It's not just Ceos and corporate spokespeople who need sufficient language to be the message. The most flourishing advertising taglines are not seen as slogans for a product. They are the product. From M&M's "melts in your mouth, not in your hand" to "Please don't squeeze the Charmin" bathroom tissue, from the "plop, plop, fizz, fizz" of Alka-Seltzer to "Fly the cordial skies of United," there is no light space in the middle of the product and its marketing. Words that work reflect "not only the soul of the brand, but the business itself and its surmise for being in business," agreeing to Publicis worldwide menagerial creative director David Droga.
In the same vein, advertising experts identify a common quality among the most favorite and long-lasting corporate icons: Rather than selling for their companies, these characters personify them. Ronald McDonald, the Marlboro Man, Betty Crocker, the Energizer Bunny -- they aren't shills trying to talk us into buying a Big Mac, a pack of smokes, a box of cake mix, a package of batteries; they don't even personalize the product. Just like the most preponderant slogans, they are the product.
Bookstore
Walk straight through any bookstore and you'll find dozens of books about the marketing and branding efforts of corporate America. The process of corporate transportation has been thinly sliced and diced over and over, but what you won't find is a book about the one truly essential characteristic in our twenty-first-century world: the business persona and how words that work are used to generate and keep it.
The business persona is the sum of the corporate leadership, the corporate ethos, the products and services offered, interaction with the customer, and, most importantly, the language that ties it all together. A majority of large fellowships do not have a business persona, but those that do advantage significantly. Ben & Jerry's attracts customers in part because of the funky names they gave to the accepted (and unconventional) flavors they offer, but the confident association in the middle of corporate administration and their employees also plays a role, even after Ben and Jerry sold the company. McDonald's in the 1970s and Starbucks over the past decade became an integral part of the American culture as much for the lifestyle they reflected as the food and beverages they offered, but the in-store lexicon helped by setting them apart from their competition. (Did any customers ever call the person who served them a cup of coffee a "barista" before Starbucks made the term popular?) Language is never the sole determinant in creating a business persona, but you'll find words that work connected with all fellowships that have one.
And when the message, messenger, and recipient are all on the same page, I call this rare phenomenon "language alignment," and it happens far less often than you might expect. In fact, virtually all of the fellowships that have hired my firm for transportation guidance have found themselves linguistically unaligned.
This manifests itself in two ways. First, in service-oriented businesses, the sales force is too often selling with a different language than the marketing citizen are using. There's nothing wrong with individualizing the sales arrival to each customer, but when you have your sales force promoting a message that has no similarity with the advertising campaign, it undermines both efforts. The language in the ads and promotions must match the language on the street, in the shop, and on the floor. For example, Boost Mobile, which caters to an inner city youth demographic, uses the catchword "Where you at?" Not grammatically (or politically) correct -- but it's the language of their consumer.
And second, corporations with multiple products in the same space too often allow the language of those products to blur and bleed into each other. Procter & Gamble may sell a hundred different items, but even though each one fills a different need, a different space, and/or a different category, it is perfectly fine for them to share similar language. You can use some of the same verbiage to sell soap as you would to sell towels, because no consumer will confuse the products and what they do.
Not so for a business that is in a single line of work, say selling cars or selling beer, where fellowships use the exact same adjectives to enumerate very different products. In this instance, achieving linguistic alignment requires a much more disciplined linguistic segmentation. It is almost always a more sufficient sales strategy to divvy up the approved adjectives and generate a unique lexicon for each private brand.
An example of a major corporation that has confronted both of these challenges and still managed to accomplish linguistic alignment, even as they are laying off thousands of workers, is the Ford Motor business -- which manages a surprisingly diverse group of brands fluctuating from Mazda to Aston Martin. The Ford corporate leadership recognized that it was impossible to detach the Ford name, corporate history, heritage, and range of vehicles -- so why bother. They came as a package. Sure, Ford maintains private brand identity, straight through national and local ad campaigns and by creating and maintaining a detach image and language for each brand. For example, "uniquely sensual styling" honestly applies when one is talking about a Jaguar S Type, but would probably not be pertinent for a Ford F 250 pickup truck. But the fact that the Ceo carries the Ford name communicates continuity to the company's customers, and Bill Ford sitting in front of an assembly line talking about leadership and innovation in all of Ford's vehicles effectively puts all the private brands into alignment.
