Water, water everywhere

Can copy become too cute for its own good? Take a look at this:

I found it in the minibar in my hotel room in Newcastle last week. In case you can’t read the copy (are you blind or something?), it says, ‘this water is made from fruit and clouds.’

Yes, that’s right, the brand name forms a sentence with the tagline. How’s that for golly-gosh advertising innovation?

The stuff itself tasted vaguely OK - a bit like overdiluted lemon barley water, but quite inoffensive. Connoisseurs of sickly-sweet copy will not be surprised to learn that TW is a brand of Innocent Drinks, and the material on the label has clearly been written by the same blissed-out team of copywriters that writes for the core Innocent brands. At the time of writing the webpage is carrying an ad for Innocent’s orange and passion fruit smoothies, which come in bottles that have had their carbon footprint reduced by half. The copy that goes with it reads

…greener than your seasick Auntie Sue on a cross-channel ferry after a big night out at Wetherspoons

Cute. And, I suppose, a slightly nicer way of putting it than

..screws over the planet slightly less badly than the old bottles, so your middle-class conscience can rest easy about buying it rather than, for example, getting a glass of tap water and squeezing some lemon into it, you lazy, pretentious, Guardian-reading git

And what’s with the ‘..made from fruit and clouds’ business? It’s fruit juice, so obviously it’s got fruit in it. And since when did we define water as being ‘made from clouds’? Water is only ‘made’ from clouds in the same sense it’s ‘made’ from taps.¹

Using water that comes from a cloud gives the drink no greater claim to purity than any other concoction involving h2O. I don’t notice sewer inspection covers bearing the slogan ‘made from millions of tons of raw human waste… and clouds’, do you?

This drive for cuteness in copy is a trend. Although Innocent’s marketing strategy offers a particularly egregious example, it’s by no means the only one, or even the worst. I’ve occasionally bought my lunch from Pret a Manger, only to lose my appetite altogether after reading the copy on the packet.

Now, I may find this trend sick-making, and so may you (if you don’t, bugger off - I don’t want you reading my blog, you pervert) but we have to live with it. Why? Because it bloody well works. It shifts products. They wouldn’t write their copy that way if it didn’t.

You didn’t come across copy like this ten years ago, and God willing you won’t in ten years’ time. It is conversational chumminess taken to its logical extreme; the tone-of-voice (very enthusiastic, very informal, faintly authoritarian and mummy-knows-best patronising) is very ‘now’. It wouldn’t have cut it in the Thatcherite eighties. But here in the UK we’ve just spent a decade voting for a government that loves telling us what to do and what’s good for us. That isn’t a party political point: it’s just an observation about the mood of the nation at the moment.

Copy runs with the zeitgeist. That’s why writing copy, and consumer copy in particular, is about so much more than just being able to string a sentence together and fit brand values and benefits in it. You have to be able to judge the mood and the cultural temperature of your readers.

Test it. And if cute works, run with cute. However nauseous it makes you.

^{1. Taps: that’s faucets to you, Yankee brethren.}

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