Braggin' (or How to Blow Up Sales)

Folks got no use for braggin'.

— Jimmy Shirl

Playing with adjectives is like playing with dynamite.

You can blow up potential sales.

The copy pitching National Retail Federation's annual convention ("Retail's Big Show") illustrates the hazard:

The three day event offers unparalleled education, collegial networking with 34,500 of your newest friends, and an enormous Expo Hall full of technologies and solutions.

Do the adjectives make the nouns that describe the event more vivid?

You decide. In my view:

• I understand the unparalleled education isn't a geometry lesson; but—besides being without peer—what is the attraction? Is the education useful? Practical? Advanced? Intensive? Digestible?
  
  
• Collegial networking sure sounds more attractive than its opposite (adversarial networking). But, practically speaking, how do you network with 34,500 people in three days? That would require—provided you never slept, ate, or took potty breaks—speaking with each attendee no more than 7.5 seconds. That's a tough way to make newest friends.
  
  
• An enormous Expo Hall also sounds more attractive than it opposite (a puny one). But how enormous is it? Bigger than Dallas? Than Ben Hur? Than a breadbox? And does every attendee equate vastness with productivity and time well spent?

It's safe to say the adjective-slinging copywriter strove, not to sell, but to please her client. Whatever happened to modesty, restraint, sincerity, dignity and good taste?

Here's the same copy adjective-free:

The event offers education, networking, and an Expo Hall full of technologies and solutions.

That's certainly clear, more sincere, and less preposterous. But does it sell?

The answer: it doesn't unsell.

Adjectives like unparalled, collegial, newest and enormous unsell, because they lack credence.

Nixing the adjectives and substituting stronger nouns and verbs would improve the copy's salesmanship:

Retail's Big Show arms you with insights, enriches your relationships, and introduces you to hundreds of technologies and solutions.

If that's not to your liking, substituting specifics instead would strengthen the copy's salesmanship:

Retail's Big Show equips you with a choice of over 125 educational sessions, countless opportunities to network with colleagues, and access to technologies and solutions from 490 providers.

And if that's too dry for you, using emotionally laden adjectives, instead of bombastic ones, would work:

Retail's Big Show outfits you for survival, delivering three full days of trend- and strategy-sessions designed for tomorrow's retail winners... countless opportunities to widen and renew your professional network... and nearly 500 chances to test-drive the tech innovations your competitors are considering—this very moment.

Young at Heart

Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you're young at heart.

— Carolyn Leigh

A former association executive's dream comes true this week when the American Writers Museum opens in Chicago.

The museum is the brainchild of Malcolm O’Hagan, who ran NEMA—the National Electrical Manufacturers Association—from 1991 to 2005.

The museum treats visiting littérateurs to a smorgasboard of great American writers, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Harper Lee, Mark Twain to Maya Angelou, Billy Wilder to Bob Dylan.

O’Hagan undertook the project eight years ago, after a trip to the Dublin Writers Museum.

He left the Dublin museum wondering why there was no equivalent among the 17,500 museums in America.

Within a year, he started a nonprofit, whose board would eventually raise $10 million to found one.

Raising that amount was no cakewalk.

During the seven years required, O'Hagan sent over 39,000 emails to donors.

"When I embarked upon this mission I made a ten year commitment," O'Hagan says in an interview with Tin House.

"Nothing worth doing is easy if you want to do it right."

Content is Everything (or Why CMOs Fail)

Content is king.

— Bill Gates

CMOs tend to survive only a tad over two years.

There's a reason. While they're supposed to be leaders, most are overpaid closet organizers.

Instead of generating demand, they busy themselves with rearranging the company's "digital assets," so salespeople and customers can find them.

Big Data is their latest space-saving gadget. With it, they can go to town again rearranging the assets, this time in hyper-segmented, algorithm-based bins.

Meanwhile, salespeople still spend 40% of their time compiling their own deal-closing content, and 60% of customers think Marketing's content is crap.

CMOs, I have news for you: Marketing isn't logistics, or distribution, or document management. Marketing is content. And content is everything.

If you want to succeed, focus on quality content:

1. Know the buyers
2. Understand Sales' pipeline
3. Create content aligned with both

What are you waiting for? Your next pink slip?

Scrapes on a Plane

It's National Etiquette Week—the ideal time to start a midair brawl.

Will the surge in incivility on planes and in airports dampen meeting travel?

It doesn't take much to do so.

The SARS epidemic clobbered tradeshow attendance in the early 2000s. (I can recall vividly that the epidemic was the sole topic of discussion at UFI's 2003 summer meeting).

Unlike SARS, incivility is a uniquely American disease.

When it comes to air travel, it seems we have two modes: fight or flight.

But there are other options.

According to Expedia's 2017 Annual Airplane Etiquette Study, the 10 leading causes of scrapes on a plane are:

• Rear seat-kicking
• Inattentive parents
• Odiferous passengers
• Audio-insensitive passengers
• Intoxicated passengers
• Incessant chatting
• Queue jumping
• Seat reclining
• Armrest hogging
• Smelly food consumption

How do American passengers respond? According to the study:

• 62% alert flight attendants when provoked
• 33% endure the offense in silence
• 13% video-record the offender
• 10% confront the offender
• 5% complain on social media
• 3% shame the offender on social media

Women Who Work

Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
She ain't no lady; she's my wife.

— Joseph Weber

Ivanka Trump's recent line extension into toilet paper has prompted me to wonder where we get some of the words we use for women.

Old English used the word wif to mean woman. (Other old languages—including Saxon, Norse, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and German—used a similar-sounding word.) It's from this word we get wife.

Old English also used the word wifman, which meant spouse. It's from this word we get woman.

To denote a high-born woman, Old English used hlafdige, which stemmed from two words: hlaf, meaning loaf (as in bread), and dige, meaning to knead (as in dough).

The hlafdige oversaw a household of servants, the hlafaetas, or loaf eaters.

The lady, you might say, was a loafer. 

Which brings us full circle back to Ivanka (although she certainly doesn't need any dough).