The words he uses -- "innovation," "driven," "re-committed," "dramatically," "dedicated" -- recite the simplicity and brevity of sufficient communications, and they are wrapped around the Ceo who is the fourth-generation Ford to lead the business -- hence credibility. The cars are the message, Bill Ford is the messenger, the language is dead-on, and Ford is weathering the American automotive urgency far better than its larger rival general Motors. Again, the language of Ford isn't the only driver of corporate image and sales -- but it honestly is a factor.
In fact, the brand-building campaign was so flourishing that Gm jumped on board. But Ford speedily took it a step further. In early 2006, they began to leverage their ownership of Volvo (I wonder how many readers did not know that Ford bought Volvo in 1999 and purchased Jaguar a decade earlier) to enumerate a corporate-wide commitment to automotive safety, over all of its private brands and vehicles. Volvo is one of the most respected cars on the road today, and aligning all of Ford behind an manufactures leader is a very smart strategy indeed.
So what about the competition?
General Motors, once the automotive powerhouse of the world, has an equally diverse product line and arguably a richer history of technology and innovation, but their collective message of cutbacks, buy-backs, and layoffs was designed to appeal to Wall Street, not Main Street, and it crushed new car sales. At the time of this writing, Gm is suffering straight through narrative losses, narrative job layoffs, and a narrative number of bad stories about its failing marketing efforts.
It didn't have to be this way.
The actual attributes of many of the Gm product lines are more intelligent than the competition, but the product image itself is not. To own a Gm car is to tell the world that you're so 1970s, and since what you drive is considered an extension and expression of yourself to others, citizen end up buying cars they honestly like less because they feel the cars will say something more about them.
Think about it. Here's a business that was the first to develop a catalytic converter, the first to develop an advanced anti-tipping stabilization technology, the first to develop engines that could use all sorts of blended gasolines, and most importantly in today's market, the originator of OnStar -- an foreseen, new-age computerized security and tracking device. Yet most American consumers have no idea that any of these essential innovations came from general Motors, plainly because Gm decided not to tell them. So instead of using its newest and greatest emerging technology to align itself with its customers, Gm finds itself in a deteriorating dialogue with shareholders. No alignment = no sales.
Another problem with Gm: No one knew that the various brands under the Gm moniker were in fact . . . Gm. Even such well-known brands as Corvette and Cadillac had become disconnected from the parent company. Worse yet, all the various brands (with the irregularity of Hummer, which couldn't get lost in a crowd even if the brand employer wanted it to) were using similar language, similar visuals, and a similar message -- obscuring the difference in the middle of brands and turning Gm vehicles into nothing more than generic American cars. Repeated marketing failures were just part of Gm's recurring problems, but as that issue was wholly within their control, it should have been the easiest to address.
When products, services, and language are aligned, they gain an additional one essential attribute: authenticity. In my own shop investigate for dozens of Fortune 500 companies, I have found that the best way to enumerate authenticity is to trigger personalization: Do audience members see themselves in the catchword . . . And therefore in the product? Unfortunately, achieving personalization is by no means easy.
To clarify how fellowships and brands in a contentious space generate compelling personas for themselves while addressing the needs of different consumer groups, let's take a look at cereals. Whatever can go out and buy a box of cereal. But different cereals offer different experiences. Watch and listen considered to their marketing arrival and the words they use.
Most cereals geared toward children sell energy, excitement, adventure, and the inherent for fun -- even more than the actual taste of the sugar-coated rice or wheat puffs in the cardboard box. On the other hand, cereal aimed at grown-ups is sold based on its utility to the maintenance and enhancement of condition -- with taste once again secondary.
Children's cereals are pitched by nonthreatening cartoon characters -- tigers, parrots, chocolate-loving vampires, Cap'ns, and a tiny trio in stocking caps -- never an adult or authority figure. Adult cereals come at you head-on with a not-so-subtle Food Police message, wrapped in saccharine-sweet smiles, exclaiming that this cereal is a favorite of salutary and cholesterol-conscious adults who don't want to get colon cancer! Ugghhh. Kids buy Frosted Flakes because "They're grrrreat!" Adults buy special K because we want to be as intelligent and vigorous as the actors who promote it. When it comes to cereal, about the only thing parents and kids have in common is that the taste matters only slightly more than the image, experience, and product association -- and if the transportation appears authentic, they'll buy.
