If You Don’t Read This Blog Post, We’ll Kill This Dog

Not really, but we'd still like you to read this post.

William Randolph Hearst allegedly said, “Give me a magazine cover with a beautiful girl, a dog, or a baby on it, and I'll give you a magazine that sells.” I say “allegedly” because I came across this quote only once, on a cover of the late, lamented National Lampoon.

Dog: It’s the new white meat?

Several marketers seem to have adopted that axiom for email subject lines this holiday season, referring to dogs even though their products had nothing to do with canines.

Take this November 6 email from apparel retailer Club Monaco. The subject line: “The best gifts + the cutest puppy.” Opening the email did indeed reveal a gif of a damn cute puppy snuggling in a soft blanket.

Awwww!

Sadly, once I clicked through to the website, no other puppies were immediately apparent. If only Club Monaco had carried the theme through—why not show puppies alongside the models flaunting the clothes? Though to be fair, the company’s Christmas Day email did feature the pup again, along with a sibling:

Double awww!

Timbuk2, which sells bags and travel accessories, followed suit with its December 18 email. You have to admire the blatant cheekiness with which it didn’t even pretend that dogs had anything to do with its marketing message; the subject line read “Puppies! Up to 50% Off Tech Tested [sic] Favorites.” The email itself continued the tenuous theme:

Again, though, no puppies showed their adorable floppy ears or cute yearning eyes anywhere on the Timbuk2 website—except on the product page for the Muttmover Backpack, a backpack designed to carry, well, you can figure it out. This sort of irreverence seemed to work well for Timbuk2, however; after all, this is a website with a tab titled “Super Exciting Fine Print.”

The canine reference was relevant to womenswear brand MM.LaFleur’s November 28 promotion. “Treat yourself. Save a puppy” implored the subject line. The email itself explain why, “instead of slashing prices for Black Friday,” the company would donate 10% of each sale that day to the animal shelter from which it had adopted “the fluffiest and most beloved member of the MM team.”

Apparently Dot, the fluffy staffer, even got a promotion out of the deal.

If I’d been in the market for MM.LaFleur’s tailored apparel, I would have made a purchase from the company on the basis of its email. I wonder if the promotion did indeed goose sales. Although Black Friday has evolved (devolved?) to focus on sales and bargains, the holiday season is also the time to appeal to people’s better, more charitable selves.

Both as a canine-lover and as someone whose day job requires her to write 12 subject lines a week, I appreciate how these seemingly irrelevant emails break the monotony of the usual “here’s what we’ve got; please open and click through.” I imagine that, used sparingly, such tactics provide a lift in response. The trick is to make sure that recipients aren’t disappointed when they do click through... and of course, to come up with other concepts for the occasional disruptor message.

Also to avoid comparisons with another classic National Lampoon cover.

The (Marketing) Week That Was

If The Voice were a contest for copywriters instead of singers, the team at Firebox would win hands down. Firebox is the sort of etailer that sells heated narwhal slippers alongside toothbrush sanitizers designed to look like ninjas alongside single-serving French presses alongside Abashiri Blue Beer.

The blue beer caught my eye in my Facebook feed the other morning. Not merely because it’s, well, beer that’s a startling blue hue. But because of the brief blurb with which Firebox accompanied the photo: “I’m blue, have a beer or I’ll die, and da ba dee da ba di.”

If you’re lucky, you’re unaware of the frighteningly catchy but utterly inane song titled “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” that Firebox was referencing. I’m not one of the lucky, however, so though the tune immediately lodged itself in my brain, I nonetheless clicked the link to the product.

The copy on the Abashiri product page was just as clever as the Facebook’s blurb, but informative too: “…This striking beer achieves its unique aquamarine hue by using a blend of blue seaweed and locally grown flowers, it even contains water from melted icebergs. To sip this beautiful blue brew is to immerse yourself in the wild and colourful flavours of the frozen Abashiri coastline. Seriously, you're basically drinking the island, soon there'll be nothing left….”

Firebox’s copy voice is consistently cheeky yet fact-based. While the writers clearly aim to entertain, they never forget that job one is to provide shoppers with enough product information to close the sale.

