Word Up
By: Mike Bennett
Tags: Language, Innovation, Culture, Brands, Growth Strategy

Innovation is critical, but ultimately, brands need to land culturally, and a considerable part of that is how language adopts and uses the brand as much as how the solution itself performs. For startups or scale-ups, services that rely on interaction, ensure your brand can “verb” as it may mean the critical difference. After all, your customers won’t search for you, or even “Bing” you; they’ll Google you.

There is a very familiar powerplay at work, and we see it everywhere. A play that happens when culture starts to tip, on mass, towards a new paradigm. From homeworking to sustainable energy to electric cars, this “culture tip” enables new players to subvert the established hierarchy. These new players seize on an innovative idea and are fast enough to exploit it.

Who, for example, would imagine Nike being challenged by a new shoe brand? but here’s Veja… a nimble (literally) sustainable shoe brand that is perfectly placed to capture the “culture tip” of sustainable, fast retail.

Again, received wisdom states, no one can challenge the dominance of the big 4 energy providers… but here’s Octopus Energy… offering sustainable energy exclusively. Banking?… Self-serve, customer first banks?! Monzo, Starling, Tide, Ana etc…. Cars? Tesla, Polestar, Lucid.

You name it, innovation has got us there, and that innovation and subsequent adoption are driven by culture… but here’s the issue. Those big established brands, whilst slow and, let's face it, sometimes institutionally stupid, have deep pockets, and guess what, they can change… and are changing.

So what happens when all cars are electric? When all energy is green? When all banking is nimble and user-centred? What makes consumers consider a product beyond satisfying a powerful need (sustainability) if all products can fulfil that need? Price? Colour? Style? Of course, it’s old fashioned brand and brand behaviour.

Would the silicon valley investment community go nuts for Prius and then Tesla, if Porsche had a zero-emissions vehicle? Maybe? But I’d bet Porsche would have cleaned up. Like all traditional auto manufacturers, Porsche came to the party very late and for various reasons; legacy production issues and investment costs amongst others. Tesla didn’t have to retool; it just started fresh. BUT Porsche and others are getting there and who’s brand packs more allure?

Brand is still such a powerful thing. I mean this in the context of human behaviour, not the world of the highly paid agencies, whose design strategy and brand materials get filed away once complete and are barely looked at again. I mean in the context of brand behaviour and audience experience.

We’re social creatures that use symbolism and language to communicate and impart meaning, from our bodies to our clothes and our use of language. Stephen Pinker in his book “The Language Instinct”, states our brains are wired for language. He writes of pidgin dialects that within a generation develop into full-blown languages blending the parent languages, so French and Spanish blend into Creole, Dutch and Portuguese mix with Malay and Khoekhoe and other southern African languages to form Afrikaans. Most languages continue to do this; it’s what defines living from dead languages.

Interestingly all forms of communication do this; we adopt words and own them to express ourselves and evolve our language constantly. This linguistic appropriation also extends to brands and is as old as the hills. People don’t vacuum clean the house, they Hoover, but interestingly they don’t Dyson the house. Different generations don’t call, they ping each other or Facetime or WhatsApp. The brand becomes a verb, and to become a verb can often be the difference between success and failure.

I discussed this point with a good friend who was bemoaning the useless UX that is Zoom and couldn’t understand its colossal success. I pointed out that all video conferencing is still primarily a mess, but Zoom’s success is many things, one of which is the power of the word Zoom itself. Everyone, post covid, Zooms, you may actually Teams or Hangout, but those words don’t trip off the tongue, or they’re clumsy as descriptors, as verbs… so we Zoom.

If you want to stay ahead of the game, innovate, disrupt… undercut and out market, but if you’re a product or service and can’t VERB, you will get overtaken by more imaginative solutions or more culturally established brands. Brands that may not VERB but do have bags of cultural significance.

We set TheCltr up specifically to look at innovative ways to drive growth and do it sustainably, finding the smartest way to connect to your audiences. Language is just one way to do that. Why not Google us, or… “LinkedIn” me.

Mike Bennett runs creative growth consultancy “TheCltr” (The Culture). He can also remember when new media was actually new.