One of our clients, Casa Dolce Casa, recently commissioned us to work on copy for a contemporary business and lifestyle directory for the East Midlands.
The book is currently being printed, but we rather liked the funky online preview version that you can flick through here. Cool, huh?
Find out more about our work with Casa Dolce Casa.
The client:
The commission:
Each year, thousands of prospective university students receive piles of prospectuses from different institutions. Edge Hill University wanted their 2009 prospectus to stand out as an engaging read that spoke directly to prospective students about what it’s really like to study at Edge Hill.
They needed case studies of individuals studying on 90 of their courses, explaining what makes the Edge Hill experience unique and why anyone might want to study there.
We’ve written on all kinds of topics in the last few years - from nuclear power stations, to tax issues, redundancy, bereavement and just about every professional service you can imagine. And I’ve never had to refuse a job for fear that I won’t be able to devise a creative way to sell to, inform or influence the end customer of said product or service.
I’ve finally found the product that would stump even the most creative of marketers.
Doggie mineral water.
Yep, you read that correctly. That’s bottled mineral water for dogs.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love animals, I’ve had both cats and dogs and various assorted small and cuddlies (including a rather gorgeous Russian Dwarf Hamster called Fudge). But doggie mineral water? Really?
I stumbled across this befuddling product as I trundled around the Trafford Centre. Displayed in all its glory, along with life-sized doggie to play with the kids, Aqua Paw proudly announced: ‘You drink bottled water, so why shouldn’t your dog?’
I was to discover, after some in-depth reading, that this product really is worthwhile, reducing the botty burps of man’s best friend. That’s a relief then.
This week The Gadget Show featured the top five most stupid gadgets of the last year. We’d love to hear about the most ridiculous product or service you’ve ever come across.
This week I spent an interesting few hours with some of the leading businesswomen in the North West.
We’re all part of Spark, the Women’s Enterprise Ambassador Network. Spark is bringing together successful businesswomen and those who support enterprise to encourage women to recognise that business is for them.
In the UK, 1 in 5 businesses are women-owned and us ladies make up 27% of the self-employed population. That lags a long way behind the fellas. A recent survey by WorkingMums.co.uk of over 1000 members revealed that 55% of women look for a new job after they have children - imagine if we could encourage them all to start up new businesses?
There are now over 1,000 Spark Ambassadors, using their experience to encourage and inspire women of all ages to get involved in business.
The network is co-ordinated by Make Your Mark and delivered by the Regional Development Agencies on behalf of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.
If you’d like me to come to your school, club or business to talk about how fantastic running your own business can be, then just drop me a line at nicola@allwords.co.uk
A couple of my close friends gave birth recently, which meant that a whole host of names have been sought out in books and online, spoken aloud in various tones ranging from thoughtful to disdainful and, ultimately, mostly discarded.
One of my friends had her heart set on Caleb, until she discovered that it is commonly believed to mean “dog”, while my other friend must have been very grateful to have had a boy instead of a girl, and thus avoided the certain argument with her football-mad husband over whether or not to name their firstborn, Chelsea.
Similar time and concern is often awarded to the choice of a company name.
Do you favour something simple and memorable that tells the customer absolutely nothing about what the company does, but could conceivably become a brand name applicable to a wide range of services, such as Google, Orange, or Virgin?
Do you choose a name that incorporates a reference to your product or services, such as Hotel Chocolat, or that aims to convey something about the company’s ethos, such as Innocent?
Do you name your company after your founders, such as Marks & Spencer? Or do you randomly pick a name out of a dictionary, without even thinking about it?
At various stages I have considered changing my company name - but eventually decided against it. I don’t want want to harm the brand reputation that I’ve successfully built up over the previous years with All Words; but, more than this, I feel that the name sums up what I do really rather well.
Words. I love them. I write them. I proofread and edit them. I speak them.
And, above all, we believe that they are the most important element of any form of business communication, from websites to brochures, newsletters to blogs, advertisements to press releases, business reports to company names.
Choose your name wisely, then. After all, you don’t want to be the company equivalent of the nine-year-old boy I once met, who had the misfortune of trying to make his way through life while bearing the hefty burden of the name Dwayne Pipe…
Spell Check Poem
(Reportedly nominated for a Pullet Surprise)
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea,
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight for it two say,
Weather eye and wring oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long,
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should bee proud,
And wee mussed dew the best wee can,
Sew flaw’s are knot aloud.
Eye have run this poem threw it
Your sure reel glad two no,
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
–Sauce unknown
Is the story really dead and buried?
Web statistics such as Google Analytics give you a fair idea of what your visitors are doing when they land on your website - they can tell you where a visitor has come from, what pages they visited on your site and often, at which point they lost interest and left.
What they don’t tell you is what parts of the page your visitors click on, which bits really grab their attention. Now RobotReplay lets you do just that. It uses a whizzy bit of technology to record your web visitors, so you can watch back each click, mouse movement and type on the keyboard.
Comfortable viewing? We’ll let you make up your own mind - the debate rolls on.