The consistency in terms of voice extends to its Twitter feed too. After reading about the blue beer, I tweeted, “@firebox may have the best copywriters ever.” Within minutes Firebox responded, “We’re also well known for our questionable music tastes, Sherry.” I can’t think of how the brand could have improved upon its reply.

For those reasons, Firebox is our winner of the week. (Cue the kazoos.)

To continue with our Voice metaphor for a moment, two other brands would definitely have been worthy challengers to Firebox. One is the publishing house Penguin. Its newsletters never fail to delight, whether it’s the cute illos of penguins and puffins or the dry humor of its copy, as in this invite to join its reader panel: “Guess what? You love books! You probably knew that already, but thanks to some analytical wizardry and other computerised shenanigans we’ve deduced that you’re one of our most dedicated Penguin Books newsletter openers. Don’t tell the other subscribers but that makes you our favourite...”

Voice is, in fact, what distinguishes Heat from Britain’s myriad other weekly gossip rags. The magazine is snarky, but deep down you know it doesn’t really want to hurt the objects of its ribbing—well, at least not most of them. It’s just a laugh and a lark, and too bad if they can’t take a joke.

Here’s a taste of Heat’s voice, from this week’s email announcing its website redesign: “After a hundred thousand meetings, a million billion printed out redesigns, and an infinite number of articles transferred from the old website to the new one... heatworld.com has a brand new look! And seriously, look at it: so shiny! So colourful! So many celebrity stories to marvel at!” Us magazine (in the States) or Now (one of Heat’s UK rivals) wouldn’t use phrases such as “million billion” and “so shiny!”—either on its pages or in its emails. Heat shows that in a commoditized market (and yes, celebrity gossip has become commoditized), a startlingly different voice is a worthy USP.

[An aside: When I lived in Devon, my Tuesday morning ritual included stopping at Tesco to buy the new Heat (and a chicken-and-bacon sandwich—oh, and some strawberry laces: breakfast of champions and that). Shortly after I returned to the States, the newsstands in Grand Central Station stopped carrying Heat, and I don’t know where I can buy it here in Manhattan. If you can hook me up, please do!]

If there are winners, there have to be losers too. Voice isn’t what let down this web advert from department store Macy’s; simple lack of brain cells did:

“The Great Baby Sale”? With the headline above a photo of a racially diverse selection of four babies, as if to show the variety of colorways you can choose from? And “Save 50% when you buy 2 or more”? Yeah, beneath that it says “select styles from Carter’s, First Impressions, blah blah blah,” but still…

Making matters worse for Macy’s is that it had paid to run on the Daily Mail’s website just below the newspaper’s nav bars and above the headline of its lead story—which happened to be “ ‘She begged me for a baby so she wouldn’t be an old mom and paid $30,000 to our surrogate’…” She probably could have saved a bundle by skipping the surrogate and shopping at Macy’s instead.

Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged here, but I’m going to try to get back into the groove. If you have anything cool or heinous you’d like to share, feel free to send it along!

Features and Benefits, Telling and Showing

It’s not often that catalog copy blows me away—and let’s face it, it’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to persuade you to pull out your credit card and make a purchase. But the copy for the latest Lands’ End catalog impressed me by exemplifying how effectively and easily copy can balance features and benefits.

Most catalog and online copy seems to emphasize product features: The dress has an empire waist; the table is made of kiln-dried wood; the drill has 195 inch-pounds of torque. That’s certainly important information. And if the consumer is somewhat knowledgeable about the product category, that along with the imagery may be enough info to close the sale.

But let’s say the consumer doesn't know whether an empire waistline best suits her figure, or that kiln-dried wood is less likely to warp and shrink than other wood, or just how much torque she needs for the projects she has in mind (clearly I have no idea about how much torque is the right amount of torque, which is why I’m being so vague here).

This is where the copy needs to focus on the benefits. Instead of simply stating “This dress has an empire waist,” you could show the benefit of said feature by writing something like “The flattering empire waist helps elongate the figure.” Ah, says the 5'2" shopper to herself, that dress will make me look taller and thinner—I’m sold.

