Interview: Dan Germain, Innocent Drinks

Dan used to be an English teacher, and always enjoyed writing. He was always a “bit of a show-off” and found writing to be a good way of expressing himself. He joined his friends, the three founders of Innocent Drinks, as their fourth employee and has been looking after the tone of voice and copywriting for this fresh and exciting brand ever since. The messages on their packs have been a key part of their success, so what exactly is Dan up to and how does he do it?

I tend to work a lot with Richard, my creative partner and one of the three founders. We’re old friends, so we’re good at talking and having ideas. We share the same ideals, ethics, and beliefs, and the copy we write is natural and honest, like a conversation you might have

with your friends or your mother. I just write it as I say it or think it. And I try to question the accepted way of doing things. In every bit of our business, from copywriting to how we make the drinks, we’ve been told “you can’t do this” from the voices of experience. And we’ve usually found that there is another, more innocent way.

Before we settled on “Innocent” the company was called “Fast Tractor.” Labels exist to prove this, though they’re locked in a cupboard. We liked Fast Tractor because it suggested freshness (to us at least). We also considered “Naked” and “Nude,” but at the time they were all just words. We didn’t really have a clue about building a brand. But things have changed. These days we use the word “innocent” as an adjective, asking ourselves “is this innocent?” when judging our work, words, behavior – everything really.

I now have a wider role as Head of Creative. We have our own internal agency, which I help to run, though I also work with external agencies when the need arises. When we work with agencies we try to work collaboratively – we have a really clear idea of how we want to look and feel, and I think/hope that agency creatives like working with people who have that clarity. I’ve learned loads from working with agencies –

I’ve worked with some of the best creatives that there are, and have pinched loads of tips on how to get to the best work.

Policing and editing our copy is an instinctive process. I can give general guidelines and tips but it is really difficult to define. If you held a gun to my head, I would say that the Innocent voice is natural, honest, and engaging. We once spent a whole day analyzing our tone only to come up with nothing much that we couldn’t have decided in five minutes.

Our tone of voice is simply the result of us being a group of friends trying to make each other laugh, which is still my aim. I can’t write for everyone in our audience, old and young, north and south. So I don’t try to. I’d end up with something less than average if I tried to please everyone.

I don’t like the word “consumer.” It suggests a predictable group of people who will jump if the advert tells them to jump. I like being an individual and my behavior can be unpredictable, and I guess that goes for most other people out there. People see through “clever” attempts to change their behavior, so I would rather present information in a simple, clear way and let people make up their own minds.

Lots of packaging is over-designed in my opinion. Every pack on the shelf shouts at you, especially in our bit of the market, with pictures of fruit and messages telling you to have your

five-a-day. We try to politely sit there and behave ourselves, and in the beginning being the quiet one got us noticed. Ultimately, we let our drinks do the talking and make sure our labels are calm and polite, and then when you flip the product over you get a nice surprise. But no pack, however well designed, can mask a bad product, and so we know that 95 percent of the success of our business lives and dies by the quality of our ingredients and recipes.

We try to have a conversation with our drinkers. That means it’s a two-way thing. People email us or call the banana phone – we get hundreds of calls/emails every week, quite often from people who are just up for a chat. The first emails that came through, which were from the first few passionate drinkers, helped us to form the voice. These people love the stuff and we made friends, which helped us to find out all about the people who drank our drinks, and why they drank them. I used to sit there and email them all day long. Those were the days.

“ I just write it as I say it or think it.”

These days it’s not just me writing the copy. We have a small group of people writing copy for our packaging – a few people at Innocent plus a motley crew of people I’ve met along the way who just fancied having a go. We write a brief and then everyone goes off and writes a few labels every few months. It’s good to include an external voice or two. Keeps things interesting. We change the copy on our packs four times a year. We generate over two hundred individual messages every year, so we hope that you always get a new one whenever you pick up one of our drinks.

The reality of what we do is so much more important than image. We’re creating a reality, and it is easier and more effective to write the way we do because then we don’t have to make anything up.

And it’s this fact that I often return to. We have a solid, well-run, copper-bottomed business, and that allows us to write what we fancy on the packs, on the web or wherever our words appear. If we delivered late, made dodgy recipes, or if they just tasted rubbish, the silly chat on our packaging would become plain annoying.

Support the customer’s journey

It’s the retailer’s job to lay out the store with clear sections, logical product grouping, and attractive displays. As part of the creative team it is your role to attract interest so that the shopper doesn’t miss the rewarding offers, promotions, or brand propositions. Your touchstone is brevity and control – every display must be eye-catching and easy to understand. Above all, create a strong sense of atmosphere, interest, and ideas by making sure that every message is consistently in the same tone of voice, reinforcing the retailer’s core brand values.

As a customer, being bombarded by sales messages when all you want to do is find a product can be enough to make you walk out of a store before you even begin to shop. Every shopper will have similar specific requirements: they want to locate what they’re looking for, be presented with a choice of similar brands and products, pay for their choice without any hassle, and leave feeling satisfied. This complete process (from entering to leaving the store) is usually called “the customer journey” and the messages that guide and support this journey are essential components of good retailing.

Visit any leading supermarket or large-scale retailer and look carefully at their brand icons, straplines, and price ticketing – you’ll see they are using a value-pricing system of one form or another. It will be based on a matrix that separates the core customer messages into a clear hierarchy, organized so that they’re not vying for attention with each other and so that the customer picks up distinct directional, brand, product, and promotional messages at the right time on the journey through the store.

