anyone impressed by that
I used to work in a bookshop. At one time, a management type decided that it would be a good idea if we published a newsletter to inform customers of signings, new releases etc. I liked the idea.
Until I saw the first draft. Which was, to put it mildly, rubbish. Phrases like “Comic sans is a bad choice for body copy” and “that lo-res image blown up 300% makes you look silly” sprang to mind, only for me to realise that this was somewhat overanalysing the problem. Which was that this was something just shy of the competence level of a homework project from a seven year old schoolchild.
Instead, I went with
Anyone impressed by that would be impressed by anything.
& is therefore never worth going out of your way to be impress
Which is a phrase that I have re-used extensively since. In fact, I use it as a rule for all of the marketing initiatives that I have to deal with. Who exactly is going to be impressed by this? if the answer is ‘a teenager circa 1997′ then we probably haven’t got this right yet.
Moral of my story: If you aim higher, you impress all those other people by default. Just about good enough leaves you alienating the more discerning people out there, and actively damages your brand.
Tags: david miller, Making impressions, marketing
August 5th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Brilliant post, and I may have to steal that saying of yours. It’s not O.K. to settle for the status quo — we have department stores for that. Cheers,
M!
August 6th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Actually, the department store opposite would’ve been a brilliant target for mimicry.
Are people that discerning though? The old “Any publicity is good publicity” might just trump all your arguments.
Another important point is that a regular news outlet is worse than useless if you don’t have regular news and an individual familiar with news+words+subejct matter ready to back it up. Arguably people have no taste, an inability to find fault with corporate entities, and no great reasoning power. Having a vacuum shoved under your nose with a neon label marked ‘valuable content’ is empirically bad news. I don’t know if this was the case here, but it’s a good one to crack out in similar situations (i.e. pseudo-marketing exec comes out with 7-year-old’s English coursework as serious-brand-initiative).