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.

Plane packaging

I got a viral email this week with photos of one of Kalula’s planes. Apart from the bright cheery green livery, it looks like someone’s gone and scribbled all over it. (I’ve checked and it’s not photoshopped.) One of them really does have ‘the big cheese’ written underneath the captain’s side of the cockpit. And it really does say ‘secret agent code’ while pointing to the plane’s registration number.

Kalula’s website says they also have a ‘cow’ plane, a ‘camo’ plane and ‘the jetsetter’ plane. Kalula translates as ‘it’s easy’ in Zulu. It’s certainly not hard to warm to their brand language.

Winning with words

Kalula’s playfulness extends in flight as well. ‘There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways out of this airplane’ – just one of the many humorous takes on the pre-flight safety routine by the flight attendants.

I’ve never travelled with Kalula. And I don’t know if they offer better value over other South African carriers. But I do know that this just goes to show you don’t need huge ad campaigns and a massive marketing budget to get your brand talked about and liked. Sometimes all you need are some well-placed words and a sense of humour.

Have you heard any memorable in-flight announcements? A twist on the ‘in the event of an in-flight emergency, pull firmly on the buckle…’ monotone drone?

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.

Self assembly

You can personalise your site with layouts and colour schemes. You can choose your photographs from their range of stock shots: attractive people in smart suits who look overly cheerful while answering the phone, attractive families in the sunshine looking overly cheerful while taking a walk, attractive business people looking suitably serious while having a conversation. Plenty of blue sky, green leaves, sunflowers and other symbolic images.

But as someone who writes for a living, I’m totally unimpressed by the ‘sector-specific text’ they offer for you to drop into your website.

Writing by numbers

When I first saw the ad, it said there was space for you to write your own text. That must have bombed; the next version reassured people that they wouldn’t have to think of a thing to say about themselves. All a business has to do is to pick a sector – accounting, plumbing, jewellery – download the instant copy that describes a generic business, and put its own name in the gaps. They don’t do one for copywriters; I checked.

This is both fascinating and sad.

Skimping on writing

Too many people in the UK think they can’t write. We know this because we meet them when we’re running workshops. People who might write perfectly good emails, letters and documents all day long think they’re bad at writing because someone told them so at school. It doesn’t take much for people to believe there’s no point trying. If an internet-hosting business has gone to the trouble of commissioning thousands of words of ‘sector-specific text’, it must mean there are thousands of customers who think they need it.

It also means they don’t want to use a copywriter, either because they think it’ll be too expensive, they haven’t met one they like, or they really don’t mind sounding just like everyone else.

Do websites need a tone of voice?

We spend our working hours helping brands stand out from each other, by writing in a way that identifies them as different. Just as photographers loathe seeing the same old identikit stock shots, copywriters groan at recycled phrases.

Are we right to continue on our quest to make business writing interesting? Perhaps we should just write our own store of sector-specific web copy and sell it at £1 a download to thousands of small businesses and make our fortunes.

‘At [insert name of company] we’ve been serving our local community with reliable legal advice for over [insert number] years. We’re right here in the heart of [insert town] and we’re only a phone call away…’

What do you think? Is generic copy for websites the way forward? Or is this just pimping our words?

Curry please

This really struck me when I was trying to order some tasty curry in a restaurant in Lahore. I decided to have a go and impress the waiters with my creaky Urdu. In effect, what I what I ended up saying was – ‘make me this, bring me that, and I want some of that too. Now.’

Now this sounds rather abrupt and even rude to our British ears. Not a ‘please’ or ‘could you’ or ‘would you mind’ in sight. In Urdu there’s not even a word for ‘please’ – the closest literally means ‘your kindness’. But you can’t use it in every situation, my wife tells me. So I shy away from using it all. And being an Englishman this is really quite awkward, as ‘please’ is undoubtedly in my top ten most used words.

Does English kill with kindness?

Much of our everyday English is wrapped up in layers of social niceties and politeness. But sounding correct and proper sometimes gets in the way of saying what we mean. And it actually often has the opposite effect by making us sound unnatural, and therefore insincere.

We Brits like to think of ourselves as a pretty civil bunch. We don’t like to come across as being rude, and go out of our way to avoid even the slightest hint of impropriety – particularly when writing at work. We all send dozens of emails every week asking our colleagues and clients for things – almost all of which are polite requests.