Just as important, the 5'11" shopper says to herself, That schmatte will make me look like a beanpole; now I know to avoid empire waists altogether. Thank you, Ms. Copywriter. Why is preventing this sale just as important as closing the previous sale? Because it saves your company from having to accept a return for a product the shopper ordered and hated or, worse, losing that customer altogether because of her disappointment with the product.

(And yes, I’m aware no one in the history of humanity has ever thought or uttered the phrase “Thank you, Ms. Copywriter,” but a copywriter can dream, can’t she?)

Here are a few examples of how Lands’ End explains benefits in the context of features to drive a sale:

Princess seams sweep from the bodice into diagonal welt pockets that add a slimming element to the skirt. And the ponté fabric is structured yet soft. So it even smooths lumps and bumps. (Not that you have any.) I couldn’t tell you what a princess seam is, but who cares: It'll help me look slimmer, which is what I really need to know.

[The tee-shirts’] all-cotton knit fabric has ultra-fine ribs. Barely visible to the naked eye, those ribs give these tees exactly the right amount of body and shape. So they’re never clingy, never sheer, never skimpy. So a ribbed shirt will hold its shape and won't cling to my bra straps or nipples? Well, that’s definitely worth shelling out a few bucks more for.

And that’s just the sku/product copy. The Lands’ End catalog also judiciously uses callouts that even more explicitly connect the feature to the benefit. For instance: What makes piqué cool? The fabric has thousands of tiny vents. Which makes our Piqué Polo sort of like wearable air conditioning. As someone who breaks into a sweat as soon as the temps climb into the 60s (sadly, I’m not exaggerating), I’m dog-earring every page of the catalog with items made of piqué.

Granted, with products that are nonessential or purely decorative, it can be tougher to isolate the benefits. But every product has ’em. 

Take a 12" blue glass vase. Because it’s glass, it would make a great weapon for clobbering a burglar should your life come to resemble a Chuck Jones cartoon. But most retailers, alas, would shy away from that sort of benefit. So for this sort of product I might write that it will add color and height to a tablescape, for instance, or will brighten a room even when flowers are in short supply.

Okay, it’s not brilliant. But it’s better than one of my pet peeves, which I come across all the time: the loading up of adjectives in lieu of substance. Don’t tell me that the vase is “striking, eye-catching, and lovely”—there’s a photo, and I’ll be the judge of whether the vase in it is indeed any or all of those things.

Novice fiction writers are constantly admonished to “show, not tell.” You could say that emphasizing features is telling, while explaining benefits is showing. Contrary to what those writing teachers say, you can’t avoid telling altogether in a work of fiction; sometimes you have to move things along with a simple "For two months the fugitives remained absent" (Wuthering Heights) or "she said." But you do often need to show as a way to get the reader/consumer to buy what you’re telling and selling, whether it’s the prowess of a protagonist or the suitability of a vase. 

A New Post from the CEO

Wow, the CEO of Aéropostale emailed little ol’ me a New Year’s message! And so did the president/CEO of Yankee Candle! Gosh, they really care about me! I’ll never shop from another teen apparel merchant or scented-candle purveyor again!

I assume that’s the response these companies were going for when they planned these particular email campaigns. They must have figured mentioning the CEO in the subject line (Aéropostale: “Happy New Year from Tom Johnson, CEO”; Yankee Candle: “A heartfelt ‘Thanks’ from our CEO”—and no, I don’t know why “Thanks” is in quotation marks) would encourage opens and instill warm-and-fuzzies in recipients.

But these messages instilled only cynicism in my suspicious, cold little soul. I did like that the message from Aéropostale’s Tom (I figure we’re on a first-name basis now) included his email address: “…if you ever have a question or suggestion, I hope you don’t hesitate to share it with me…”  The letter also emphasized the company’s commitment to quality and community in a straightforward manner.

The Yankee Candle message was, like most of its fragrances, too cloying for my tastes: “Home is where our most cherished memories are made. Where the stories of our lives are fashioned and held close. As a reflection of our dreams and aspirations, home is the most personal of places. So I feel very privileged, as we approach a new year, that you have invited us into yours…” 

Of course, if Harlan M. Kent, Yankee Candle president and CEO, felt so privileged, he could have at least included an email address so that I could touch base with him, the way I can with my new buddy Aéropostale Tom.

