Brands are like human personalities and reputations. They’re just as complex and diverse. And the way consumers go about judging brands is a skill we know from judging fellow humans.

One of the most insightful tools we apply to the judgement of people is the analysis we make of the language they use: accent, word choice, performance, sentence length, fluency etc. All of these elements of language use can be pretty subtle but no less influential for being so. The subtlest of them all may be the metaphors we use. Human beings think in metaphors. That doesn’t mean we are all poets. It just means that our minds tend to handle abstract concepts by finding analogies with tangible, concrete, often physical things that we are able to perceive.

In that vein, I was interested to find out about the naming system IKEA use for their products. Here’s a snapshot:

Chairs, desks: men’s names (e.g. Jerker)
Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names (e.g. Oslo)
Kitchens: grammatical terms among others (e.g. Metrik)

There are lots of jokes to make about some of the names this system creates like Fyrklöver and Lessebo which get somewhat lost in translation, but for more serious reasons I still like their system. Language is a window onto human minds. So the semantic frames in which IKEA places its categories tell consumers something about how IKEA thinks about these different categories. IKEA uses language and metaphor to give away a bit of its personality and its that, as well as the prices and good parking facilities which consumers grow attached to.

The power of effective language use is often overlooked. But since it’s the job of brand owners to manage meaning and personality, and our ears naturally bend to language for clues, isn’t it right that more brands should give weight to tone of voice and linguistic style as a fundamental part of their brand strategy?

1. “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.” (Walt Disney)

2. “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” (Jeff Bezos)

3. “The way to gain a good reputation, is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.” (Socrates)

4. “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” (Donald Porter)

5. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” (Bill Gates)

Borrowed with pride from all over the place.

An interesting debate raged on Today Radio 4 yesterday regarding the decline of France’s culinary expertise. Author of new book “Au Revoir To All That” by Michael Steinberger and French cultural commentator Agnes Poirier discussed whether the withering of the small town bistro mirrors a decline in the culinary standing of the country.

Some compelling facts came out; in 1960 France had 200,000 cafés, by 2008 it was down to 40,000. Traditional cheeses are being lost, as no one wishes to continue making them and even Camembert, is now threatened. Thousands of wine producers are also facing financial ruin, turning to violence against supermarkets to draw attention to the problem. The French are also cooking less than ever at home and the average meal in France is now 38 minutes long, down from 88 minutes 25 years before. Instead McDonald’s is now the country’s largest private sector employer. In 2007 it had more than 1,000 restaurants in France and was McDonald’s second most profitable market in the world.

In 1997, The New Yorker published an article by Adam Gopnik asking, “Is There a Crisis in French Cooking?”. Gopnik suggested that French cuisine had become ‘rigid, sentimental, impossibly expensive, and dull’. The “muse of cooking”, as he put it, had moved on, to New York, San Francisco, Sydney, London. In these cities, the restaurants exuded a dynamism that was now increasingly hard to find in Paris.

Steinberger thought this demise was premature in ‘97, you could find bad food in France if you went looking for it but France was still “the first nation of food and anyone suggesting otherwise either was being wilfully contrarian or was eating in the wrong places.”

But in 2003, The New York Times Magazine published a cover story trumpeting that Spain had supplanted France in the culinary world. The article discussed the arrival of la nueva cocina, that was reinventing Spanish cuisine with El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià, the highest profile of these new wave chefs. The article made the point that Spain’s gastronomic vitality contrasted with France’s food scene, which was described by the NY Times as ‘ossified and rudderless’. “French innovation”, he wrote, “has congealed into complacency”. The Spanish food critic Rafael García Santos said: “It’s a great shame what has happened in France, because we love the French people and we learnt there. Twenty years ago, everybody went to France. Today they go there to learn what not to do.”

All very ironic considering that only in July 2005 Jacques Chirac, in a meeting with Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schröder, allegedly said of Britain “One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad.”