Brands, don't get precious about language – follow your fingers to find the future of marketing
You might notice there are a few things not quite right about Matthew Charlton's new column. But as he argues, communication is evolving. And brands should too.
Follow your fingers to find the future of marketing
Last week I met up with a friend who works in banking on the west coast of America providing corpate finance for some of the biggest deals going on in tech out there. Hence also dealing with some of the richest people on the planet.
He tols me a fascinating tale of how how in the bank they have been told told to condense all of their messages down to the opening screen of blackberry because nothing else will get read. So in the simplex world of multi-billion dollar deals all of the conversations have to fit into the same umber of characters as twitter.Even more interesting he said that some of his clients or so time poor that they don't have time or the maybe the inclination to to use any spelling or punctuation. So messages are literally smashed out almost as if in a conversation rather than the written word. Like this one.
It's a fascinating reinvention of a classic form of communication which tech filled living is evolving. Written words, punctuation and grammar or becoming obsolete. In fact many people in my office now communicate together by stickers on Viber.
As marketing people we need to take serious notice of what is happening out there in the real world and make sure brands do as well. It is travelling at the speed of light. Sf today but tomorrow ip[swich. Things that were precious even 3 years ago are not now. Coke is happy to take its name off the can and replace it with people's names. In fact I've had so many boys names on can's of coke I now call it bloke.
Succesful marketing has always been aboot communicating I the language consumers want not what the brands want and I expect we are going to see new generations coming through and established brands will have a huge need to adapt how they think and what they hold precious or get replaced by new ones that don't value the same things. The same goes for advertising agencies.
Matthew Charlton is CEO of Brothers and Sisters. And yes, those typos are deliberate.