Why do some brand communications
take off and others flop?
We're told that today's social-media savvy youths
are a generation of image-hungry consumers, starved of literary input and
awaiting their next online fix. Whether it's a video game, a 3D film or Angry
Birds, kids today don't know and don't care about language.
Or do they?
Socail networking, surely the media phenomenon of
the 21st Century, laid its foundations in the word; only Pinterest has tapped
into the potentials of visual communications; surely others will follow but for
now verbal equates with social. There is no clearer definition of personal
branding than the 145 characters provided for self-expression by Twitter. Brand
linguistics are as vital today in modern communications as they were in early
20th Century propaganda: "Keep Calm and Carry On" is as poignant a
piece of advice for modern brand managers with a penchant for the verbal as for
the nation's morale seventy years ago.
Marketing's overarching end goal is persuasion:
persuading the consumers to buy and persuading the clients to listen. Luckily
we have a particular tool for exacting this persuasion in our language:
rhetoric. Rhetoric is the portmanteau term for devices and techniques that help
to construct powerful arguments; some are used by us every day and will ring
bells that haven't chimed since English GCSE and others are less familiar.
Here are some of the most effective devices used in
advertising:
Tricolon
This means very simply the use of three:
Triangle structures seem to appeal greatly to the
human brain and it reoccurs in literature, art, architecture and many other
mediums. We are brought up to expect beginnings, middles and ends and tricolon
offers this grammatically. In the English language tricolon echoes the
simplest sentence form: subject, verb, object. For example
MacDonald's' ubiquitous “I’m lovin’ it” offers a complete grammatical unit
expressing the sensory delight experienced when munching down on a Big Mac and
fries.
Placing the verb in the middle is where we would expect it to be in a
descriptive statement. In contrast to this, Carly Rae Jepsen’s song (now
virtually a brand itself) places the verb at the beginning, making her
statement imperative. This is however moderated by the “maybe” at the end;
Carly's blend of sexual confidence and insecurity is perfectly captured by her
rhetoric, it is this vulnerable forwardness that has made her such an icon.
Rhyme
Rhyme is a controversial one. We are socialized to
respond to rhyme and it is embedded in our education as well as our culture
(think nursery rhymes to pop-songs) yet because of this it can have an immature
quality (think bad poetry or limericks). Today it can carry a gimmicky
tone to it, meaning it is unsuitable in speech or formal writing but useful in
punchy advertising slogans. There is a finality to rhyme that lingers on from
literature of the past: after all there's a reason why Shakespeare ended every
scene with a rhyming couplet.
Rhyme used in something like “Beanz Meanz Heinz” is effective because it
presents a kind of memorable mantra for children and Mums; the semantic
progression of a=b (Beanz=Heinz) is reinforced by the rhyme, cementing together
the association of baked beans with Heinz.
More subtle variants on this are seen in half rhyme, “Get the Abbey habit”
and “I'd walk a mile for a Camel” both have a gentle echoing quality issuing
from the mirrored sounds. Internal rhyme is when the syntactical units rhyme,
for example: "Du pain, du vin, du Boursin". This particular one
is so catchy because the first two elements are monosyllablic but
the lengthened “Boursin” makes us linger over the word.
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia is a device in which the sound a
word makes reflects its semantic meaning, e.g. "bang" or
"crash". These words tend to appeal to a more primal part of our
understanding and directly communicate sense through sound, hence why they are
so common in science fiction. Yet they can also work on a more sophisticated
level; words like "lugubrious" and "unwieldy" have echoes
of their sense in their sound. The following slogan from Alka Seltzer uses
onomatopoeia to a brilliant effect:
The phrase "Plop Plop, Fizz
Fizz" demonstrates the sensory numbness produced by a hangover. There is a
suggestion of the regressive state to which we are reduced by the
overindulgence of the night before. The combination of the sounds with the following
rhyme, "Oh, what a relief it is!" make this slogan somewhat childish-
a humorous take on the way in which grown adults are demolished by raging
hangovers.