These messages come across as hokey (at least to me) because they’re so out of character for these companies. I’ve never received anything but the usual promotional email messages from them before.

Conversely, I received several emails from Karmaloop founder and CEO Greg Silkoe during the holidays. Granted, most were part of a reactivation campaign. But it’s not unheard of for Greg (who included not only his email address in several of the messages but his mobile number too) to communicate via email to customers throughout the year. What’s more, Greg’s emails, in keeping with the hip, fun, trendy Karmaloop brand, are disarmingly informal:

“It's me, your fearless CEO and Sushi Chef Greg Selkoe @Selkoe. I want to tell you about a bunch of exciting things coming up in the loop they call Karma over the next few weeks! 

“But first... since we love you so damn much:

“30% OFF & FREE SHIPPING NEXT 24 HOURS!! It's this simple Buy Any NEW or REGULAR PRODUCT (excluding sale stuff).  SHOP NOW!

“What? wait... did I just read this correctly? How do you guys work the magic you do? Nobody knows, roll with it!”

The emails from Karmaloop Greg come across as part and parcel of the Karmaloop brand. The lone emails from Aéropostale Tom and Harlan M. Kent seemed like patches sewn onto the fabric of their brands at the last minute.

At least the Aéropostale email provided recipients with an outlet for feedback (Tom’s email address). Assuming Tom or one of his minions actually responds in a timely, personal manner to any messages sent to that address, Aéropostale’s New Year message could be seen as an effective means of establishing a genuine relationship of sorts with subscribers.  

As for the Yankee Candle email… well, maybe the Real Housewives of South Boston would have appreciated the message.

(Yes, this is my first email-related post for quite some time. Most of my 2012 posts were related to writing, editing, and marketing my novel Beyond Billicombe, which was published in September. Beyond Billicombe has nothing to do with email marketing, but I think you might like it anyway; you can check it out here.) 

Hearing Voices

From the time I learned to read, I wanted to be a writer. I also wanted to be an artist, but by age ten I realized I didn’t have the talent, so I switched my goal from becoming a writer/artist to becoming a writer/actor. Sadly not only do I have a face for radio but I also have a voice for silent films, so I soon struck that from my list of aspirations as well.

Yet I still do get to act, via my writing.

That’s largely why I gravitate toward writing in the first person. For me, writing a character is often about pretending to be the character (hence my acting out dialogue when I write). And writing in the first person makes pretending, for me, even more participatory. Like acting.

I recently finished the first draft of a novel that’s told in the first person by the two main characters. It’s a sequel to a novel I wrote several years back, which used the similar structure. My favorite aspect of writing both books was ensuring that the two voices were distinct, so that you could tell who was speaking without any sort of heading declaring which chapter was narrated by Steve and which by Cat.

For these characters, making the distinction was relatively easy. Steve is a schizophrenic in his 20s, born and bred in rural England, not particularly well educated. Cat is an American in her 30s who relocated from New York to London, a college grad, and a writer to boot. But I wanted to go beyond the obvious differences in vocabulary. So Steve’s sentences tend to be shorter, especially when his illness is manifesting itself, while Cat makes use of compound-complex sentences. Also, when Steve is having a psychotic break, like many schizophrenics he’s unable to interpret metaphors. Ask a symptomatic schizophrenic what “A stitch in time saves nine” means, and he won’t say that it suggests you should take your time completing a task correctly the first time to avoid having to redo it or fix it later; he’ll likely parrot that it means you should do one stitch now and not nine later, or go off on some tangent. So when Steve is in hospital and says that, for instance, his guilt is a vest of explosives strapped to his chest, he means he literally feels the weight of the explosive guilt strapped onto him.

The novel I’m getting ready to self-publish, however, is written in the third person.

I did this partly because I wanted to challenge myself to write in a style that doesn’t come as naturally to me. And partly because I wanted the freedom to fluidly move back and forth between the points of view of the two protagonists within the same chapter, and sometimes even the same scene.