And cereal honestly sells. From Cheerios to Cinnamon Toast Crunch, more than billion worth of cold cereal was sold in the United States alone in 2005. If you were to look at the five top-selling brands, you would see a diverse list targeted to a diverse set of customers. The language used for each of these five brands is noticeably different, but in all cases totally essential.
In finding at the first and third best-selling brands of cereal, one might initially think that only a wee difference in ingredients mark their distinctions. Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios are both based around the same whole-grain O shaped cereal, but are in fact two very different products, beyond the addition of honey and a nut-like crunch.
The language behind Cheerios is remarkably easy and all-encompassing -- "The one and only Cheerios." Could be for kids . . . Could be for young adults . . . Could be for parents. Actually, Cheerios wants to sell to all of them. As its Web site states, Cheerios is the right cereal for "toddlers to adults and everyone in between." The subtle heart-shaped bowl on each box suggests to the older consumer that the "whole-grain" cereal is a salutary start to a salutary day. But the Web site also has a section devoted entirely to younger adults, unblemished with testimonials and "tips from new parents" talking about how Cheerios has helped them to raise happy, salutary children. The language behind Cheerios works because it transcends the former societal boundaries of age and adds a sense of authenticity to the product.
While you could probably live a happy and salutary existence with Cheerios as your sole cereal choice, there is a expansive segment of the cereal shop that demands more. For the cereal-consuming collective almost in the middle of the ages of four and fourteen, a different taste and linguistic arrival is required. Buzz the Bee, the kid-friendly mascot of Honey Nut Cheerios, pitches the "irresistible taste of golden honey," selling the sweetness of the product to a demographic that craves sweet foods. While the parent knows that his or her child wants the cereal because of its sweet taste (as conveyed straight through the packaging), Honey Nut Cheerios must still pass the parent test. By putting such statements as "whole-grain" and "13 essential vitamins and minerals" on the box, the product gains authenticity, credibility, and the approval of the parent.
Two different messages on one common box effectively markets the same product to both children and parents alike, helping to make Honey Nut Cheerios the number three top-selling cereal in 2004. So with the addition of honey and nuts, general Mills, the producer of the Cheerios line, has filled the gap in the middle of toddlers and young adults, and completed the Cheerios cradle-to-grave lifetime hold on the consumer.
To take an additional one example, if you want citizen to think you're hip and healthy, you make sure they see you drinking bottled water -- and the fancier the better. No one walking around with a diet Dr Pepper in hand is finding to impress anybody. These days, there's almost a feeling that soft drinks are exclusively for kids and the uneducated masses. There's a cache to the consumption of water, and costly and exclusive brands are all the rage. Now, there may be a few citizen who have such extremely refined, educated taste buds that they can taste the difference in the middle of Dasani and Aquafina (I honestly can't), but the connoisseurs of modish waters are more likely than not posers (or, to continue the snobbery theme, poseurs). You won't see many citizen walking around Cincinnati or Syracuse clutching fancy bottled water. Hollywood, South Beach, and the Upper East Side of New York City are, as usual, an additional one story.
There's one final aspect of being the message that impacts what we hear and how we hear it. How our language is delivered can be as foremost as the words themselves, and no one understands this principle better than Hollywood.
At a small table tucked away in the projection of a boutique Italian cafeteria on the outskirts of Beverly Hills, I had the opportunity to dine with legendary actors Charles Durning, Jack Klugman, and Dom DeLuise. The entire supper was a litany of stories of actors, writers, and the most memorable movie lines ever delivered. (Says Klugman, an Emmy Award winner, "A great line isn't spoken, it is delivered.") Best known for his roles in The Odd concentrate and Quincy, Klugman told a story about how Spencer Tracy was practicing his lines for a movie late in his vocation in the nearnessy of the film's screenwriter. Apparently not pleased with the reading, the writer said to Tracy, "Would you please pay more concentration to how you are reading that line? It took me six months to write it," to which Tracy shot back, "It took me thirty years to learn how to say correctly the line that took you only six months to write."
Spencer Tracy knew how to be the message -- and his shelf of Academy Awards proved it.
Excerpted from Words That Work by Dr. Frank Luntz. Copyright 2007 Dr. Frank Luntz. All ownership reserved. Published by Hyperion. Ready wherever books are sold.
Be All That You Can Be: The company Persona and Language Alignment
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