brand presentations that take about three-and-a-half days to go through. The first part often goes over that particular agency’s or client’s take on branding. In this bit, they’ll tell you that it isn’t about slapping a logo on everything. It’s much, much more than that. They’ll probably have a SillyGrandioseLabel® for what they do, which sums up what branding is, just with a ™ on the end. 500 insights, activation plans, and all manner of shapes (triangles, keys, doughnuts, onions) later… you get a ‘proposition’ that’s ‘not for external use’ and is so broad you could recycle it for any other brand. If a good product, service or idea comes off the back of these soupy strategies, it’s a miracle. Or the strategy’s post-rationalised to fit it.

It goes on, and so could I, but I’ll spare you. The question to ask is whether it’s too late to do something about it…

Read the rest over at Design Week.

London via the World...

They can use the line on its own or change it to match different products: London via Madagascar, London via Sydney or via The Gulf of Guinea.

And via everywhere else.

This was part of a bigger project to help them with their tone of voice.

Part of a bigger branding and tone of voice job.