I wrote in a previous post about the differences between writing for the US and UK markets. Of course, an increasingly popular medium for marketeers is the movie, where the verbal side of the equation – as opposed to the written – comes to the fore.

Those of you in sales will have of course wrestled with the verbal side of accents, be they regional, national or spoken as a second language, from the wealth of face-to-face meetings you’ve had. Getting on with someone verbally is the ‘sine qua non’ of sales success.

As consumers and business-to-business people we’re well used to forming an opinion of someone from their voice and they way they use it, and this is arguably more important in the movie medium where often, in the case of voiceovers, you can hear the person but not see them.

Again, as with writing, it’s important to figure out what your key market is, and how disposed they are to either a regional accent, a domestic accent or a non-domestic one. Statistically speaking, some accents have more of an allure, a cachet, and some are a turn-off. It is what it is.

One of the companies I worked for considered the US its major market and the UK its secondary market. It produced collateral that favoured the US format, spelling and phrasing. For one of its more prestigious videos, it adopted a ‘mid-atlantic’ accent developed with a professional (and quite well-known) actor. Compromise which pleases no-one or sensible one-accent-fits-all approach? It depends, of course :-).