Archives for category: Communication
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Mothercare

March 14, 2018 //
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Mothercare store front

I was at my mother’s house in England the other day, casting an eye over all the toys we had as kids, which she has saved of course, and which her grandkids now enjoy.

I came across the edge of a toy package from Mothercare. This company has been around for ages and is clearly a highly respected name in anything to do with children. I love the identity – which I think the company has now moved away from – with the little child image literally under the protection of the m of mother.

What struck me for the first time that I can remember was how outdated the name was; the actual words mother and care put together to make a new name, as many company and product brands do. Back when Mothercare came into being, parenthood was possibly the almost exclusive preserve of the female parent, and that’s simply not the case any more.

The funny thing is, and I feel this about many household names and brands, we never question the name. We see the word mothercare and we equate it with a parenting brand for children. This is what a brand does to us. We rarely take the name out of context, deconstruct it, before realising that it’s perhaps not as appropriate as it used to be.

I think there are lots of examples of this, brands that we take for granted because they’re much more than the sum of their words. Lots of them, hiding in plain sight.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Revenue Protection

March 12, 2018 //
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In this ultra-PC world we live in, as I’ve noted previously, communication is never far away.

I was travelling on a train in the UK the other day and the automated announcer reminded everyone that they needed a ticket to travel and couldn’t get one on the train. This message came from the ‘Revenue Protection’ department.

That’s the fraud protection department, right, since travelling without a ticket is fraud? I’m left wondering what message they’re going for, what impression they’re trying to project, with the term revenue protection.

Isn’t that a little like calling a short person like me vertically challenged? Perhaps they don’t want to antagonise the fare-dodger.

If someone travels without a ticket, and they’re not entitled to free travel, then they’re damaging the profitability of the transport company. As a consequence, all of us fee-paying passengers are indirectly punished when the company has to raise fares, or reduce services, or go for more government subsidy – which is of course a function of the taxes you and I pay – and we end up paying more.

So why not call it what it is? Fraud prevention is better, methinks.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Strategy

Opposite is True

March 5, 2018 //
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In this sophisticated world that we live in, communication has become equally sophisticated. Technology is of corse front and centre in this.

But as the communication industry becomes more and mature, you tend to see quote a bit of the ‘opposite is true’ phenomenon. I define this as the situation where people say one thing but everyone else knows that they mean the 180-degree opposite. It’s pretty common in political situations, with both a small p and a large P.

Here’s a couple of examples:

  • ‘Asking for a friend’. We all know that they’re not asking for a friend, they’re asking for themselves. This has become a standard joke these days in potentially embarrassing ‘Agony Aunt’-type situations
  • ‘Such-and-such has the full support of the board.’ Whether they’re a sports manager or a political leader, this can only mean one thing: they don’t have the full support of the board and their days are numbered

Note that I don’t include Fake News in this category. That’s the type of communication designed to dupe us all into believing that the opposite of the opposite is true.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language

This Week vs Next Week

February 28, 2018 //
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It’s really hard for native English speakers to agree on the correct definition of this week vs next week. Even family members confuse each other. How much harder must it be for non-native speakers, unless they’ve been taught an easier, simpler way?

Then there’s this weekend vs next weekend. If it’s Wednesday today, does this weekend or next weekend start in 2 days’ time? Tricky one. Sometimes we have to qualify ourselves by saying something like ‘this week coming’. Awkward. It interests me that something so basic and important is subject to such variance.

For me it’s a simple distinction, like the distinction between this and that, which governs how we explain the difference to those speakers of language who have no separate word (‘dieser’ being both this and that in German). I argued in that post that this is close in time and place, and that is less close in time and place. With me so far?

This week is the week we’re in right now, and I count my week from Monday to Sunday.

This weekend is the first weekend after today. If it’s a Saturday or Sunday, this weekend is the one I’m in, right now.

Next week is the week commencing Monday. If it’s a Sunday, next week starts tomorrow. If it’s a Monday, next week starts a week today because I’ve started this week. If it’s any other day than Monday, next week starts on Monday.

Next weekend is not this weekend, it’s the one after.

However, if you count your weeks from Sunday to Saturday, then all bets are off, because if it’s a Sunday then for you next week starts next Sunday, not tomorrow :-). Ha, I’m actually laughing out loud as I write this.

Should I have used a diagram? Do you agree with my definition? Do you care?

 

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Categories Communication, General, Language

Better Late Than Never

February 26, 2018 //
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Better late than never, as they say, which is typically true I think.

I usually like to celebrate the anniversary of this blog post in two ways. First, on the anniversary itself, an annual reminder of when I started it. Second, every time I hit a 100-post milestone.

I noticed today that I’ve recently clocked up 700 posts – enough for two full and fairly random books. In fact I think this is number 704 – at 3 posts a week that’s two hundred and thirty-some weeks’ worth – so please excuse my ‘institutional’  tardiness.

Sometimes late is not better than never, you need to bury it and move on. On this occasion, I think it’s pretty harmless.

Onwards and upwards!

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Categories Communication, Marketing

How Did We Do?

