The Language of Branding

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

may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall

fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in

the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the

hills; we shall never surrender."

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.