Transcript

CHRIS WEST

We use a variety of linguistic tools in our process, and I think this makes us different to what a lot of creative agencies are doing. So, in the 20 years I worked in advertising, there would come a point where I had to stand up in front of the CEO and say ‘This is one of the words we want to use about your brand’, or ‘This is the end line that we want to use about your brand’, and the CEO would say ‘Chris, why’s that?’ And I’d have to shrug my shoulders and say ‘I’m the writer, that’s what I think.’

And we were in a situation a couple of years ago where we … I had to stand up in front of the CEO of a multinational hotel chain. And he’d asked us, specifically, ‘What are the three words that we should use internally to describe our brand?’ And we presented a word, and he said ‘No, that’s not it!’ And we said ‘That’s okay, we have this other idea for a word.’ And he said ‘Hey, that’s interesting. Why that word?’ And because we knew about corpus linguistics, we were able to say ‘Well one of our great linguists has gone off and looked at four-and-a-half billion words in American English and seen how this word is used. And it’s most commonly used in this context. And, so, whilst there may be 12 different opinions about this word in the room with you now sir, this is how the outside world thinks of this word. And when you say this word this is how they’re used to hearing it.’

But I’ll give you an example of how we’ve used corpus linguistics recently. We were recently using text analytic software with a supermarket. And one of the themes that emerged was people’s discontent with the manager. And the typical expression would be something like ‘The manager was incompetent.’

So we asked our skilled linguists to help us understand what was in the meaning of the word ‘manager’. And, in fact, we found there are two meanings of ‘manager’. One is ‘the manager’ is almost the brand’s representative on Earth. He or she is the person who’s put there to make sure everything works properly, and to make sure all the wrinkles are smoothed out. Now, there’s another use of the word ‘manager’ – which we all experience – which is pretty much everyone in an office these days is called a manager. And it’s become a professionally hollow term.

So when I want to find the German bread on the shelf at the supermarket – which was there last week, I’m pretty sure it was – I speak to someone, and he says ‘I’m the manager, how can I help?’ And I think ‘Well, this is great. Here’s the guy that’s the brand’s representative on Earth, and he’s going to help me.’ And he doesn’t know where the German bread is. So, suddenly, I think ‘Well, hold on, he’s the guy – or she’s the guy – and they’re incompetent.’ And then my brain switches in to the other meaning of ‘manager’, which is ‘They’re not the manager. They don’t have a manager round here; everyone’s a manager. No one does anything.’

And, of course, in Britain there’s a third use of ‘the manager’, common, in everyday language, which is the ‘football manager’. And what happens to a football manager if he loses three games on the trot? He’s fired. So this manager that can’t find my German bread, my lactose-free milk, or my chocolate-covered rice cakes, he should be fired!

So what we were finding by using corpus linguistics was not just what people thought, but what people really meant and what was a deep-seated belief about this person that was being presented as a manager.

There’s another example of how we use the skills of linguistics to help our clients understand. We were asked by the manufacturer of an engine-oil lubricant to help them. Their situation was, for about 20 years, they’d been using one word in all of their marketing communications. And that word was ‘performance’. So we asked our linguistic analysis team to conduct a corpus linguistic study on what ‘performance’ meant.

And they came back with some interesting results. They said, first of all, there are slightly different meanings between British English and American English. In American English ‘performance’ means mechanical performance. So that’s good; that suits the manufacturer of an engine-oil lubricant.

In British English, ‘performance’ has another connotation, which is human performance. ‘The actor gave a good performance’, or ‘The MP’ or ‘The PM’ … ‘The prime minister was credible, they gave a good performance.’ So that works for the engine-oil manufacturer in Britain as well, because, by luck or by design, they had always included the guys from the lab in the white coat in their communications.

So there was this understanding of human performance influencing the product. But there’s another connotation now, developing about the word performance. Corpus linguistics shows that the way performance is used more and more these days, particularly over the last five years – around about the time the word performance stopped performing for our client – is in ‘performance management’. This is a term that HR departments use.

And, really, they use it in a way to say ‘This is a standard up to which you can never quite get yourself.’ Or, actually, you’re on ‘performance management’, or ‘performance measurement’, shortly before you’re fired. So whilst the engine-oil manufacturer was talking about the performance of this engine oil, and the people that do it and what it does in the machine – and they expected that to work – as soon as they said ‘performance’, someone was sitting at home going ‘Oh no, “performance management”! Oh no! That’s the stuff that happens when I get fired.’

So corpus linguistics had helped the client understand why a word that they’d been using for 20 years wasn’t suitable anymore because the meaning of the word had moved on.