February 7th, 2012 by Max Robinson
We’ve all flown with budget airlines. We all gripe about them too. Cheap and sometimes not so cheerful. Cheap because they cut back on the creature comforts. You get a seat and that’s it – everything else you have to pay for. But this doesn’t mean your experience as a customer has to be cut price.
South African airline Kalula is trying to shake all that up. And they’re doing it using words. Read more…
February 1st, 2012 by Sarah McCartney
I’ve been seeing TV ads recently that are targeted at people who want to quickly build their own simple websites.
Now, as someone who’s built a couple of template websites (and written a book about it), I was quite curious to see what’s on offer. Read more…
January 24th, 2012 by Max Robinson
I’ve just come back from visiting family in Pakistan. Urdu, the national language, can be fantastically ornate and polite, developed over centuries in the Mughal royal courts of the sub-continent. But modern Urdu has moved on and is much more direct. It gets right to the point in as few words as possible – something we could certainly learn from, especially when we’re writing for work. Read more…
January 16th, 2012 by Heather Atchison
Well. What a kerfuffle Waterstone’s caused last week (at least in certain circles) by announcing they’re dropping the apostrophe from their name.
Even their own employees were having a field day with the PR it created. (Tip: read from the bottom up.) Read more…
January 10th, 2012 by Ben Afia
I was chatting with an old friend and colleague, Michael Croton, about how we work at Afia. We were talking about how creative consultancies often have a defined methodology. Often it’s an overarching framework or process that holds a brand project together, for example the brand bridge or brand funnel. It gives clients something to relate to and helps them understand the process they might go through. Read more…
December 15th, 2011 by Sarah McCartney
What happens when a carefully crafted brand tone of voice has to roll out over national borders? When the English spoken in international meetings is part fluent, part adaptation, part business dialect and for the most part not pretty?
English doesn’t belong to the British. Many people choose to learn American English as their second language; and there’s Australian English, plus African and Indian versions. Then there’s ‘globish’ – the oddball mishmash you hear students of all nationalities using to converse, but that bears no relation to the English that mother tongue speakers use when talking together. Some of the right words may be there, but it’s often missing phrasing, grammar and slang.
And international business English is so ugly it would make a literature professor eat his own Kindle.
So we often find ourselves explaining, in English, to important people from several countries, how we’d like them to use our guidelines to encapsulate their brand, but in their own languages. And they inevitably ask us, ‘How’s that going to work?’ Read more…
December 5th, 2011 by Bill Hilton
In our last post we looked at some of the pitfalls of writing to win attention.
Now that we know what can go wrong, it’s time to think about how to get things right – how to write words that really work for your audience. We can give you the secret of success in one word: planning.
Why plan?
November 28th, 2011 by Malcolm Mortimer
Today pretty much everyone has information overload. So many different ‘voices’ compete for our attention that we only have time to give each one a fraction of our time. TV, email, direct mail, social media, txt msgs, personalised digital adverts. All trying to tell us or sell us something.
There are only about 18 ‘usable’ hours – in my day, at any rate. Which turns life into a blur of ‘headlines’ designed to give us the core of the message in a nutshell. But writing to grab attention has two pitfalls that are well worth watching out for. Read more…
November 17th, 2011 by Max Robinson
Don’t worry – this isn’t about the death penalty. (Which is an important subject, but perhaps a bit heavy for here.)
This is about another burning issue that crops up time and time again during our working days. And we’re just as passionate about this cause as the people who write to the tabloid press calling for the return of hanging. We won’t be shouting ‘off with their heads’ if you disagree with us though.
I’m talking about capital letters, and how they’re used and abused. Read more…
November 8th, 2011 by Sarah McCartney
Last week I was in Osaka – a city that makes Tokyo look calm and quiet – eating at a friendly, noisy restaurant with the kind of Japanese food that you don’t get in London, and a menu in English. This was English as produced by a translation machine, the kind that Japanese tourists to the UK whip out of their pockets at every linguistic obstacle.
While drinking my sticky concoction of sake and yuzu, I wrote down some of the more unusual results.
I know it’s a bit of a cheap shot, but let’s take it as a good example of why we should always use a mother tongue speaker to double-check our writing before we put anything in print. Read more…