Could you please send me that report? Would you be available to talk tomorrow? If you could confirm the date of the meeting I would be most grateful. Prim and proper is our natural way.

The alternatives, to most English-speakers, border on the uncouth: Send me that report. Call me tomorrow. When’s the meeting? Goodness, you’re a tough cookie.

But there is a middle ground – a way of sounding warm and friendly without couching every request in ‘could you please’ or ‘would you mind’.

The secret to sounding warm but not fluffy

Many of the letters and emails we write for our clients are asking customers to do specific things. The originals say things like:

Please call a customer service advisor on XXXXXX who will be happy to help you. Please ensure you have your account details ready.

They’re perfectly polite, but sound a bit robotic and stiff. The missing ingredient? Pronouns (you, we, I, etc). They allow you to be direct without sounding rude.

Give us a ring on XXXX and we’ll be happy to help. Please have your account number to hand, as we’ll need this when you call.

This sounds much more like it’s from a human being than computer system. And people are far more likely to respond to a person than a machine – especially one that sounds likeable.

Check yourself

So the next time you find yourself writing to ask someone to do something, make sure you’re speaking directly to the other person. See if you can strip out any unnecessary words without losing too much warmth.

Then read what you’ve written out loud. You’ll know straight away if it sounds unnatural or insincere. This is the best test of all.

Do others do it better?

Do you think we could learn something from other language speakers? If you know of any lessons for English to learn, please share it with us below…

Even their own employees were having a field day with the PR it created. (Tip: read from the bottom up.)

Mayhem on the high street

Given the mishmash of apostrophe usage on the British high street, you might wonder why the fuss.

• We have the venerable Boots (courtesy of 19^th-century trader Mr Boot), which has always made do without the apostrophe before the ‘s’.
• M&S (started by Mr Marks and Mr Spencer) cleverly dodged the bullet by not getting possessive in the first place.
• Then there’s Tesco, commonly and wrongly known as Tesco’s.
• And Sainsbury’s, sticking to its apostrophe (but for how much longer?).

And that’s just a few of our high street retailers – place names are a whole nother story. In London for example, Earl’s Court and Barons Court happily sit right next to each other.

One thing that’s clear is that for most people apostrophes aren’t. So let’s quickly look at just what this little squiggle is all about…

The single reason apostrophes exist

Apostrophes show us that letters have been left out. And that’s all, folks.

Even when used to show possession, like ‘Mr Smith’s car’, the apostrophe is a relic of how our language evolved. Back in the youth of English, people would have said and written ‘Mr Smith his car’ (we weren’t quite there with the concept of women owning things…). Gradually shortened to ‘Mr Smith’s’, the apostrophe took its rightful place.

So it shows missing letters – that’s it. This is why ‘it’s Tuesday’ needs an apostrophe and ‘its rightful place’ doesn’t. That’s why the plural of anything should never have one (four dogs) unless there’s something belonging to them (four dogs’ bollocks).

Once you get your head round that, it’s really not so hard. But an awful lot of people don’t get it. Or care enough to use it when they’re tapping furiously into their mobile, iPad, whatever.

What does the future hold?

So is the apostrophe on its way out? Killed off by uncaring URLs, the speed of online communications, and the general confusion about their use?

As much as it pains me (I love the little buggers), I think we’ve got a hell of a fight on our hands to keep them from eventually falling out of use. They do have a purpose and they do clarify meaning (how many times has a ‘were’ tripped you up where a lazy or rushed writer meant ‘we’re’?). But I fear the odds are stacked against it.

If the UK’s top high street bookseller is choosing to make theirs redundant, the poor apostrophe’s days may well be numbered.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t end up like Mr Waterstone’s did…

Tell us what you think. Do you love them? Hate them? Think they’re on their way out?

Moments not theory

But Michael pointed out that at Afia we really focus on practical moments, not abstract theory. It could be the moment a customer picks up a pack from the shelf and reads it. Or the moment an in-house marketer sits down to write a presentation. Or the moment someone in customer service responds to an irate customer on the phone.

Writing at Boots many years ago, I wanted a tool to help me decide what to do at the moment I started to write and had to make decisions about the tone of voice I’d use. So I wrote tone of voice guidelines to help me and my colleagues make good decisions and do the right things at those critical moments.

