The Language of Marketing

I was absently staring at a new tube of toothpaste this morning as I washed my hair. You have to look at something, right? This one declared “healthy, whiter teeth for longer”. An image of extremely long (but healthy and white) teeth filled my mind, and was immediately pushed out by the technical writer in me asking “whiter and longer than what, exactly?”

Most marketing slogans give technical writers the screaming heebie-jeebies. Not only do they make spurious and vague claims like ‘more fibre’, ‘less fat’, and ‘20% bigger’ with alarming regularity, but the adjectives! I have no doubt that it is actually possible to sell things with sentences that contain only one adjective. And if they do need more than one, I’m sure a comma wouldn’t kill them. I could rant on the folly of adverbs, too, but that is a whole different article.

Why are marketers such terrible writers?

Because customers expect spin, and spin is easy to write. All you need is a handful of adjectives and a call to action: “The new fruity refreshing Globswoddle Fizz is now available. Experience the heady taste of summer today!”

While yelling at the toothpaste tube in the morning might make us all feel better, it is not likely to turn us into marketers just to help an obviously flailing industry. I finished my marketing degree about three weeks before I decided that the marketing industry was the last place in the world I wanted to work. Eventually, I became a technical writer instead, and discovered that I had inadvertently ended up working in marketing after all. Every word we set to paper is marketing in one way or another. If it is going to be read by a customer, then it needs to sell the product. But the last thing we want to write is spin.

Why are writers such terrible marketers?

Because customers want anything but spin, and while spin is easy to write, spinless marketing is not so easy.

Spin is wanted and welcomed in places where it is expected, like product packaging and on the airwaves. When our customers read technical manuals or help text, they are looking for a solution to a problem. If they were suddenly faced with the empty promises of spin, they would lose faith in the documentation, and possibly the product.

However brutal honesty is not required, either. Product documentation should not tell customers that the product cannot fulfill their expectations. Every question needs to be anticipated and answered. The documentation must give the customer hope that their problem can be resolved, their task completed, and their sanity retained in the process.

Effective documentation never tells the customer that a product is terrible (even if it is), and it never tells a customer that they are stupid (even if they are). It never makes over-inflated claims of software brilliance, and it never assumes greater-than-average user intelligence.

Somewhere nestled in there is product documentation that shows the product in a positive light, without the hard sell. Sound easy? Like most technical writing, it sounds easy until you actually try to do it. Some tips for getting started with spinless writing:

Kick adverbs, take names.
Adverbs are a big red flag for spin. Be ruthless and cut them all out. If your sentence requires a modifier, consider what you are really trying to say. If it forms part of an instruction or description (‘The widget can be fully removed by …’), reword it to remove the adverb (‘Remove the widget by …’).

Never call anything ‘simple’.
If you tell your users that something is ‘simple’, ‘quick’, or ‘easy’, and the customer struggles with it (for whatever reason), you are essentially telling them that they fail at life. Try not to insult your users.

Mind your adjectives.
Adjectives are fine in their place. Use them only where necessary, though, and try not to use more than one at a time. (‘Locate the red button’ is fine, but avoid ‘Locate the large, shiny, red button’ that is next to the ‘tiny, silver, shiny lever’).

Know your stuff.
If you can’t describe your topic in a single short sentence, you don’t understand it well enough, and it becomes too easy to succumb to spin statements. You need to be able to give succinct and accurate descriptions for each and every component part, as well as the product as whole. If you are not able to do this, continue to research your product until you can.

Understand the enemy.
As modern humans, we are largely desensitised to advertising, simply because we are so totally immersed in it. Start noticing it. Analyse what language is used, the sentence structure they’ve employed. Work out how you would re-write it to send the same message, but without the spin.

Edit with a knife.
Never say more than you need to.

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This article was originally published in Words: A Quarterly Bulletin for Technical Writers and Communicators. Volume 3, Issue 1: February 2011, with the following bio:

Lana Brindley has been playing with technology since that summer in the 80’s when she spent the whole time trying not to be eaten by a grue. She has been writing since she could hold a pencil, and is currently writing technical documentation for Red Hat. Lana holds business degrees in marketing and information systems, and with any luck will have a technical communicators degree by the end of the year. She works from her home in Canberra, Australia, and occasionally leaves the house in order to berate university students and conference goers about passive sentence construction.

This post has been cross-posted to fossdocs.