‘Committed to’

Saying that you ‘commit’ to something gives the impression of diligence without actually, er, committing you to anything. Commitments sound firm and serious, but without concrete detail they’re just paper promises, making them ideal in situations where you want to give the impression of decisive action without the inconvenience of actually taking it.

‘Committed to’ is a staple of environmental and ethical statements where the firm wants to convey a moral stance without necessarily backing it up with action:

We are committed to reducing the environmental impact of our activities

A close relation is ‘aim to’, which evokes the businesslike setting of targets without actually specifying what those targets are – or explaining what you’ll do to achieve them.

‘Against’

Increasingly, firms feel they have to demonstrate their morality, in line with the perceived values of customers. On packaging, for example, they want to convince people that the product they’re buying is of good origin, and hasn’t been manufactured in an evil or destructive way. Unfortunately, reality sometimes gets in the way, so they have to resort to some slippery writing to muddy the waters. For example:

Against animal testing

Of course you are. Who isn’t? But that’s not the same thing as confirming that you don’t, in fact, do it. This verbless, subjectless sentence fragment cleverly floats the notion of animal testing being bad, and someone being ‘against’ it, without actually saying who that person is, or what real-world action has been taken as a result.

It’s a gamble on the probability that the inattentive customer – who’s probably reading this while they lather up the shampoo – isn’t going to think too deeply about what’s really being said. And it almost certainly works.

‘See if you can’

‘See if you can’ is a way of positioning an eye-catching outcome as inevitable, when in fact it’s all down to the reader to achieve it.

I haven’t been able to find it online, but I’m pretty sure a slogan along these lines was used to promote a ‘healthy’ breakfast cereal (possibly Special K):

See if you can lose 5lb in two months

The ads were carefully designed to foreground the desired outcome while soft-pedalling the obligations on the reader. ‘See if you can’ was set in relatively small type, while ‘Lose 5lbs in two months’ was absolutely colossal. The obvious, cynical aim was to make people think they’d lose that weight just by eating the product – rather than just see whether they could, which is something else entirely.

‘Helps to’

‘Helps to’ is a way to make a relative or partial claim in terms that make it sound absolute or total. For example, here’s a line from the packaging for Vick’s First Defence, a cold medicine:

Helps stop a cold in its tracks

As with the ‘lose weight’ line above, typography plays a part in managing the message. ‘Helps’ is fairly small, while ‘stop’ takes up the whole width of the box.

Because stopping something in its tracks is a metaphor for bringing it to a complete and final stop, that’s the impression we take away from the line. But in fact it’s completely undermined by the ‘helps to’, which only promises that the product will make some undefined, unquantified contribution to stopping a cold. Which, when you think about it, isn’t really much of a promise at all – what else needs to occur in order for the cold to be ‘stopped in its tracks’, and how do I make it happen?

The faux-scientific ‘clinically proven’ is the icing on the cake, giving the line a nice touch of men-in-white-coats authority. I’d be surprised if many OTC drugs reached the market without being clinically tested to validate their claims, so citing this to impress customers is disingenuous at best. It’s rather like Don Draper’s use of ‘it’s toasted’ to promote Lucky Strikes – taking the unavoidable and making it desirable.

But should you do it? I’ve already made clear my own views on honesty in marketing. But needs must when the devil dances. Whether you use these techniques is up to you!

‘Help to’

In conjunction with ‘can’ (see below), ‘help to’ positions your product or service as part of the solution to a problem without taking sole credit. For example:

Crunchaflakes can help to reduce weight as part of a calorie-controlled diet

Of course they can. Any food can. With the calorie-controlled approach, it’s simply a question of adding up the calories and keeping below a set target. The claim is very carefully delineated and hedged about, and is neither distinctive nor remarkable. But it lodges the idea of weight loss in the reader’s mind.

‘Can’ and ‘could’

Use ‘can’ and ‘could’ for indefinite claims that you want to sound definite. For example:

While traditional fan heaters have an average lifetime of 10–15 years, the RoomHeater 32 can keep on pumping out heat for decades.

Indeed it can, if used relatively sparingly. If used incessantly, its lifetime would be much shorter. Caveat emptor!

Hundreds and thousands

Look again at the example above. What period does ‘decades’ actually denote? Dunno, but it sounds like ages – just as words like ‘dozens’, ‘hundreds’ and ‘thousands’ sound like big quantities.

Strictly speaking, 101 is ‘hundreds’ – it’s 1.01 hundreds, which is more than one and therefore plural. If you’re uncomfortable with that, stick to 200 and above, which is definitely more than one hundred. ‘Hundreds’ sounds bigger than ‘217’.