This eliminated the need to worry about varying sentence structures and having to work with a more limited vocabulary (which is much more difficult than you might think; there’s a reason it took Dr. Seuss nine months to write The Cat in the Hat, which uses just 236 unique words). But I still wanted to show the differences in the characters within the language of the third-person narrative. Sometimes it was relatively simple: When the narrative is focused on Richard, a Londoner now living in Devon, I use British English to describe a scene; for instance, the bus stand shelter will be made of Perspex. When the focus is on Suzanne, a London who moved to the States when she was ten, the vocabulary is more American; the bus stop shelter is now made of Plexiglas. (This changes gradually the longer Suzanne stays in England, however. Over the course of the book, she begins thinking of her cell phone as her mobile, trucks as lorries.)

Then there are the elements that I’ll call out in my descriptions. Richard’s former girlfriend was a hairdresser, so when he meets someone, I describe her hair and other aspects of her physical appearance first. But because Suzanne is an actress, she tends to notice voices and accents first, then how a person carries himself. Maybe no one else will notice these subtleties, but they make writing more like acting to me. My favorite actors walk differently from one role to the other, adopt a different posture, hold their cigarette differently. I want my writing to do the same.

I try to do something similar when writing copy for clients. Say I’m writing about a figurine shaped like a lotus flower. If the target shopper is affluent, well educated, and well traveled, I might toss in a sentence about how the lotus is a millennia-old symbol of purity in China before describing the piece’s painstaking craftsmanship. If the target shopper is less affluent and educated, I would probably focus more on the lovely colors and how they’ll easily add a spot of color to even a neutral setting.

(Copywriting guru Herschell Gordon Lewis has written extensively on this subject, by the way. I learned just about everything I know about copywriting from the columns he wrote for Catalog Age/Multichannel Merchant back when I was an editor at the magazines. So thanks, Herschell, for enabling me to make a living now that I’m no longer working full-time as a magazine writer/editor.)

Getting into the head of a character, whether it’s a fictional creation that’s sprung from your own imagination or the target customer of a product you’re describing, prevents your prose from being pedestrian and makes it easier to sell your wares, be they a story about a young actress searching for her missing brother or a Limoges box. It also makes the task at hand, at least for me, more fun. And given that so much of writing is a matter of mechanics, you might as well inject fun wherever and whenever you can. Besides, if you enjoy the writing process, the reader is more likely to enjoy the reading process.

(I’ve illustrated this post with a photo of Robert Carlyle because he’s one of those actors who metamorphose among characters in the way I described above. Compare the swag of Gaz in The Full Monty to the contained vulnerability of Stevie in Riff-Raff to the repressed longing of Mr. Gold in Once Upon a Time. Of course, that he’s a pleasure to look at had a bit to do with his placement at the top of this post as well.)

Yays and Nays of the Fortnight

Not having worked in retail for a couple of decades, I forgot exactly how frenzied the lead-up to Christmas can be. And though my primary client is an online merchant rather than a bricks-and-mortar store, and I write copy rather than wait on customers, “frenzied” did indeed describe the weeks after Thanksgiving for me, workwise.

But now that we’ve reached the calm after the storm, I’ve been able to sort through my backlog of catalogs for some belated yays and nays.

* The headline of every single copy block for every single product in Hammacher-Schlemmer’s Last Minute [sic] Gift 2011 catalog begins with “the”: “The Best Inflatable Bed,” “The Marshmallow Shooter,” “The iPad Leather Satchel.” The result is a cumulative, subtle but effective reinforcement of the primacy of Hammacher’s products. Hammacher doesn’t sell any old Turkish shower wraps; it sells The Turkish Shower Wrap; ditto The Indoor Barking Dog Deterrent, The Waterproof Gloves and Socks, The Plantar Fasciitis Orthotic Sandal…

The brilliance of this stylistic decision is undermined, though, by another choice. None of the compound adjectives, starting with “last-minute” on the cover, are hyphenated in the display copy. This results in headlines such as “The Space Saving 36 Pair Shoe Rack,” “The Irregular Heart Beat Detecting Blood Pressure Monitor,” “The Hands Free Over Ear Book Light.” Combine that with the use of all caps, and you’ve got some product headlines that you really have to stop for a second to process. Perhaps that’s the point: In the absence of hero photos or lifestyle spreads (every page in the catalog is designed around the same basic grid), maybe the lack of hyphens is meant to act as speed bumps to keep readers from whipping through the pages too quickly.  

