It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it.
Jan 18 | Dan, Creative Director
Try this experiment. One night, before going to sleep, turn to your significant other and say, “I love you.” Then the next night, try something like, “Of the three billion (men/women) on this planet, not a single one has your seductive charm, sublime grace and ravishing beauty.”
Okay—which of these Goodnights guarantees you’ll be doing something besides sleeping when the lights are out?
Finding new ways to say the same old thing can make a dramatic difference—in the boudoir, and in advertising too. Heck, especially in advertising, where clichés, stock phrases and stock situations (ah, the good old Slice Of Life!) have been reused, repeated and recycled until consumers react with indifference. That first “I love you” that swept them off their feet has been uttered so many times by so many advertisers that it’s now stale, blasé, yawn-inducing. You’ve gotta find new ways to court them.
Fortunately, as our experiment confirms, it’s entirely possible to find new ways of expressing oft-repeated messages, keeping them fresh, engaging and persuasive. In advertising it takes verbal and visual skill along with imagination—but most of all, it takes the simple determination not to say the same old thing the same old way.
One classic example is the Where’s the Beef? commercial Wendy’s ran (more than 20 years ago!) to tout its beefier burgers. The message—“our burgers are better”—was hardly a new one in the burger marketing wars. But the fresh, unique twist on this message, the “Where’s the beef?” line delivered in the froggy voice of the immortal Clara Pell, single handedly catapulted Wendy’s from a relatively obscure burger chain to one of the big three in the business. Twenty-five years after the commercial launched, it’s still remembered and loved, and “Where’s the beef?” is still a punch line heard in offices, TV shows and even presidential campaigns.
Think for a moment of the awesome return Wendy’s got for simply finding a fresh way to say Our burgers are better. And think too about finding fresh ways to tout your own products and services in your advertising. The fact is, unless you have a completely new and unheard of gizmo (A Revolutionary Device!), your messages are likely to fall into one of several categories:
• Your product saves time
• Your product saves money
• Your product makes life easier for users
• Your product is superior to your competitor’s
There’s nothing wrong with this: these messages are entirely legitimate ones, and they’re meaningful to your customers. But you’ve got to come up with fresh, compelling ways to express these messages or your customers will eventually tune them out—because they’ve heard them before, over and over.
At Patterson/Bach, we preach the gospel of fresh messaging, and we practice it too. Go to pat-bach.com for examples. Maybe there’s not much new under the sun, but there are always new and exciting ways of describing what is—and that’s what we do best.