Willy was weary of being regarded as devious, purely on the basis of his species

Fractions

Closely related is the word ‘fraction’, as in ‘now available at a fraction of the original price’. 99/100ths is a fraction, but your audience will think of the ones they learned at school, like 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4, which will make them think you’re offering a huge discount.

Relative improvement

Whiter teeth. Improved search engine rankings. Increased sales. Shinier hair. Whatever it is you’re offering to do, make it relative and unquantified, not absolute and specific. That way, even the tiniest improvement fulfils the promise.

Yes, of course my copywriting will increase your sales. I guarantee it. By up to 50%.

‘Up to’

‘Up to’ or ‘as much as’ are used when you want to quote a numerical or statistical claim, but can only substantiate it within a certain range.

For example, you might be marketing a service that gets people tax rebates. Let’s say that on average, people get rebates of around 10% of their bills, but some have received 50%. Instead of quoting the average, or the range, you can say ‘customers have received rebates of up to 50%’.

All you’re really saying is that the rebate is in the range 0%–50%, but it’s the upper number that will stick in people’s minds. Very few will infer the corollary, which is ‘some customers got nothing’.

Note that the ‘up to’ number must be honest: it may be unusual or exceptional, but it must be achievable.

‘Over’ and ‘more than’

Closely related to ‘up to’, ‘over’ and ‘more than’ make numbers sound larger than they are. For example, ‘over 50%’ sounds bigger than ‘51%’. When given a vague numerical range, people tend to overestimate. (If you want them to underestimate, use ‘under’ or ‘less than’.)

Watch out for using both ‘up to’ and ‘more’ together, which results in nonsense:

Save up to £50 or more!

Here, the £50 is neither a minimum or a maximum, just an arbitrary point in a completely undefined range. Although the audience may latch on to the £50, blurring the meaning twice means more confusion rather than more impact.

‘As much as’ and ‘as little as’

For a rhetorical twist, use ‘as much as’ or ‘as little as’ to imply that the figure you’re quoting is particularly high or low. For example:

The iPhone is now available for as little as £35 per month.

This suggests that £35 is low, but with no frame of reference to substantiate the claim.

Reported beliefs

Tom Albrighton is now regarded as the best copywriter in the UK.

Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? But who’s doing the regarding? Charles Saatchi, or my mum?

The use of the passive case, which omits the subject of the verb, allows you to say something is being done without specifying who’s doing it. With verbs such as ‘thought’ or ‘believed’, you can put out a claim that may be completely unsubstantiated, simply by saying that someone thinks it’s true.

You can also use abstract nouns such as ‘concerns’ (usually ‘growing’), ‘speculation’ (often ‘intense’ due to being ‘fuelled’) or ‘allegation’ (probably ‘fresh’) to generate a sense that something’s cooking without naming the chef.

This ploy is very commonly used in political journalism, often to report an ‘off the record’ sentiment from a genuine source. A typical sentence might begin ‘Critics of the Prime Minister now believe…’.

Consider the following quote from this Guardian story, which brings all the techniques together in one sentence:

The disclosures will fuel growing concern that the prince is continuing to interfere in political matters when many believe he should remain neutral if he wishes to become king.

Who is concerned, and why will the disclosures fuel their concerns? Who are the ‘many’ who believe Charles should remain neutral? What is the factual basis for saying that he might not succeed to the throne, or that his succession is conditional on his behaviour? What, actually, is being said here?

Nothing. But it sounds good. 

Rhetorical reinforcement

Use words such as ‘clearly’, ‘surely’, ‘self-evidently’ to make a premise sound like a conclusion. These rhetorical words add weight to a statement that may have no basis in fact.

Surely the recession is now drawing to a close?

It may be, or it may not – you haven’t actually said either way, but readers will think you have.

Unprovable superlatives

The CDs entitled ‘The best rock album in the world… ever!’ and similar highlighted the useful fact that superlatives are unprovable.

Suppose you start describing your firm as a ‘leading local widget maker’. Are you including firms who make other things as well as widgets? Or just widget specialists? Or just local widget specialists?

What’s more, how do you define ‘leading’? Do you sell most widgets? Make most money from widgets? Or just make the best widgets? Or are you just one of the best at making widgets? It really doesn’t matter, because the only thing readers will remember is ‘leading’. They won’t be querying your definition.

If you’re still unsure about your claim, dilute it with ‘regarded as’ or something similar, or position yourself as ‘one of the leading…’. Does that mean one of the top 10? The top 100? The top 1000?

Or you could copy Carlsberg, whose addition of ‘probably’ to ‘the best lager in the world’ allowed them to float the most outrageous marketing claim of all (‘best in world’) without actually making it.