Then again, it could just end up frustrating readers well before they hit the halfway mark, leading them to chuck the catalog aside and reach for, say, the latest Brookstone catalog instead.

* The Holiday 2011 catalog from CardsDirect is one of the best website traffic drivers I’ve seen in a long time. To play up what is clearly the company's strong suit, customization, the opening spread points out the myriad personalization options available: inside image, front and inside message, signature, logo, even paper stock.

The following spread is nearly as good. “This is our phone number: 866.700.5030. It’s toll free. We thought we’d start with that, so you’d know we’re not just a website. We’re a company that makes sending custom cards simple. We offer over 4,000 products, but don’t let that sound overwhelming. The reality is we have the quality you want, the prices you need, amazing designs, and customer service that makes it easy.” If you don’t think that’s brilliant, I’d love to learn why.

(What’s not so brilliant, in my opinion, is the relatively small, widely leaded font, which floats among a huge amount of white space. I think bumping up the type a bit would have encouraged more people to actually read this killer graf without diminishing the visual impact. And countdown to a wonderfully scathing comment from Josh Pincus Is Crying in five, four, three…)

* I love that commercial in which a woman and her fiancé opt to spend money on rock-climbing gear rather than a diamond ring. The music’s great, the script is clever, and the images are gorgeous. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times on TV and, just yesterday, in a movie theater. But damn if I can ever remember what it’s for. (I Googled it using “commercial woman climbing rock.”) And no matter how artistically/aesthetically brilliant it is, if it doesn’t make people think fondly on your brand or take the action you want them to take, it fails as a marketing effort. I like being reminded of this from time to time, as it’s very easy to let a desire to be clever detract from the task at hand.


The image at the top is the front cover of the holiday Dean & Deluca catalog. With the lack of cover lines, the gourmet food retailer is assuming that recipients already know what it sells, and one could argue that the lack of a call to action fails to spur readers to open up. But the image is so engaging that this may be a time where rules were meant to be broken. In any case, I like it, and since this is my blog, at the top it goes!  

Of Puppies and Catalog Copy

Think of holiday catalogs as a kennel worth of puppies yapping and bouncing and nipping for attention. They’re all so cute, how do you decide which one to take home with you?

In any kennel or litter, a few pups will stand out. One or two may grab your attention for the wrong reasons: too aggressive, or too passive. But usually another few will catch your eye not because they’re the most adorable but because they’re the most engaging. These are the ones that take an interest in the visitors in their midst, sniffing their shoes perhaps, or looking up and cocking their head in an invitation to play. These puppies are inevitably the first to find themselves new homes.

It’s the same with the dozens of catalogs that crowd our mailboxes this time of year. The gorgeous covers will no doubt entice you to open them up, but without copy that engages you, chances are good that they’ll be relegated to the “look through them later” pile—and by the time later comes, you may well have already completed your holiday shopping.

The Cath Kidston Christmas Gift Guide 2011 is one such catalog. Cath Kidston is a British purveyor of what some might consider quintessentially British fabrics, accessories, bags, and the like. During the past few years the company has expanded to the States, mailing a catalog with U.S. pricing, setting up a U.S. website, and establishing a Stateside call center. But the catalog lacks an engaging personality to complement its cute merchandise. And let’s face it, there’s no shortage of cute merchandise this time (or any other time) of year.

It’s bad enough that the product copy is sparse: “Tea rose white key fob (imported)” is a typical description. Where is it imported from: the U.K., China, Timbuktu? What’s it made of? How large is it? Yes, a picture’s worth a thousand words, but when the photo is a small silhouette of a product providing no sense of scale or hint as to its construction, those aren’t the right thousand words.

