Whose responsibility are 'the messages'?

Long ago, back in my days as a wage slave, I remember being regularly told by a senior partner of the firm I worked for in a (somewhat junior) marketing role that it was my job to get 'the messages' right.

What frustrated me was the fact that he seemed to be abdicating responsibility for knowing what 'the messages' should be. Certainly, a marketer and copy writer should be abe to craft 'the messages' about the business in a way that conveys their meaning clearly in ways that are relevant and appealing to the target audience. But I really had to question the idea that an owner of the business doesn't have responsiility for knowing what 'the messages' should be to start with.

Key marketing messages need to convey what the business is about, its values and ethos, the benefits and advantages it offers its customers, and ther personality of the business. If these are not the concern of a business owner it hardly seems fair to place the responsibility onto an employee. (That said, this was an outfit who thought it appropriate to expect me to craft them the words for an equal opportunities policy as an alternative to actually having an equal opportunities policy so there was no point me being surprised).

When my copy writing services are called on I generally face one of two scenarios:

1. A clued up client who knows what 'the messages' are but is aware that they need some help in conveying them clearly for their customers and other audiences.
   
2. A client who really doesn't know what they want to say and hopes a copy writer will decide for them!

The first is a straightforward situation; a marketing background can make the task even easier. The second is one that calls for some business and marketing input - but that really is a separate task and often quite a significant one - what started out looking like a copy writing assignment can become a review of their entire marketing strategy and that, of course, an entirely different task but one that might well be necessary to enable 'the messages' to be written at all.

Francine Pickering
Copy writing from a marketing point of view

Keeping it simple, keeping it clear - copy writing for translation

Another interesting copy writing challenge - a sales brochure for a translation company.

An important part of the brief is that the brochure will need to be translated into other languages (obviously!) so I need to avoid any culturally-specific expressions, metaphors and such that won't translate with the same meaning or with an easily identifiable equivalent.

Not that I'm prone to flowery excesses but it's added a different level of discipline to keeping the meaning clear.

Francine Pickering
Clarity Marketing Ltd.

What difference can persuasive copy make?

This past few days I've been writing copy for a GPs' practice - re-writing a practice newsletter and putting together the first issue of their refreshed newsletter. The work is part of a wider range of marketing consultancy that I'm providing and it's proving to be an interesting exercise.

I attended a meeting of practice manager, doctor, nurses and health assistants to discuss their series of health promotion campaigns and how we can feed these into the various communications channels we'll be using. They voiced a concern about how it was possible to get more of their patients involved in these campaigns and the role that the communications tools would play.

My task will be to make these pieces, as I put it at the time, "less instructional and more persuasive." Whether they will have a noticable impact on getting the harder to reach elements of their pateint base involved is yet to be seen. It will be an interesting one to watch.