February 23, 2018 //
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Completing the circle of a process is so important, otherwise you can’t restart the process from the right palace. This is especially true in business, sales, marketing, in fact pretty much anything involving a project or initiative.

The way to do this is to ask ourselves: how did we do? What was the actual result of the activity, against the target or goals we set for it? Too often we finish a project, a month or a quarter and then we launch into the next one, always looking ahead. But if we don’t look back and review how we did, and take on some learnings, then we don’t improve.

One area I find frustrating is in the area of weather forecasting. They’re in the business of scientific predictions. They’re always looking ahead. I’m sure they review their actual performance internally, but it’s oh so rare to hear the weather industry publicly review its performance against forecast, for the benefit of its consumers.

You could argue that economics is another one, but actually economics shouldn’t be about predicting. The role of economics is to explain what happened. They can’t accurately predict what will happen, or else we’d all be worth a fortune.

No, economics is about ‘what did we do?’ For many other walks of life and work, though, it should be ‘how did we do?’

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Mandatory

February 21, 2018 //
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I wonder if a lot of Americans spell mandatory wrong? They tend to say man-dit-ory and I’m guessing a lot of them try to spell it that way. I must confess that I thought there might be a variant spelling using the ‘i’, as sometimes crops up when the two languages continue to diverge, but no, the ‘i’ version is a non-runner.

It’s easier for us European English speakers to spell it correctly since we sound the word differently to our new world friends. For us the second syllable is the gloriously named ‘schwa‘ vowel, the sound we make on many unaccented syllables that comes from the middle of our mouth, the most economical and efficient place from which to issue a non-stressed syllable. Think of the word ‘sofa’, and the ‘a’ is your classic schwa sound.

This, I would suspect, makes it more natural for us to guess that an ‘a’ is the correct letter, since it feels closer than an ‘i’ and certainly better than an ‘e’, ‘o’ or ‘u’, although they all have schwa representation as well – as in independent, potential and support, respectively.

I guess you can make the argument that since you ‘mandate’ something, it would make sense to see mandatory, but I’m going to stick my neck out and say don’t be surprised if US dictionaries start permitting manditory as an alternative spelling in the next decade or so.

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Categories Communication, Language

Nice One

February 19, 2018 //
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‘Oh, nice one.’

I like receiving a ‘nice one’ from someone. It’s an elegant compliment I think. It’s almost an aside, almost an afterthought, quite understated, and for those three reasons it comes across as both appreciative and genuine. It doesn’t sound perfunctory.

Nice is often thought of as an underwhelming adjectival endorsement, a way of damning someone with faint praise.

‘What do you think of my dress?’

‘It’s nice.’

‘Gee, thanks for that glittering encouragement.’

Nice one, on the other hand, as well as its sister phrase ‘nicely done’, doesn’t carry that undertone of non-commitment. It’s not over the top either. It’s just about right, at least to my English ear which is tuned to appreciate signals of understatement, modesty and humility from others, even if I can’t always give them myself.

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Categories Communication, General

In Praise of BBC Four

February 12, 2018 //
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I don’t watch much television. I don’t have the time or the staying power for box sets. I like to catch the occasional film and will watch most sport if it’s on.

When there’s nothing grabbing my attention, I will flick channels. I flick them relentlessly. I’m an inveterate flicker. And do you know what usually stops me and holds my attention? BBC Four.

BBC Four is a wonder. Its documentaries, especially the music-based ones, are extremely sticky for me.

The best compliment I can pay BBC Four is that it’s like the web. It’s a black hole. You can lose yourself in BBC Four for hours. I don’t know how many times I’ve promised myself 10 minutes of TV time before bed, chanced upon a 70’s collection of Old Grey Whistle Test clips of legendary bands or musicians, and lost a couple of hours. BBC Four tends to do themed programming, so if you find something you like, there could well be a similar program to follow.

Yes, on balance, I think BBC Four is the best television channel, possibly in the world, though I’m judging it from my limited sample size.

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Categories Communication, Customers

The Bum Call

February 9, 2018 //
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The Bum Call, otherwise known as the Butt Call by our North American friends, is that call you didn’t mean to make, when your phone shoved in your back jeans pocket feels pressure on one of its key keys – see what I did there? – and accidentally calls someone. It’s a mild annoyance.

Sometimes your bum call is the last person you spoke to. Sometimes it’s a completely random person, and you wonder what fidgeting and contortion combination you made as you sat that would cause your phone to navigate through a phone book, select a person and call them. Amazing.

True story: when I worked in Dublin as head of marketing of a software company I would occasionally answer the switchboard number if it was ringing out. On this occasion, I answered a bum call from a guy I had just been in a somewhat strained meeting with and he was bitching – about me! – on the phone to his mate in the car, for about 10 minutes. How cool is that! It’s the kind of frank, unguarded feedback we almost never get.

Then again, if you’re a pay-as-you-go customer and you’re only as good as your phone credit, the bum call costs you money as well as being annoying. As my son said to me the other day: ‘I accidentally bum-called Adam and it cost me a euro.’ That’s a big deal when you top up at 10 euro a time.

The bum call is a bit like the bum note in music. Surprising, unexpected, unwanted, annoying.

 

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Categories Communication
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