More damning is that the catalog assumes the reader knows what Cath Kidston stands for. There are plenty of Anglophiles among American consumers. Photos playing up the brand’s unique heritage and aesthetic, showing the floral-patterned mugs and canisters on the shelves of an English country kitchen, say, or a family wearing the brightly colored Wellingtons while carting a tree through a quintessentially English countryside could easily have replaced the full-page hero shots of various products placed under a Christmas tree while telling a story more compelling than “these make nice gifts.”

And if ever a catalog cried out for a founder’s letter and a few paragraphs explaining what makes the brand unique, it’s this one. The inside front cover does have an introduction, but it’s tentative and singularly lacking in personality: “You’ll find this guide packed with all our favourite products just perfect for giving. We’re known for our reworking of British country house style, so if you’re looking for gifts with a playful twist on vintage prints, we’ve got everything from stationery to nightwear.” 

That’s pretty much it. Bear in mind that Cath Kidston's prints, at first glance, look like the sort of dainty flowers and colorful dots to be found on myriad other products. How do the Cath Kidston patterns differ from the others? Are the items handcrafted? That red umbrella with the white dots on page 26 that costs $46—is there something particularly British or otherwise special about it, or should I just pick up a similar one from Amazon.com for less?

I understand the realities of keeping page counts down to improve margins, but surely the spreads dedicated to the oilcloth duffels and totes could have included a clever sentence or two about how oilcloth is a practical go-to material for bags in the U.K. because of the changeable weather. This would highlight the unique benefits of one of the bags’ distinguishing features as well as reinforce their British heritage. Likewise, the spread of pajamas and slippers could have called out how especially cozy they are, so important in drafty British country homes that often lack central heating.

There are plenty of stories to tell about these products, stories that could be told succinctly via words and lifestyle photos. But in its catalog, Cath Kidston hangs back, like a shy puppy relying solely on its good looks to get adopted. That might work if there were no other puppies in the kennel or catalogs in the mailbox, but such isn’t the case.

Let’s compare to another catalog I received the same time that the Cath Kidston book landed in my mailbox: the Vosges Haut Chocolat Holiday 2011 edition. This catalog has a lengthy founder’s letter that takes up most of page 4. I’d have made this the inside front cover and edited it a bit to bump up the type font, but let’s not quibble. This letter explains, in loving detail, what distinguishes Vosges from the numerous other chocolate catalogers vying for my money: “Chocolate and curry?! The doubting begins. After just a single bite, one is beckoned to the present moment and in place of doubtful questioning or even thoughts of disgust, the face changes from awe to pleasure. It is in this place that one becomes open to experiencing new ideas through chocolate…” The letter goes on to detail the unexpected inspirations of the collections within the catalog: Italian seasonings, Rastafarians, the African American influence on American music, aboriginal Australians. Right there I’m intrigued enough to want to read through the catalog to discover what sort of chocolates could possibly have resulted from the founder’s musings on African music.

Opposite this letter is a collage of photos showing the candy being made. The photography is gorgeous, but just as important, it tells a story, aided by captions describing the creative process.    

The product copy throughout emphasizes just what makes these candies so unusual, often with an impressive economy of words. A description of the Budapest truffle, for example, could have simply read “Dark chocolate with paprika”—factual but not all that alluring. “Bright and sweet Hungarian paprika warms dark chocolate,” however, piques the curiosity while setting the salivary glands working.

My daughter doesn’t really like chocolate, but even she was enticed by the Vosges catalog and pored over the photos and the descriptions. By the same token, my husband’s brother is not a dog lover. But when he met our dog several years ago, he was so taken by his mellow nature and overall sweetness that he soon found himself not only petting the dog but even allowed Augie to sit in his lap. 

Granted, Augie is pretty darn adorable (see below). But it was his personality that won over my brother-in-law—just as the Vosges catalog’s creative won over my daughter, and me. 

Why Harpo Quenches My Thirst, but Jennifer Aniston Doesn't

Until a few weeks ago, an image of Jennifer Aniston holding a bottle of water was splayed across a billboard a block from my office. I’m sure the brand of water was also splayed across the billboard, but I don’t recall it, even though I stared at the billboard often enough. Nor do I recall any message, like “Jennifer Aniston says this is the tastiest water ever” or, to quote from the episode of Avatar in which Sokka has a bad trip after guzzling down some hallucinogenic cactus juice, “It’ll quench you. Nothing’s quenchier. It’s the quenchiest.” 