This has influenced my advice to clients ever since. I’ve found that helping staff make good decisions about the brand makes change happen at the heart of the organisation. And this has a positive effect on how customers experience a company and brand.

Tone of voice in the moment

So that’s why we focus on brand and tone of voice guidelines. These help with structured decisions at critical moments based on brand strategy and ideals. We train and coach people on the decisions they make on individual words and phrases, and help them understand the big impact these can have on their customer.

I’m now thinking about these moments as I work with our clients, and will be back with more thoughts in future blogs.

What kinds of support and guidelines do you find people respond to best?

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?’

How to get a tone of voice working round the world

1. Explain the idea behind brand tone of voice.

2. Acknowledge that English doesn’t translate word for word into their languages and that this isn’t the aim.

3. Listen to all the objections they have to rolling out the new tone of voice in their territory. These will include: ‘Our customers expect to be spoken to seriously.’ ‘Our staff won’t want to do it.’ ‘My directors won’t use this new tone of voice.’ ‘We’ll lose business.’

4. (Make a private note that these are the exact same reasons your English-speaking objectors came up with and basically translate as: ‘We’re comfortable where we are and we don’t want to change.’)

5. Discuss the main practical differences in structure between English and other languages, so you’ll have a good idea of what you’re dealing with when you’re translating your methods. Don’t let this bog you down.

6. Explain that you had parallel problems changing from cold, impenetrable business-speak in English to warm, human language, so you understand their position.

7. Ask them to talk about their business using the kind of language they think their customers would use. You can remind them that Warren Buffet always writes as if he’s addressing his aunts, who knew nothing about his business.

8. Ask them to explain what they do at work as if they were talking to their friends and family who don’t work for their organisation.

9. Ask them to review examples of the language they’re currently using, as if they were sending it to the people they just practised talking to.

10. Watch the penny drop. This might take some weeks, and possibly months, but at least you’ve got things moving.

11. Suggest that they each get some of their most creative and most enthusiastic people (not necessarily the most senior) involved early on to help you work on translating and localising your tone of voice workshops and handbooks.

12. Start training.

The important thing to remember when taking a new tone of voice across language borders is that it’s the customers who are most important. An organisation only needs to change when it’s using language that builds barriers instead of bridges. As soon as you start to put yourself in the readers’ shoes, it all falls into place.

Spending time winning over the hearts and minds of the right people is essential to making a new tone of voice work – in any country. When staff morale, response rates and productivity start to go up, then everyone starts speaking the same language.

What’s your experience?

Have you tried to make a tone of voice work in different countries? How did it go?

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?

Writing is hard. If you sit down to write something from scratch, you’re trying to do two things at once:

1. Think about what you want to say
2. Put it into plain, readable English

These are difficult tasks that need a lot of concentration. Trying to do both at the same time is like driving up the M1 at 110mph while reading your road map.

Like the driver who works out a route before hitting the road, you’ll write better if you do these two things separately, and make a plan before you start typing or pick up your pen.

But wait – you’re in a hurry. Planning takes time, right?

Yes, it does, but if you do it right it’ll cut the overall time you take to write something. You won’t spend ages deleting whole paragraphs and swearing at your PC because your brain is overloaded. Planning helps the writing process flow more easily – and more quickly.

Four simple steps to successful writing

At Afia we use a four-step planning process. If you don’t have much time you can do it in your head, but it works best if you jot it down – especially if you’re working on a longer piece of writing.

The four steps are simple. Write down your…

1. Outcome – what do you want this piece of writing to achieve? Sounds obvious, but many people start writing without a clear, concrete idea of what they want to say. What do your want your readers to grasp and/or do? Try to summarise it in a sentence or two.
2. Audience – who are you talking to? What do they want/need to know? Imagine a single person who might be a typical member of your audience. Write just for them.
3. Content – how are you going to organise your ideas? For short, attention-grabbing pieces of writing, try to put the really important stuff at the top, in paragraphs a line or two long. This is the meaty bit of your planning – write a short, ordered list of what you want to say.
4. Tone – what kind of language, style and level of formality are you going to use? This will depend on how your organisation wants to come across – how you need to sound when you write and speak to be true to your brand. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a clear tone of voice to use and good guidelines to help.

