Don't Waste Language

A brief rant about commercial copy-editing.

I’m back in New Zealand at the moment.

One of the joys of going away for a while is discovering all the subtle changes that have occurred while you’ve been gone.

My experience of walking through the supermarket isles and seeing the jump in prices across the board wasn’t exactly a joy but it was interesting. The less jarring layer to this experience was seeing all the new brands that had popped up since I’ve been gone.

I guess New Zealand’s smaller market offers a low-risk opportunity for companies to test their latest ideas before rolling them out to the rest of the world. As a result, we often get our hands on products and health fads before they make it to foreign shores.

After living off whatever speed laced chemical they put in airplane espresso for over thirty hours, I shot right to the coffee isle and found myself holding a packet of Avalanche coffee.

(If the cover image to this article didn’t load. Go into the Substack app to see what I’m talking about)

Avalanche coffee have been around for a while. I’ve tasted it. It’s fine though never landed at the top of my list. But this packet was different:

A handful of ground coffee lumped into a palm. Syrupy liquid dripping from between those as if to display its concentrated strength.

The imagery spoke to the addict in me. The use of the word potent revealed an advanced understanding of the product they’re selling and who they’re selling it to. If you are marketing the strongest blend in your coffee range, you are advertising an addiction and a visceral high to kick off the day, nothing else. So long as it is passable taste wise, that’s all the bases covered.

Now, curiosity certainly drove some of my decision making that day at the Woolworths counter. But this branding choice was enough to make me put down the Ommph! blend by Hummingbird Coffee— which is typically my go-to brew— and take this Potent blend up to the counter.

Once at home. I marvelled further at the packaging.

It was also pretty stark. Just the simple image and word to let you know what it’s all about (granted, this is by no means an original take, but done very well in this case)

I turned the bag of expresso around and prepared myself for a clever back of bag description to match the roaring first impression.

I was expecting: Short sharp sentences. Maybe a runaway script that mirrors the intake of the caffeine. A stilted rhythm that wakes you up as they’re advertising this drink will do for you.

What I found was:

For those who can’t load the above image it reads:

Crafted with a fusion of origins, our Potent blend embodies unparalleled complexity. A robust full bodied richness, a tantalizing crisp acidity with a lingering cocoa finale that leaves an enduring impression.

For all those copywriters out there who are biting their fingernails at the thought of AI taking over. This is exactly why.

I’ve seen this style and voice in the descriptions of a hundred different coffee bags, whiskey bottles, blocks of chocolates and wines. I saw the same thing when I was working in the property market. “This home is so luxurious you’ll fall asleep before you make it to the end of the description!”

Of course you can’t scoff too hard at a company taking the well trodden path. It’s safe. It’s proven. But in this case it was a waste.

They’d already done fantastic ground work to invoke a mood. Setting the table for an informal but interesting ride on a wave to match that unhinged setup. But instead the suits at Avalanche settled for a default “Luxurious."

There so many angles they could have gone with:

A wacked out use of the potent angle. Descriptions of burnt off eyebrows, wide bloodshot eyes drinking coffee through a stakeout. Anything to emphasise the high octane promise they’ve made.

Or if that feels a bit too close to the energy-drink vibe, they could have leaned into a borderline formal breakdown of just how strong the blend is. Think Breaking Bad, with Walter White mixing chemicals in a back room for his clients. Serious business. You are catering to a demographic who buys their wine for the alcohol content not the tannins!

Strength is what you’re selling.

Don’t talk to me about Arabica Forests and Columbian foothills— that just gets me thinking about barefoot children and their empty stomachs as they watch another one of their natural resources get shipped off in crates.¹

“Unparalleled complexity, tantalizing crisp acidity,” is there a competition for how many syllables you can wedge into a paragraph that no one told me about?

The worst offender is the final section of the final sentence— which I’ll paraphrase because it’s already too long, “with a lingering cocoa finale that leaves an enduring impression.”

Choose “lingering” or “enduring” you don’t get to use both!

But this isn’t about the specific wording so much as it is about the tone.

Why would you assume the person who picks up the bag of beans with a dripping hand is the same person who wants to be lying in the hammock eating grapes while the peasants fan them with ferns?

This just seems like a clear instance of a copyeditor taking the first thought that comes to mind and throwing away an opportunity to do something with it.

I just marvel at the thought process behind this.

“Let’s slap on another overwritten script designed to invoke luxury and depth.”

Do they read such descriptions and genuinely feel moved by them? Am I the odd one out on this?

Or is the assumption that no one actually reads those things, so let’s rinse and repeat the tried and trusted formula until our consumers let us know this is no longer ticking all the boxes?

I can practically hear the suit throwing out the instruction that trumps any alternate suggestions. “Don’t get all creative with it. This works. So just do it,”

Sure it works. It’s tried and tested like the love song that rhymes High with Sky. Uses lines like “You are a shooting star,” or “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Yea, they’ve been used a lot. Once upon a time that heavy use of imagery, smells and texture might have been effective. But they’re hammered so hard into our cultural consciousness by this point, that you barely even read them as your eyes roll over it.

It’s dumb.

It displays either an ignorance of or an arrogance towards the power of language.

Take the more interesting path. It’ll sell more.

Craft Beer Brands do this really well. Interesting bottles, interesting copy. There’s a artsy feel to these products. People are listening to music while they consume them. Use that. Part of the experience when buying one of those colourful beer cans is being able to point all of the intricate details out to your friends, laugh about the clever line on the label. Capitalize on that.

I don’t know why this has turned into a marketing seminar. I don’t know shit about marketing.

But this just annoys me. I spend a lot of time thinking about wording things well so to see such bull-faced carelessness around it is an insult.

This is someone’s job. And yes, they may be on deadline to get shit scrawled out quickly. But throw some respect towards the craft. If you regurgitate this type of shit then you deserve chat gpt to take over your industry.

Every time you write a sentence, there’s an opportunity to do something interesting with it.

So don’t waste it.

1. I know neither of those things were specifically mentioned in this description, but they’re relatives of the same stock family. You get the point. I’m invoking a mood here.