Alliteration
This is when the same sound is repeated
at the start of a word, for example: “Bring on the Branston”. The
idea is that we will link the two in our heads; we’ll never want to “bring on”
any other condiment other than branston because it just won’t sound right.
Alliteration can make memorable sound bites in this way, but can sound jangling
if overused, like in AOL's "Welcome to
the World Wide Wow".
Assonance
A repeated sound
within a sentence, this is similar to alliteration but often much more subtle, “Don’t
give up the ship” is an example of the gentle chiming it can create
(give/ship).
Parataxis
Parataxis is the balancing of clauses,
providing equal grammatical importance to each, as in, “I picked up
my mother and I met my daughter”. If we compare this to “I picked up my
mother before I met my daughter”, we can see that the former implies an
equal significance to both mother and daughter, whereas the
latter prioritises the mother. It implies that all elements of a larger
structure share significance and this can be expressed without conjunctions,
as in eBay's "Buy it. Sell it. Love it".
This classic paratactic structure mimicks Caesar’s “I came. I saw. I
conquered”. No link word between the individual clauses is required and
the absent subject implies an invisible yet accepted community, in this
case the eBay community.
Isocolon
This is the repetition of words at the
start of a sentence, as shown in Churchill's famous speech:
"We shall defend our island,
whatever the cost
The resultant effect is emphatic and
didactic and we can't help to feel roused by Churchill's booming
rhetoric. There is a certainty and a confidence in the repetition that
allows for no doubt as to our own resilience. The isocolon conveys
extremely effectively the sense that we all start in the same place,
"we shall", but we all end up somewhere different, nonetheless
fighting as a united front.
A similarly inspiring British institution, Butlins, also tapped into this
powerful rhetoric device with, "Come to life. Come to Butlins".
This use of isocolon cleverly plays with the varying meanings of “come to life”
as being revived and “come to” as heading for a destination,
combining emotive experience with physical place.
The Imperative
This is when we make a command, for example:
"Don't do that", "Stand up please". We usually find the
verb located at the start of the sentence:
Both of these are commands,
however they are non-threatening, encouraging us to self-improve. These brands
show us how they will change our lives and the imperative tone provides little
room for doubt.
There is a hidden world of rhetoric
lurking in the depths of our own language, harnessed by advertisers but unknown
to many of us. An ability to decode these devices can unlock language and
reveal subversive intentions. By conquering the basics of linguistic aerobics
we stand in a position to persuade like advertisers do; underestimating the
importance of language in branding is a mistake most marketers do not make
twice.
Placing the verb in the middle is where we would expect it to be in a descriptive statement. In contrast to this, Carly Rae Jepsen’s song (now virtually a brand itself) places the verb at the beginning, making her statement imperative. This is however moderated by the “maybe” at the end; Carly's blend of sexual confidence and insecurity is perfectly captured by her rhetoric, it is this vulnerable forwardness that has made her such an icon.
Rhyme used in something like “Beanz Meanz Heinz” is effective because it presents a kind of memorable mantra for children and Mums; the semantic progression of a=b (Beanz=Heinz) is reinforced by the rhyme, cementing together the association of baked beans with Heinz.
More subtle variants on this are seen in half rhyme, “Get the Abbey habit” and “I'd walk a mile for a Camel” both have a gentle echoing quality issuing from the mirrored sounds. Internal rhyme is when the syntactical units rhyme, for example: "Du pain, du vin, du Boursin". This particular one is so catchy because the first two elements are monosyllablic but the lengthened “Boursin” makes us linger over the word.
A repeated sound within a sentence, this is similar to alliteration but often much more subtle, “Don’t give up the ship” is an example of the gentle chiming it can create (give/ship).
This classic paratactic structure mimicks Caesar’s “I came. I saw. I conquered”. No link word between the individual clauses is required and the absent subject implies an invisible yet accepted community, in this case the eBay community.
A similarly inspiring British institution, Butlins, also tapped into this powerful rhetoric device with, "Come to life. Come to Butlins". This use of isocolon cleverly plays with the varying meanings of “come to life” as being revived and “come to” as heading for a destination, combining emotive experience with physical place.
