Imagine

Guest post by Larner Caleb
www.larnercaleb.com

As I was thinking about the late, great John Lennon this morning (today is the 30th anniversary of his untimely death), a stream of words and phrases popped into my head; original, creative, one of a kind, rebellious to name just a few.

Then another word; Imagine.

And, because my mind jumps from nebulous pillar to tenuous post, I was reminded of a designer I often worked with at a previous agency. She told me this story of a previous copywriter she used to partner. A writer who would always start every piece of copy with the word, ‘Imagine’. See… not that tenuous after all.

‘Imagine a shower which was so luxurious, you wouldn’t want to leave.’

‘Imagine providing for your own funeral, so the ones you leave behind don’t have to.’ (FREE cliche embedded in that beauty.)

Anyway, you get the picture. That led me to thinking that it would be one of the words that would definitely be in my top 5 never-ever-use-words-upon-pain-of-a-slow-death-watching-X-Factor-re-runs. I did think about that as a title for this post, but ‘Imagine’ just seemed to be a better fit – certainly on The Drum’s homepage.

So, imagine a world without these 5 humdingers:

Passion – every man and his dog are passionate. How many sites open up with ‘passion’? We’re passionate about unblocking drains. We’re passionate about neutering your cat. Don’t use it. It’s not only bad from an SEO point of view these days, but if everyone’s saying it, why not be original and tell us what you do and why you do it so well?

Fresh – ‘Fresh’ is not fresh. It’s stale. And a ‘Fresh approach’ has been lying around in the copy cupboard so long, even the mice are turning their squeaky little noses up at it. How many of those hanging air freshener trees have you seen used as concepts? How many more pieces of fruit can we take? Any more and we’ll all be on the pan for weeks with japanese flag syndrome. No more please. Find another way to say you’re doing/launching/selling something new.

Solutions – okay, we’ve all got problems one way or another. And we probably all want them solving. But I don’t want ‘A fully automated pipe flow interruption solution’ or ‘A solutions-based approach’ to losing my love handles. I want to know how it’s going to be done, how long it will take and how much will it set me back. ‘Solutions’ just makes you add more crap as a prefix or a suffix to justify its inanity.

Provider – often teamed up with ’solutions’, this one. I don’t want a provider, thanks. I might want a plumber, a cake-baker, a barber with a good line in no-chat-whatsoever, or in desperate times, a barman who’ll serve me first time every time, but, pound-to-a-pinch-of-a-toilet-based-fertiliser-solution, I’ll never want a provider.

Imagine – don’t have your prospect merely imagining, musing or contemplating. Have them believing. In fact, even better, have them hitting that ‘Buy Now’ button so hard, their PC throws a wobbly meltdown. Imagine is just a lazy way of opening up any piece of copy, proposition or headline, so if you’re a copywriter, avoid this hackneyed method at all costs. If you’re an account handler or marketing bod on the receiving end, send it back and ask the writer to do your product or service a little more justice by at least being bothered to get out of bed.

After all, you never saw Mr. Original, John Lennon, hanging around in bed all day… oh hang on…

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There are, of course, a zillion more, un-selling-friendly words out there. And the great thing about this creative trade is that it’s all very subjective, so what are your most avoidable?

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RIP John.