You’ve seen it–the stiff and proper guy on the brochure cover in a 3-piece suit, (I mean, who even wears a 3-piece suit anymore) horn-rimmed glasses, reading the Wall Street Journal. When you turn the page and read the opening paragraph, you think snoozeville. Many companies struggle with this when writing copy and putting together a marketing piece. Can you use an informal style of writing and still get respect from your customers and potential customers?

Absolutely.

But (you knew there was one coming) it may depend on the type of business you are in.

Can you be punchy and fun if you are a bank? Banking is serious, right? You are dealing with people’s money, so it’s probably not a good time to be fun. Wrong. Check out Umpqua Bank. They even go so far as to make up their own words–Umpquatize.

Is this right for every bank? No. You have to know who your customers are. I have a bank as a client that uses a more formal style of writing for their professional groups–financial advisors and mortgage brokers (B2B)–so there isn’t any use of contractions or phrases with periods. But when they create pieces for their customers, it is a lot less formal, so they use contractions and phrases.

There is also a lot of controversy surrounding the use of contractions and phrases that are not complete sentences. All acceptable. It’s called marketing people! Is it grammatically correct? Not always, but that’s OK because marketing copy (copywriting) is not the same thing as writing copy for a journal or for an English class paper.

Article Tags: Copywriting | formal writing | informal writing | writing style
Filed under: Advertising, Business, Copywriting