I guess I’m supposed to associate the brand of water with whatever positive attributes Jennifer Aniston is believed to possess, and figure that by drinking it—or maybe just by holding the bottle—I’ll gain those attributes too.

The only reason I even thought of the billboard is that last night I came across a 1955 commercial for Pepsi starring Harpo Marx. Even though Harpo, of course, never uttered the name of the brand, I could easily recall which soft drink he was plugging. 

Granted, comparing a billboard to a nearly two-minute commercial that includes harp playing and pantomime isn’t apples to apples. So let’s compare one print ad to another. First, Aniston for Smartwater (I Google’d “Jennifer Aniston” and “bottled water” to find out the brand):

The copy establishes a rationale for Aniston to be promoting water, and to be flaunting her toned torso while doing so: “Working out feels great… afterwards. That’s why I drink Smart. It’s hydration I can feel. (And it’s one part of my routine I never sweat.)” What it doesn’t do it explain why I should drink Smartwater over not-so-smart (read: tap) water.

Now, here’s a 1961 ad for Smirnoff, featuring (yet again) Harpo Marx*:

 “When I honk for vodka, I expect Smirnoff,” reads the headline. The copy continues, “Harpo, the silent one, may be excused from naming his brand. But you, gentle reader, should be specific. For, ever since Smirnoff changed the drinking habits of America, countless Johnny-come-lately vodkas have gotten into the act. To ensure yourself of the flawless original, always call for your Smirnoff by name. It makes the driest Martinis, the smoothest Screwdrivers, the most delicious drinks of every kind. So know what you drink—drink what you know.”

The link between Smirnoff and Harpo is tenuous at best. Jennifer Aniston is much more likely to drink Smartwater than Harpo, who didn’t really imbibe, was to have consumed Smirnoff. Yet the Smirnoff copy gives me a reason not just to buy vodka but to buy Smirnoff vodka: It’s smoother and drier than the rest.

Many brands, like Smartwater, forget that with celebrity endorsements, the celeb is merely the hook. He or she will attract the consumer’s attention, but it’s still up to the brand to sell itself. No matter how seemingly perfect the match between a celebrity and a product may be, that in and of itself won’t persuade most consumers to buy said product. First of all, I’d wager that most consumers no longer believe that the celebrities use the particular products they endorse. Second, there are too many celebrities posing for pictures with too many products.

Of the commercials I’ve seen in the past few weeks, just one sticks in my mind. And it doesn’t feature a celebrity. It’s for an antiflatulence product called Gas-X, and it includes the line “Your son Rip is on line toot.” It’s neither sophisticated nor tasteful, but it seized the attention of all three of us in our household. Just as important, it used that attention to inform us of the benefits of the product (speedy relief of gas and bloating, in individual-dosage packaging that easily fits in a trouser pocket). 

In this case, “Your son Rip is on line toot” is the celebrity, catching the audience’s eye in the same way that Harpo’s mugging did for Smirnoff or Jennifer Aniston’s flat tummy does for Smartwater. But the rest of the commercial touted the unique selling proposition of Gas-X just as the ad copy did for Smirnoff but failed to for Smartwater.

If only Jennifer Aniston had said, “Smartwater’ll quench you. Nothing’s quenchier. It’s the quenchiest.”

* The reason for my current obsession with Harpo is that I just finished reading his autobiography, Harpo Speaks, and it was one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years. You needn’t be a Marx Brothers fan to enjoy it; I wasn’t. Harpo's evocations of growing up poor in Manhattan, struggling through vaudeville, and hanging out with other members of the Algonquin Round Table provide an indelible sense of those milieus while also showing without telling what a happy-go-lucky, decent, and sweet guy Harpo was. And as an adoptive parent, I was moved to tears by his description of how he and his wife presented their four children with the stories of their own adoptions. So if you haven’t read it, do so.