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When Change is Good

According to an article in the New York Times (February 29, 2008), “more than one in 100 American adults are behind bars.” It sometimes seems like our legislators are hellbent on turning us into a nation of jailbirds.

Rocket scientists, alas, are a much rarer species. This can have embarrassing consequences for those of us who make a living as writers, as I discovered to my chagrin back in January 2002.

Back then I was lead writer for the hardware product marketing websites at Apple. I’d written a page for the PowerBook G4 that extolled, among other things, its quantum increase in processing power.

This was ignorance on my part. My lapse apparently amused a fellow named Lars at Mathematica, and he sent someone he knew at Apple an email.

Here’s what the snippet that was passed on to me said: “Could someone please teach the guys at Apple elementary physics? A quantum is the smallest possible energy increment. So they just pulled the most minimal increase in processing power possible.”

Oops. Lars was right, of course. My bad.

Now in case you don’t know it, besides making you feel like a dolt, emails that point out mistakes in product marketing copy can create panic at some companies.

Depending on who you work for, the typical knee-jerk overreaction could range from emergency meetings to reprimands from editors, or — in extreme cases — a hysterical outburst from the Chicken Little head of corporate PR, whose team has been fully mobilized and placed on red alert.

But Apple is a different kind of company. Our product marketing managers, bless them, were aware that web copy isn’t set in stone and can be changed in an instant. The phrase “quantum increase” was changed to “quantum leap,” and the PowerBook went on selling like the proverbial hotcakes.

My point is that until Lars showed me the error of my ways, idiots like myself (and I’m not alone), thought a quantum increase meant a huge increase. That’s because most of us don’t learn the meanings of words and phrases from a dictionary.

We get a sense of meaning from context. This works pretty good for the most part, but there are times when the sound or tone of some words or phrases may suggest a completely different or even opposite meaning.

For example, when people say things like, “Debbie is gung ho to get started,” they’re using gung ho to mean the person has a can-do attitude or is highly motivated to do something.

Fact is, gung ho was originally Chinese for work together. It was introduced into the American lexicon in 1942 by Evans Fordyce Carlson, an old China hand who made gung ho (as in work together) the motto of the 2nd Marine Raider battalion.

But the sound of gung ho (and maybe also its initial association with Carlson’s Raiders) suggested an entirely different meaning. And that is the meaning it has today in popular usage.

In The Problem of Style, a collection of lectures delivered at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1922, John Middleton Murry noted how popular usage sets in motion the process he called smoothing the coinage of language.

Popular usage can change what a word means, so that over time some words and phrases can even take on the meaning of their antonyms.

Watch the news anchors on television and sooner or later you’ll hear one of them talking earnestly about towns that have been “decimated,” obviously intending to convey the news that the population in said towns had been wiped out almost to the last man.

As it happens, the word decimate is derived from the Latin decimare, meaning to take a tenth part from. The strict definition used to be, to kill one in every ten of. But decimate sounds like it means a total massacre, and that’s the way it is most frequently used.

Many dictionaries have bowed to popular usage and list two definitions of the word decimate: to destroy and kill a large proportion of, as well as its original meaning (to kill one in every ten of).

Speaking for myself, I’m not inclined to be stampeded by the objections of a pedantic person. The history of language shows that in any dispute over proper usage, the vernacular wins every time. But when you’re dead wrong, as I was with my PowerBook copy, the best thing to do is correct your mistake and enjoy the rest of your life. Because when you indulge yourself as a writer and allow your copy to stray too far ahead of popular usage, the ad itself could become an issue and a distraction.

Few people reading this are likely to recall the line Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. There was an outcry from academe when it first appeared. Sticklers for grammar professed outrage at Young & Rubicam for its lapse in using “like” instead of “as.” But Y&R’s copy chief George Gribbin stood his ground; that was the way most people spoke, he said, and he was right.

The moral of the story? Change is good — sometimes, anyway.

Copyright © 2008 The Graham Agency. All rights reserved.

