Rory Sutherland's Blog

Rory Sutherland

An online game I part-invented a few years ago invited players to compile a list of words only women use. Pelmet*, Hectic, Frantic and Ruched were all frequent submissions ; Ramekin was, I think, another.

I would be grateful for a list of words only men use (suggestions below, please).

And, while we are at it, what about a list of words only copywriters use? (Has anyone, ever, unironically referred to "Toilet Tissue"?) Or, more interesting still, a list of words copywriters never use?

And that's when it gets interesting.

I must admit, 17 years as a copywriter sometimes feels like a protracted visit to a respectable maiden aunt - where you have a strong urge to swear the moment you leave. The copywriter rarely gets to use 95% of the adjectives in the English language - for the reason that they're nasty. Outside a charity account, words like "Fetid" or "Pustular" don't get much airtime.

Nor, unsurprisingly, does the word "But".

You see an advertisement is largely there to deliver unqualified praise. It has no room for buts, howevers or thenagains, any more than for words like fetid.

A famous exception: "Volvos - they're boxy but they're good" was seen as proof of the writer's insanity.

Another famous exception - "Reassuringly expensive" also explicitly tackles a negative.

Most ads don't do this. Perhaps more should try. After all, you establish a certain plausibility by acknowledging that the purchase involves a trade-off.

Imagine for a moment that we weren't beset by clients who were desperate to see every inch or second of an ad devoted to an encomium of praise for their products. Would more copywriters, left to their own devices, start using the word "but"?

I ask this because, at time of writing, any advertising 2.0 event will contain a bar-chart showing the various sources of information we most trust to help us make a purchase decision.

Salesmen in shops, tramps, relatives, friends, zoophiliacs, the occupants of mental institutions: all of them seem to score more highly than "advertising".

Perhaps we should spend a moment asking why.

Okay, so our advice is commercially biased, it's true. But then so is a salesman's.

Yet a salesman, along with everyone else outside advertising has this one feature in common - they use the word "But"? "It's not the fastest car in the world, but it's reliable....."

Spend a few minutes listening to people talk about their holidays, their cars, their favourite wine or their favourite films. Ask them for a recommendation. Somewhere they'll always use the word "But".

It's expensive/not too everyone's taste/fifty miles further/prone to midges/not quite as pretty as Tuscany/slightly dangerous.... BUT - and then there follows the USP.

People aren't fools. They know that almost every purchase decision nowadays involves a trade-off. Sometimes I even suspect that decision-making actually requires a trade-off to make it satisfying. Many people who set out to spend £5000 on a painting will feel oddly quite cheated if they find one they really like for £2000.

We love making trade-offs. Stark & Stelios (where you fly easyJet and stay in a £300 hotel) and Prada & Primark are multi-brand versions of the same phenomenon. It's the joy of solving value equations in our heads. It's what makes an easyJet booking rather interesting.... "it means getting up at 6am but it saves £90." Or buying on eBay - "This bloke has a slightly dodgy feedback rating and the manual's missing - but it's really cheap."

If we love our purchases to involve a little value artithmetic, should our advertising not acknowledge this more often? Would people pay more serious attention if our ads occasionally just seemed more like, er, the truth?

This question goes hand in hand with Russell Davies's criticism of the Single-Minded Proposition or USP - which assumes a level of condensed, over-simplified (and boring) argument rarely found in real life decisions. As Russell remarks, "Noone ever says of a film, 'I enjoyed that - it was really simple'."

If we wish our advertising to enjoy the same levels of trust currently accorded to salesmen, perhaps a few more dual-minded propositions would help.

The truth, after all, is rarely simple. My wife says it can often be quite hectic. 

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* It should be noted that the word Pelmet may be used by men exclusively when prefixed by the word "Pussy" to denote a very short skirt.