The perils of personality in branding: meat and railways

Something different for my LinkedIn rant, err, I mean, article this month – it’s not cyber securtiy for a change. I’m talking language, and I’m talking marketing. And, fair warning, this one does get quite... sweary.

Case Study 1: Meat-free Meat

Picture the scene. There was me, in Tesco, hungry and browsing meat. Fine, great. I happened across the meat-free-meat aisle. Ooooh, something new. I’m a bit of a carnivore, so for me to be in this aisle is somewhat unusual, and people who know me are already surprised. But hey, you never know until you try it, only one planet and all that, so I thought I’d give meat-free meat a go.

Presented with a wall of obtuse branding and different messaging (as is the case in every aisle), I picked up something almost at random. The packaging looked very funky. Modern, fresh, irreverent. It was very much in this modern vein of ‘Oh look at us and our personality’ (I blame Innocent Smoothies for popularising this bullshit trend, btw). I turned over the packet in my hand and saw this absolute clusterfuck of marketing:

Read that again without having a seizure, I dare you.

I literally said aloud, to no-one, “The fuck is this shit”, put the pack down, and did not buy it. And that’s not (just) because I’m a word snob: it’s because it’s absolute horseshit and I will not endorse it with a purchase. What the fuck were they thinking!? You can just imagine the meeting now, can’t you. The brief to the agency was probably “We want lots of personality”, but what they got was “We want to sound like pretentious, cutesey, overtly anti-corporate, dickheads.”

Am I just an embittered, jaded millennial, butthurt that not everyone shares my values about words?

Well, OK, I probably am, but this choice piece of corporate ‘personality branding’ really is taking things too far. Given meat-eating is in decline amongst younger adult humans, and taking the branding as a whole, I assume this Gen-Z brainrot language is a deliberate ploy to go hard after that market segment. Which at first flush looks like a 'fair enough then' marketing strategy. But I think that’s actually a dangerous one. It’s all a bit ‘Larry is a man, Larry has brown hair, therefore all men have brown hair’. This is: “All Gen-Z like irreverent marketing, they all want to eat no-meat meat, therefore all non-meat-eaters are vacuous irreverent idiots who don’t see through this marketing ploy’. And this isn’t actually supposed to be a dig at Gen-Z. There are plenty of people who take a less serious, sometimes sideways view of the world (your humble author is one of them).

The problem with this, my own personal incredulity aside, is that it goes so far beyond merely adding some colour and personality to your branding that it alienates people. And that runs counter (despite their appearances) to the very corporate aims of 'selling product'.

Maybe somewhere some intern typed that wordvomit in frustration, forgot to delete it, and was very surprised when it made it through. Or maaaaaaybe it's just bad marketing.

Case Study 2: Railways

On the other side of the coin, we have the railways. Now, there’s this guy called Dave Harland, who’s very good at words, and very good at doing LinkedIn, and he has a newsletter that I subscribe to. Not a plug, just a fact. In one recent edition he went off on one about the rail industry’s use of phrases like ‘station-stop’ and ‘alight’, and how it was all very fuddy-duddy and an example of bad, inaccessible language.

It pains me to say this, as I’m genuinely a big fan of Dave and think he’s usually bang on the money, but I’m going to disagree with him. I think the rail industry not only gets a pass to use this undeniably weird language, but that is should be encouraged.

Backstory: few things in life have been so revolutionary to society as the railways. Before then, we couldn’t even decide on what time it was from town to town. The railways fundamentally changed the way we operate as a society, as a culture, even as human beings. I’m shortcutting it a bit – go google it if you don’t believe me – but basically this gives it some bragging rights. And, rights aside, I think we should allow it to retain its heritage. By losing the specific langauge choices like ‘station-stop’ and ‘alight’ we lose part of our history. It would be another step in the global homogenisation of our lives. And that’s something I’m very much not a fan of.

If you like, the railways choosing to retain this language is their version of personality branding, and I think that here it’s played right. It's a connection to our history and heritage and should be celebrated and encouraged.

So, sorry Dave. I still love you. And I’m absolutely not brave enough to tag him in this abysmally ill-thought-out ramble.

From a cynical marketing perspective, one could say it invokes the cultural memory of British trains just always being a bit late and a bit shit (#privatisationdoesn’twork), thus lowering people’s expectations and thus the number of complaints. But that’s bollocks. That’s not why they do it. They do it coz it’s the language of the railway, and I’m 100% behind preserving that heritage.

However, the hated homogenisation has already begun. The decline is already happening. I was standing at the station last month and a voice came on and said “Will all customers...”. This immediately got my blood up. Customer? I’m a passenger. Not a customer. A passenger. As I board your machine and put my travel plans (and, y’know, my life) in your hands, don’t talk to me like I’m buying a bunch of fucking grapes. Let me guess, some consultant bought some software that only said 'customer', or there was a management change and the people who use this critical national infrastucture that was stolen from us, are now thought of as 'just customers'.

Oooooooh, alright, whilst I’m here, this really fucks me off too: the first half that ‘customer’ announcement was a computer-generated voice saying ?“I am sorry for the delay...” Oh are you now?! No, you’re a fucking computer, there is no I. You cannot be sorry for anything. Feel free to apologise on behalf of the company with a ‘we’, but you are a machine recording. I imagine some fat-brained marketing exec said “It’ll mean more to people if it sounds like it’s coming from a person – get that computer to say ‘I’”. When what they fail to grasp is: people who don’t think about this stuff don’t give a shit what personal pronoun it uses, where as people like me, people who notice such differences, think much less of you for being conniving little shitbags.

I'm reminded of a phrase that's so hauntingly and guttingly accurate that once you hear it, it changes your life. Or at least it changed mine. It's applicable to every area of life you care to think about, in any situation or scenario. Are you ready?

"Nothing works; no-one cares"

Dispiritingly accurate innit.

Right. I’m going to have a little lay down. I’ll try to make my next article less sweary, but no promises.