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St. Patrick’s Day

By graham on March 18, 2009

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 © 2009 The Gra­ham Agency. All rights reserved.

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When Change is Good

By graham on April 2, 2008

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 our 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.

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Dead Guys Finish Last

By graham on March 29, 2008

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.

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Made in Japan

By graham on March 23, 2008

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 317,000 miles (507,200 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 over­priced 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.

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