Clichés can be verbal as well as visual. Last month, Bruno Bouchet examined overused images; this month he casts his eye over hackneyed phrases.
Writing communications for financial services is tricky. There are very limited claims that can be made. Caveat terms like “potential returns”, and legal reminders that sharemarkets can go down as well as up, are important. However, that doesn’t mean that other terms should be trotted out without any real thought as to their value or impact. Phrases that are over-familiar allow a reader to assume they already know what you’re trying to say and so turn off from your message; so it’s important to avoid terms that have been worn as smooth as some of the following.
Tailored Solutions
It’s not just financial services that are guilty of offering “tailored solutions”, but the industry does love using them. A chemistry lecturer friend of mine always asks, “How do you sew liquid?” To him, a solution is “a gas, liquid or solid dispersed homogeneously in a liquid”. The concept of individualised products or services that are adjusted to each client’s needs is a really positive one, and the term does offer a neat shorthand for that; but it is so overused and under-substantiated it’s become meaningless. Few companies explain how their solutions are tailored. The general obsession with providing “solutions” rather than products or services is also wearing very thin.
We’re passionate about…
There was a time when passion meant intense, even excessive feelings. It was a term of wild abandon that bordered on being a negative. Now it’s a requirement for individuals and companies to be “passionate” about what they do, even if it’s structural market analysis or producing paper clips. It’s become a blandly ubiquitous term that means nothing. Using words like “determination”, “rigour”, “belief”, or “commitment” instead can offer real force without falling into cliché territory.
Your one-stop shop
This phrase is like the proverbial bad penny. Every time that I think it’s finally disappeared from communications, someone drags it out of the cliché cupboard and dusts it off. For financial advice firms offering a comprehensive range of services, it is a tempting phrase; but it is the company equivalent of describing yourself as a “jack of all trades”. It suggests a cheap supermarket, not quality specialisation. Sadly, I have once seen it combined with another term on this list where a company described itself as a “one-stop shop of tailored solutions”.
Making your money work as hard as you do
This is another phrase that has itself been worked so hard it’s collapsed at the coalface. It tries to humanise money by relating financial services to human toil; but beneath the phrase lie some assumptions we should be careful of. Usually, making someone work as hard as you do is an act of resentment – “If I’m working hard, then I’m going to damn well make sure Danny Dollar works hard too.” This isn’t an emotion most companies want to trigger in their audience. Maybe I’m overanalysing the phrase, but regardless, it’s overused.
We’re different
This phrase makes me reach for my red marker pen, cross it out and write “show, don’t tell!” in the margin. Telling people your company is different simply doesn’t work. You need to give them an example of how you are different and let your audience decide for themselves. Invariably the phrase is used to suggest a difference that isn’t much of one. I’ve lost count of the number of financial advice firms that claim to be “different” because they charge on a “fee-for-service” basis. It’s an important message, but really it isn’t that “different”.
Super [solutions] for your retirement
Any headline about superannuation that has the word “super” as an adjective is a shortcut to “Clichétown”. It’s a hard one to resist because there are so few really positive words that you’re allowed to use in financial services. Terms like “spectacular”, “perfect”, “brilliant”, “ideal” all send ASIC into a compliance tizz, so it may seem unfair to rule out “super” as a descriptor. If you’re going to use “super”, it has to be something really clever that might raise a smile – “super solutions” doesn’t cut it.
As each year passes, phrases fall in and out of fashion (in 2008-09 it was “turbulent times”) but a few perennial favourites, like these, seem to endure. By using words your audience don’t expect, you can avoid them skimming your message – in fact, you’re halfway to getting your message through.
If it helps avoid clichés, keep this sentence in mind: “We’re passionate about being a one-stop shop of tailored super solutions that make your money work as hard as you do.”
Bruno Bouchet is creative director of Wrap Creative – www.wrapcreative.com.au
