The hobgoblin in the room

‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’ Or so wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet it is a truth universally acknowledged that unswerving consistency is one of the keys to building mental availability for a brand.

From Robert Heath, to Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk, the science is unimpeachable: Prime the audience’s positive memory structures with advertising, then trigger them at the point of purchase with the same brand assets, and sales success will follow.

I have neither the evidence nor the talent to contradict this orthodoxy. Like every contemporary strategist, I believe it, I preach it, and, wherever possible, I practise it. However, while I am confident it is the truth, the unreconstructed direct marketer in me suspects that it is not quite the whole truth.

French lessons

Cut to a first-year French class at a boring Midlands grammar school, where an especially slow pupil (me) is being beaten around the head with a copy of Longman’s Audio-Visual French, Volume One.

The recalcitrant younger me has failed, yet again, to remember the difference between second person singular and second person plural. How many times did I have to be told that Monsieur Marsaud would never, ever, address his boss using the pronoun ‘tu’?

I eventually learned that in French, as in many other languages, there is an intimate form of address (‘tu’) and a plural form (‘vous’) which is the more formal, respectful one.

This subtle distinction, so Mr Tivey (‘Sir’ to you) taught us, is an example of something linguists refer to as ‘register’. Which, put simply, is the way in which a speaker uses language differently to suit different situations.

The concept of register was something I was happy to pack away in the recesses of my memory after A-levels, until a lady called Belinda helped me rediscover it some years later.

Enter Belinda

Belinda was a short woman. In fact, she was only ten inches tall on her elegantly pointed tippy-toes. She was also a little cold and somewhat brittle, though perhaps that is inevitable when you are made of finest Coalport china.

Writing copy to sell Belinda to the customers of a credit card company was my first professional challenge in our marvellous industry. And once again, I found myself being whacked about the head, this time by my copy chief and part-time Mills & Boone author, the redoubtable Janice.

‘You call that xxxxing copy? It sounds like you’re preaching to the congregation, not wooing a parishioner.’ (She was fond of mixing profanity and religion was our Janice.) After more beatings, I came to learn the importance of copy tone. Eventually, I became reasonably competent at moving from one register to another to match not just the audience but also the occasion.

I am often reminded of Janice when I read email copy today. Even emails to existing customers of several decades’ standing appear to be written to sound like a declamation (‘vous’) and not a conversation (‘tu’). As an industry, it sometimes seems we have become tone deaf.

Our unquestioning pursuit of the hobgoblin of foolish consistency appears to have led strategists and creatives alike to neglect the importance of register, especially, but by no means exclusively, in one-to-one communications. Yes, the copy may be on-brand. But it is on-occasion?

There's no need to shout

Too often, we shout when we should be speaking in a whisper. We behave like a stage comedian rather than that likeable acquaintance with a smile in their voice. In short, we fall into the trap of writing a personal message as if we were writing a billboard.

Fitting the voice to the moment is more than just a case of adjusting the volume control up and down. Idle web-surfing has revealed that linguists have devoted much time to defining registers, and it is more complicated and more fascinating than I ever imagined.

Believe it or not, there is even an international standard set of definitions for linguistic registers (ISO 12620 if you want to look it up). Interestingly, this codification came about when programmers had to start teaching AIs how to converse naturally with their human colleagues. For those who think HAL is the only truly human character in 2001, this surely is a case of life mirroring art.

Outside the world of the artificial intelligence lab, linguists seem to have more or less agreed that there are five broad registers, which express themselves not only through the speaker’s choice of vocabulary but also through variables such as punctuation and sentence length. Here they are:

Frozen or ‘static’ register. This is a form of language which is frozen in time, usually because it is enshrined in a culturally important text. (The Book of Common Prayer is a good example.) A cynic might suggest that, in our world, this is the register of the Brand Guidelines: Thou shalt be approachable, responsive and empathetic. (Interestingly, none of these words are ever used by real people.)

Formal register. This is the language of speeches and official proclamations. We heard far too much of this register in emails sent by brands to express their ‘heartfelt concern’ in the early weeks of the ‘unprecedented circumstances’ of the pandemic. Some brands appear to have mislaid the memo telling them it’s time to knock it off. As a graduate copywriter, it was the register I defaulted to when talking to prospects about Belinda. Until Janice put me right

Consultative register. This describes the kind of language used between professionals in individual, person-to-person conversations. It is fairly formal, but not unduly stiff or stilted. There is a person behind the keyboard, not a robot or a committee. I like my solicitor, my financial adviser and my anaesthetist to talk to me like this. It conveys expertise and thus makes me feel the speaker is worthy of the fee I am paying them.

Casual register. This is the language of the dinner party. Or maybe the pub if you’re just a few pints into the session. It is the default setting for conversations between friends who have a certain amount of shared history and background knowledge. This is the kind of tone I like to hear from a brand I have done business with for years. Or perhaps a charity of which I am a long-standing supporter.

Intimate register. This is the language of the close family unit, or the pub at that sweet spot between the sixth and the tenth pint when you have declared your lifelong devotion to your best mate and the fighting has yet to kick off. I do not think I have come across this register in copy since Club 18-30 went tits up. Though I am happy to be corrected.

This inventory of registers is helpful when thinking about both the remote and face-to-face interactions your brand has with customers. However, it is inevitably a blunt instrument. In the messy reality that is real life, register is, of course, the product of a multiplicity of factors. For instance, some channels (SMS being a particular one) carry their own linguistic codes that may push a brand’s register towards the casual. The context of the communication is also key, as indeed is the age of the audience.

For example, listening to people of my age, those who still have in their linguistic repertoire a ‘telephone voice’, there seems to be an expectation that a bank should speak in the Consultative register much of the time. However, this may be a generational effect, perhaps one area where the otherwise flawed concept of generational cohorts definitely holds true.

I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.

With heavy irony, the inventory of registers designed for machines has rather more nuance to it than that espoused by academic linguists. While the Big Five list of linguistic registers is largely organised around degrees of formality, ISO 12620 takes account of other variables of occasion, too. Much to my delight, it includes both an ‘Ironic’ and a ‘Facetious’ register. It is reassuring to know that our future AI overlords will be able to make that distinction.

Almost as much as God loves a trier, strategists love a matrix. And this case is no exception. On one axis, let us imagine there is a list of registers. On the other, a list of occasions (combinations of content, context, audience and channel). The cells record the register most appropriate for the brand to use on each occasion. Each brand will have its own version of this linguistic matrix, defined by its core personality.

You may want to try playing this game on your next long train journey. Better still, get your strategist and your creative team to do it for you. At the end of the exercise, they will have worked out the all-important ‘How’ to go alongside the ‘Who’, the ‘What’ and the ‘When’ so carefully documented on your customer journey map.

Put this thinking into practice (always the hard bit) and the result will be a conversation between your brand and its audiences that mirrors the kind of conversations real people have between each other. The ultimate outcome? Greater liking, which can lead to greater trust and thus greater willingness to consider.

Consistency is undoubtedly key to establishing the neural networks that wire brands into our minds and activate emotional memories at the point of choice. But, to paraphrase Emerson, we must not confuse consistency with mindless uniformity if our brands are to remain relevant at every point in the marketing funnel*, and beyond.

?*A concept which may or may not have validity, depending on the day of the week. But there are plenty of articles about that already.

This article first appeared on BBH Labs.