MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
OMG, LOL, exclamation marks - the way brands speak to us has changed a lot in just the last decade. Darian Woods, host of The Indicator podcast from Planet Money, experienced this when ordering a pair of chino pants recently. Woods and cohost Adrian Ma have more.
DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: So the other day, Adrian, I bought some extremely ordinary pants. They were plain navy chinos from J.Crew.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: (Laughter) As opposed to unusual pants?
WOODS: They were not going to win any awards for novelty.
MA: OK, so you were in the market for some classic, you know, preppy American clothes at reasonable prices.
WOODS: When my order arrived, I got this email. Subject line, best news ever - your order has arrived. Psst, check your mailbox, doorstep, wherever. And there were three exclamation marks here.
MA: (Laughter).
WOODS: We hope you really, really love it.
MA: Wow. That's like a, like, uncomfortably personal tone to take from, like, a marketing email.
WOODS: It would make sense if it was, like, selling ice cream or something.
MA: Yeah (laugher).
WOODS: But it was just kind of incongruous to what I thought the brand was about.
JOE BURNS: This is something that I've been calling Your Cool Friend TM.
WOODS: So brand strategist Joe Burns thinks J.Crew is part of a wider plague.
BURNS: It's a tone of voice, a type of personality that more and more brands are adopting. They're trying to make it feel that, you know, they're just relatable. They're your friend but slightly cooler. The coolest one of your friends is what they want to be.
MA: Your Cool Friend TM.
WOODS: Every brand speaking like it's your cool best friend.
BURNS: You go back 10 years, and you'd have brands like Old Spice being this kind of crazy dude on a horse.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Hello, ladies. Look at your man. Now back to me. Now back at your man. Now back to me. Sadly...
WOODS: Or you'd have one of my favorite brands, The Economist. You know, they had this really austere tone of voice with - you know, it kind of sounded like an MBA grad who read a dozen books before breakfast.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HENRY KISSINGER: Good evening.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Good evening.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: It's Henry Kissinger. Ready for a good chat?
WOODS: Brands used to have a tone of voice that was designed to be distinctive and to cut through and to be really noticeable to consumers.
MA: Yeah and then came social media and the rise of Your Cool Best Friend TM.
BURNS: All of this, I think, started off with the likes of Wendy's. So Wendy's on Twitter were one of the first brands to really employ this tone.
MA: Around 2017, Wendy's ditched its polite corporate voice on Twitter. It roasted customers and started talking trash to McDonald's in the comments.
WOODS: Yeah. So, like, a customer would tweet, is it shameful to be eating Wendy's food while sitting in a McDonald's parking lot? And Wendy's would tweet back, you're probably raising the property value, TBH.
MA: Is this cool? Or is this just kind of, like, snarky?
WOODS: It's snarky and cool.
MA: Now, Joe, he says he isn't criticizing the pioneers of this voice.
BURNS: But what I do feel like is that this tone of voice has become so pervasive, it's kind of become the new generic. And it's lost its cool edge because every brand starts to speak like that.
MA: Joe thinks this kind of witty tone became popular with brands because it boosts its ability to get shares and likes and repost on social media.
BURNS: What does immediately very well, it tends to be that relatable tone of voice. The problem there is you're already talking to an audience who's engaged with your brand, but there isn't necessarily the data that backs up that that tone of voice is going to also work for new customers, too.
MA: We're your cool friends. I'm Adrian Ma.
WOODS: And I'm Darian Woods, also your friend - questionable, though, whether I'm cool - NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF BONKERS BEAT CLUB'S "HIGH ENERGY BAD ATTITUDE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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