Dead Guys Finish Last

How important is a brand’s heritage? I’d say it depends on the product category. With automobiles, for instance, evidence indicates that a brand’s heritage does play a part in the buying decision.

For a now rapidly dwindling segment of elderly car buyers who fondly recall the grand old General Motors (GM) brand in its heyday, a boulevard barge with a plush interior and a Cadillac badge on its nose may still be the ultimate statement of luxury.

Back in 2003 Buick, a struggling brand then in its 100th year, tried to evoke its heritage by resurrecting GM’s flamboyant automobile stylist Harley Earl (1893-1969).

For reasons that were never made clear, GM apparently thought it had an appealing spokesman in Earl, whose dubious design legacy included such touches as rakish tailfins, lots of chrome, and two-tone paint.

The McCann-Erickson ads for Buick with John Diehl (Detective Larry Zito on Miami Vice) as the fedora-wearing ghost of Harley Earl were embarrassing. They bombed, of course, and Buick sales continued their slide.

It was a questionable strategy — and not just because of Earl’s tailfins-and-chrome reputation or the fact that his star had waned after consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, a hugely influential book that excoriated automobile designers for their preoccupation with looks at the expense of safety.

Perhaps the real reason Buick’s campaign failed is that history is not America’s favorite subject: 45 years after Harley Earl’s retirement, few people knew who he was.

It wasn’t the first time an obscure old guy had been featured in automobile advertising. Nissan had launched its Mr. K campaign back in 1996. The ads featured a stand-in for a sprightly octogenarian named Yukata Katayama (also known as Mr. K).

The Chiat/Day advertising campaign for Nissan starred actor Dale Ishimoto, a decorated Japanese-American veteran who’d served with the storied 442nd Regimental Combat Team in World War II. In the ads, Ishimoto played Mr.K, who’d had, among other things, the good sense to rechristen the Datsun Fairlady as the Datsun 240Z when it was first introduced in the U.S. in 1970.

Mr. Katayama was revered by a devoted coterie of diehard American fans who fondly recalled his efforts on behalf of the sturdy little cars made by Datsun, the name under which Nissan cars and trucks had originally been sold in the United States (the ads, by the way, didn’t attempt to trace the brand’s lineage, and didn’t mention the fact that the name Datsun was changed to Nissan in the U.S. in 1981).

The assumptions underlying Chiat/Day’s creative strategy appear to have been that millions of car-buyers would know who Mr. Katayama was, and that they were familiar with the story of what he had done to establish the Nissan brand in the U.S.

Unfortunately for Nissan they didn’t, and sales predictably plummeted.

The question is, even if the car-buying public had known who Mr. K was, would they have cared?

Copyright © 2008 The Graham Agency. All rights reserved.

Made in Japan

Not so long ago the words Made in Japan and Japanese could be used interchangeably. When used to refer to manufactured goods, they meant practically the same thing. Not anymore.

When the Japanese emerged from the rubble of World War II, Made in Japan stood for shoddy products, like toys that fell apart.

Then Japanese manufacturers learned statistical quality control methods from W. Edwards Deming, a curmudgeonly professor of statistics at New York University who’d been invited to Japan to conduct seminars for corporate executives in 1950.

Deming (1900-1993), who’d grown up dirt poor in a tar-paper shack in Powell, Wyoming, and had gone on to earn a doctorate in mathematical physics at Yale, had a rigorous approach to quality control.

His method was (if you’ll pardon a huge oversimplification) to keep a careful tally of the number of product defects, figure out what caused them, fix the problems, measure how much the quality improved after that, and then keep refining the manufacturing process to get it as close to zero-defect perfection as possible.

By the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese had mastered Dr. Deming’s methods well enough to capture huge swathes of the U.S. market for everything from automobiles to cameras and consumer electronics.

Anecdotal evidence helped: Over time, people noticed that those boxy little cars from Datsun (now Nissan) were built so tough, you practically had to beat them with a stick to make them stop running.

I wasn’t an early convert to anything made in Japan myself, especially not cars. I’d always been a great believer in American iron.

