You can tell how poor your brand image is when people define it by what it is not. As pointed as this is for Gordon Brown and his future, this approach to describing people and organisations is quite common. It may seem amusing, but it is also disappointing. Calling a spade a spade is not that easy. Especially if it’s new, obscured by what has gone before or simply contravenes majority values. Meat-free sausages. Non-governmental organisations. Childless couples. Such institutionalised language suggests that society is not very forgiving of anything outside the mainstream. Over time, I’ve moved towards the mainstream from the margins. On the way in through this asteroid field, I’ve dodged a lot of jagged acronyms. Up in the atmosphere, I’ve punctured many jargon filled barrage balloons. But then, it is my job to be precise, definite, say the unsayable, all with an imaginative flourish. So, naturally, I take great pleasure when I discover an example of precision that fuses language together to create a meaning that was always there before but never expressed. My singleminded friend, Mark E Smith, does this to great effect. In a song entitled Hip Priest, on the LP by The Fall called Hex Enduction Hour (released 27 years ago this week), the narrator nonchalantly says, ‘I got my last clean dirty shirt out of the wardrobe’. This could only have come from a working class Mancunian with a sharp wit and a pub habit. Just as the title of this piece could only have come from a blank and bemused American government policy wonk. But one has nailed the meaning in an unforgettable way.
Mark Griffiths www.idealconsulting.co.uk
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
"You can tell how poor your brand image is when people define it by what it is not". I am not sure about this Mark.
ReplyDeleteMany cases you might cite for this are classic cases of comparative naming and can surely be useful in branding. After all if one product or brand is well known why not use some of that awareness to place your own product and at the same time differentiate it.
Take for example. Low Fat Milk. It's Milk and its got less Fat (than other milk). I would argue that it is advantageous to describe it this way. As long as people want to cut Fat from their diet - like I must.
It is a problem when the comparison is unflattering, as is the case in your Gordon Brown quote. Just like the Hip Priest, Gordon Brown, 'is not appreciated'.
Of course of comparative description can also be done badly. Witness the another description for the same milk product -'Skimmed milk' - which fails significantly for me. Its sounds like the milk has received extra processing and has been diminished in some way.
Even worse. Yesterday my eldest daughter (a vegan) was describing how to make 'egg free egg'. It sounded terrible, but also in the mathematical side of my brain 'egg free egg' is nothing at all (1-1=0).
Is 'low-fat milk' really milk? I would argue that it is something else and should be named as such. Soya milk is not milk, just a milk substitute. Again, a failure of the imagination. The eskimos have twenty different words for snow. That's igloo mentality for you. It's amazing how we can develop our lexicon of love (hello Martin Fry, 51 today!) for language on a cold day with a flat horizon. All this is a call for precision. And, failing that, a call to make use of the collision of opposites in a mundane world, as Mark E Smith shows.
ReplyDelete