Getting Vernacular

About six years ago I was sitting down with Billy, a linguistics professor, talking about the renaissance of the web and how it could come to be the 'dominant type of media' - a horrible expression but you get my point.  Billy's response was typically simple but profound as he pointed out the dominant media would always be what we were doing at the time - having a conversation.  It was a remark which stayed with me.  Today, one of the greatest marketing challenges for brands is to use the conversational language of their customers.  Which is ironic.  Because contrary to some popular belief marketing people are in fact human - and also customers.  But the barrier remains and indeed grows as the conversation economy goes stellar.  In the manifesto Johnnie and I have written, Co-Creation Rules, we make the point by saying that corporates and brands must Get Vernacular, which is a nod in the direction of the ever correct Doc.  I have found the best way to illustrate this is to compare two reports of a football match that took place between Arsenal and Blackburn at the beginning of the year.  The first is from Arsenal's official-but-dull site which reported that, "Many teams would have buckled under those circumstances but Arsenal rolled up their sleeves, stayed true to their footballing principles and ran out worthy winners".  The second report is from Arseblog, the AFC mega-blog, which said of the game, "If you were walking down the street and you saw two buses about to explode, for some reason, and one bus contained a squadron of killer robots who were going to give everyone on earth the plague after they shagged everyone’s wife, and smeared poo all over your freshly painted house and the other bus contained the Blackburn Rovers football team and you had to save one, then there’s no question we’d all get the black death and have stinky walls."  Hugh hits the same territory here as does James Governor here.

Comments

[Jason Ervin]

Thanks for another great post.

I have been trying to tell management, at the enterprise software company I work, is coming for the past two years.

What is funny is we had hired an outside agency here in Austin to create our new messaging, brochures, etc... and when I told them to use real photos of real people (customers, employees, etc..) they looked at me like they had seen a ghost, maybe it was their future flashing before their eyes. Also when I told them we would be using a human voice they kind of snickered.

During the re-branding of the company our management pulled the plug on the personable approach and rewrote the content to sound "more professional". So now we are back where we started with dry, non-personable content that sounds like every other company out there. "Our enterprise blah, blah, blah is the , which increases blah, blah, blah.

Example: Go check out Dell's website and then go to Apple's. Which would you consider more personable and someone you would want to build a relationship with?

[Rich Benson]

Who would have thought that, in 2007, an amateur football blogger who (rightly) calls Sam Allardyce a ****bubble, would (again rightly) be held up as a bastion of modern marketing?

[James Cherkoff]

Thanks Jason, when will the marketing realise that the real word is interesting?!

Richard - indeed!