I’d had a 1978 Chevy Nova that never gave me any trouble, and I expected all American cars to run that good. But then I bought my first lemon, and then a second and a third.

I had a run of bad luck with a Cadillac, a Chevy Malibu and finally a Ford Taurus that died of catastrophic transmission failure before I could finish paying for it.

I’d also driven enough American rental cars on road trips — and had experienced enough problems with them — to grow disenchanted with U.S. automobile brands.

It was finally time to take that big step and risk buying a Japanese car. I’ve never had cause to regret it: My 1990 Mazda Miata has a little over 288,000 miles (463,491 kilometers) on its odometer and still runs good.

My little red Miata would have had a lot more miles on it by now if I hadn’t clocked 146,000 miles (234,964 kilometers) on my 1997 BMW Z3. (To digress at length: yes, I fell for the German engineering line, although I must admit that BMW’s advertising is no longer quite so arrogantly off-putting as it used to be when the account was handled by the agency formerly known as Prince — uh, I mean Ammirati & Puris, a creative boutique that, through a series of mergers and acquisitions, disappeared into Lowe Worldwide. Back in the 1980s the BMW print ads used to read like they’d been written by angry little men in bowties. I have no way of proving this, but I could have sworn those ads gave BMW owners a bad attitude and subtly influenced their road manners; it was almost as if they’d drive their boxy little cars, thinking, “Get out of my way — can’t you see I’m driving a BMW?”).

Anyway, back to Japan: These days not all Japanese products are made in Japan. Japanese automobiles, cameras and consumer electronic products are manufactured all over the world — including the U.S.

And there’s mounting anecdotal evidence that that has had adverse effects on the perceived quality of Japanese products. Some Japanese cars, for instance, have been found to have so many glitches that they’ve slipped in J.D. Power consumer satisfaction surveys.

Ultimately it comes down to the question of a brand’s provenance. Will U.S. consumer perceptions change, and will customers eventually wise up and learn to distinguish between products that are actually manufactured in Japan and those that are Japanese in the sense that they are Japanese brands manufactured in other countries?

What does this augur for Japanese brands down the road?

Copyright © 2008 The Graham Agency. All rights reserved.

St. Patrick’s Day

Chances are, a few years down the road someone will ask you what life was like before the Internet came along. I don’t know about you, but I’ll be ready with my St. Patrick’s Day story.

The story actually begins two days before St. Patrick’s Day, on March 15, 1986. I’d just arrived in Los Angeles on a KLM flight from Amsterdam.

When I hauled my suitcase over to the Frontier Airlines counter to confirm my seat for a connecting flight to Denver, the clerk asked me where I was headed. Grand Junction, Colorado, I told him.

“So how come you bought a ticket only to Denver?” the man said.

“I didn’t know Grand Junction had an airport,” I explained, never having heard of Walker Field (now Grand Junction Regional Airport). “I’m fixing to take a Greyhound there from Denver.”

The man shook his head pityingly and wrote “GJ OK” across the ticket with a green felt marker, took my suitcase, and told me to board the plane.

When I asked him how much I had to pay to fly the extra 250 miles, he waved me off, saying, “St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner.”

And so it was: two days later, I went over to the Quincy Bar & Grill in downtown Grand Junction and celebrated in an appropriate manner. Frontier Airlines went out of business a few months after that (the name, however, is back; when some former Frontier executives formed a new airline in 1994, they named it Frontier Airlines).

Anyway, that’s my St. Patrick’s Day story. It reminds me of what life was like before the Internet. Because back then there was no way of finding out — short of calling a travel agent (remember them?) or asking a ticket clerk at an airline counter — if there were flights to a particular city.

As for what airlines flew there and at what times, a travel agent or airline rep would be happy to tell you. All you had to do was pick up the phone and call a travel agency or an airline to get that information. And if you were smart, you’d have a pencil and paper ready to write it all down.

Copyright © 2008 The Graham Agency. All rights reserved.