When you’ve finished steps 1, 2 and 3, you’ll find you’ve done at least half the hard thinking your piece of writing needs, so your brain will be free to focus on actually putting the words down and getting the tone right.

So there you have it: four simple steps that make a world of difference, and that’ll help your messages hit home – every time.

Do you have a blueprint for writing success? Share it with us here…

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.

Pitfall #1 – the little boy who cried wolf

Firstly, hyperbole. This creates inflation in the currency of words – it simply devalues them.

So why does this happen? Because people think the best way to get people’s attention is to SHOUT LOUDER!!! So now an ordinary soldier – just because he’s doing his job in Afghanistan – is ‘incredibly brave’. But how brave does that make the hero who wins a VC? Mega-brave? Squillionically brave? Because just being brave doesn’t cut it any more.

Or, when weather forecasters predict that overnight temperatures will fall from +4C to -2C, they now have to ‘plummet’. Yet last winter some places sank from 0C to -22C… and there were no words left to describe the ‘Siberian’ magnitude of the drop! They’d all been used up.

Pitfall #2 – the wrong end of the stick

It’s all too easy to give the wrong impression to someone with a ‘snapshot’ attention span. Even if there’s no actual headline, we create our own summary based on what we see or hear in the first few seconds.

This second pitfall is often exploited by sales-hungry media, who intentionally leave people with the wrong end of the stick. Because we don’t have the time or attention span to process the information in full, we easily miss the real point and jump straight to the wrong conclusion. Great for ‘hysteria mongers’. But lousy for those of us trying to convey serious messages.

For example, finishing a weather forecast with ‘slight chance of snow on Northern hills’ quickly becomes ‘snow set to hit UK next week’ both in our minds and in the more sensationalist media. And this when the main story is actually about the weather ‘still remaining unseasonally mild for most of Britain’.

The point is this: when we get careless about our language and fail to really emphasise the right messages, we risk miscommunicating. After all, your message is not what you say, it’s what the other person understands.

So given the cacophony of voices and messages we’re all hit with daily, it’s every writer’s job to make sure what they say is clear, interesting, accurate and relevant to their audience.

How to avoid these pitfalls?

Tune in for part 2 next week to find out…

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.

Because we tend to get all squirmy when we see unnecessary capital letters sprinkled all over the place. There’s a time and place for capital letters. And it’s really quite simple: at the start of the new sentence and when writing a proper name.

Max Robinson. That’s my ‘proper’ name. I don’t have an improper one, but I imagine that could be quite fun.

But let’s be serious. Because capital letters seem to demand a certain level of seriousness. They usually announce or begin something. They’re important, but they shouldn’t be used just to make something look important. Use them too much, and their impact drops.

I SAID THEY SHOULDN’T BE OVERUSED.

Sorry, I thought you couldn’t hear me at the back there.

More often than not, especially on the web, using capital letters just feels like shouting. And no one likes being shouted at.

Sometimes we ask our clients why their brand language is peppered with capital letters. We tell them about our pet hate and sometimes they get it. At other times they look at us blankly. Who are these writers coming in and messing around with our words?

We have many guises at Afia. Sometimes we’re the Royal Navy coming to the rescue of tired brands and jaded communicators. But when it comes to capitals, we’re most definitely pirates of the high seas. We take no prisoners.

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.

• Whisky: on the rocks, with water or directly
• Grated radish credit of the Pholiota naneko
• The salad of “homemade tofu” and “stubborn farm vegetables”. Please have it with citron miso dressing
• Please have a slice cabbage and the pork which I boiled with Calbee sauce
• Cuttlefish fish guts pickled in salt. Please with grated radish
• A crab casserole using crab’s carapace as a plate
• Grill of a dried flat fish
• Freshly made “unwashed” tofu
• It is the tender tofu which it made with a black soy bean
• A gorgeous fragrance is mellow, and it is plum liqueur with the depth
• A nice smell of the Okinawa produce muscovado and eloquence like the plum liqueur are exquisiteness
• I sprinkled the soup which a crab was in to an omlet
• A fragrance of soft muscovado is a characteristic. Hot water percentage is recommended
• Fried cock cartilage

Honest, no kidding. It’s all there on the street next to the river, with the ten-foot puffer fish hanging opposite the door. I have no idea what it was called, but here’s a picture, just in case you’re in the area. The food was fantastic, although we didn’t choose any of the above.