Talk The Talk: Use Conversational Language.
Sainsbury's have a Twitter account. They presumably think it will help them engage in conversations with their customers on a human level. But do their customers really want to talk to "colleagues"?
When seeking to engage the external (aka real) world, don't use the alienating internal language of the corporation. Just say "talk to us".
posted by john dodds @ 1:07 AM
4 Comments:
Completely agree. I find PA announcements in and around public transport are particularly rich in meaningless (or at best confusing) jargon. The announcers at London Bridge tube station regularly speak of "the Northern gate-line", which presumably refers to the line of ticket barriers that lead to the Northern Line. Unfortunately that only really makes sense to people intimately familiar with the geography of the station; to the rest of us it just sounds like a mistake.
I grabbed a sandwich from the Pret a Manger chain the other day and was rather put-off by their marketing copy. Their slogan is ""Just-Made"" (double quotations because they use them), which I think is their idea of being cute and conversational but to mean seems questionable: Yeah, this sandwich was "Just-Made"...
Plenty of talkative nonsense on their packaging. Going too casual can be obnoxious. Sometimes I just want to know the ingredients, not how the CEO is feeling.
Just out of interest - and I do agree with what you're saying - but do you actually think the general masses [1] notice [2] give a shit?
As the other commenters have suggested, I think people do notice from time to time. They don't obsess about it - nor do I - but it's such an easy error to avoid and is a reflection of a deeper malaise. I think people sense that.
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