Smaller retailers can adopt a similar approach, often more easily, as they don’t have to use every element, and they will have greater flexibility and less formality. If you let products sit quietly on the shelf you are relying on the customer to discover them. Use posters or shelf messages to point out key items and their benefits and you’re likely to attract impulse purchases. Go for the “wow” factor – try to give the customer a reason to purchase. A good approach is to pre-print blank tickets, posters, and signage so that your messages can be over-printed and put up in-store quickly and cheaply, enabling the store to operate short-term promotions and display very topical, specific, and timely messages.

Key elements in a value-pricing system

All retailers take their own approach to communicating quality, value, and service. Many focus on low prices, and most value-pricing systems will incorporate the following elements:

The style and tone of voice you use must represent the client’s brand accurately and be concise, clear, and easy to understand. If a retail brand is youthful, wacky, cutting-edge, cool, or funky you have a license to write your copy accordingly, but don’t lose sight of the function of your messages. If it’s well respected, established, and sophisticated your voice must reflect this. If it takes time for customers to work out the meaning of your message they probably won’t bother, so cut your copy down to the bone, use as few words as possible, and be prepared to sacrifice your juicy creative lines for straightforward guidance if necessary. For example, if you’re tempted to write “This delicious, aromatic Blue Mountain coffee is supplied to us exclusively and we grind the beans freshly on the premises for you. It’s Fairtrade approved and we keep the prices as low as possible. Try a cup for free before you buy your supplies for home!,” consider this as an alternative “Freshly ground, exclusive Blue Mountain Fairtrade coffee. Enjoy a free cup now when you buy 1lb!” This is a reduction from 46 to 16 words!

Understanding the customer journey

Your customer’s journey in, around, and out of the premises actually begins outside the store, with the enticing advertising and external messages you use to attract attention and draw in passing shoppers. A lot of effort and attention goes into the design of store window displays, but despite this many customers don’t pay much attention to the detail they contain. They are either driving or walking past, while others will be heading into the store anyway. Either way, passers-by do not have much time to stop and absorb complicated messages. Use short, punchy words, and as few as possible, remembering to reflect the brand’s personality at all times.

“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”

Jeff Bezos

The key elements in guiding the customer journey:

You are unlikely to have any control over the number of supplier promotions in the store. These are often written, designed, and produced by the product supplier and are part of the deals made between retailers and manufacturers. Sometimes they come to you in the form of a brief, and you should endeavor to ensure that the same guidelines apply to these as to your client’s other customer messages.

“Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.”

John D. Rockefeller

In-store posters should be big and bold, and they may require little more than an evocative image and a brand identity. The posters created by Fairacre Farms to promote their apples through educating their customers about the specific benefits of different varieties are perfect examples of clear and powerful communications. They contain a clear, benefit-led message and are warm and enticing (page 83).

End-of-shelf displays – which are highly effective sales points – must have a few basic communications elements and be light on copy. An emotive headline and concise qualifying line will be all that’s needed to support the graphics and steer the customer to the products being highlighted.

What are the products saying to your customer?

So much effort has been put into attracting the customer to the products on the shelves, but what about the products themselves? Whether the product range is the retailer’s own-brand or is a stand-alone proprietary brand, your pack copy has to clearly show what the brand is, highlight the product name, explain the benefits it offers, and conform to a number of statutory requirements, including lengthy ingredient (sometimes called INCI) lists. These elements may seem very straightforward initially, but can be surprisingly complex, as they will have to be applied across many items in the range.

On any product, space for copy is severely limited, and the requirements (generic brand message, product details, benefits, full ingredients list, and legal disclaimers) often take up the lion’s share, even before you’ve had the chance to think about a creative line. It is vital to work with the designers and production artists to establish the copy area for each specific product, and to calculate the precise word count. This will save you a lot of time and will help you to manage the expectations of your client from the start.

There are distinct differences between the role of copy on the front and back of the pack. The copy on the front of the pack – especially the brand and product names and descriptors – is an advertisement; it has to catch the eye and encourage people to put it into their shopping baskets. There is rarely time for customers to read your back-of-pack copy in a busy shop – it is intended to be read back at home, when they are relaxed and unhurried. Your back-of-pack copy should provide detail and evidence that reassures customers that they have made a good purchase, and create enough motivation or incentive to ensure that they will replace it from the same product range.

“No matter what your product is, you are ultimately in the education business. Your customers need to be constantly educated about the many advantages of doing business with you, trained to use your products more effectively, and taught how to make never-ending improvement in their lives.”

Robert G. Allen

Get the tone of voice right

If you are writing the copy for an extensive product range it makes sense to define the tone of voice for yourself, for the people approving the copy (the marketing team, business owner, or senior client) and for any other writers and the rest of the design team. This doesn’t need to be sophisticated or cleverly designed. A few carefully prepared pages of paper will be as effective. The tone-of-voice guide on page 16 is a good example of the approach you can take. As with any copy, keep it as short as possible. A few evocative sentences, set in large type, can be a good way to present the tone of voice.

The core elements to a brand matrix:

Parameters such as these present an experienced writer with a clear guide when selecting language, phrases, words, and expressions to evoke the essence of the brand.

Your tone-of-voice guide has to have some structure, some thinking behind it that makes sense to everyone who will be involved with it. Most follow the direction given by a brand matrix, a chart showing a profile of the brand, which aims to identify and explain its core elements. If a brand structure or matrix has not been provided by the lead creative agency or the client’s marketing team, you should consider creating your own to use as a rough guide for your copy.

Creating a product brand is a bit like giving birth

Except more painful. If you were the first person ever to create a new product brand, your job would be a thousand times easier, because the main challenge is how to create something simple, clear, and different when the shelves are full of great brands that have used up all, or most, of the great ideas you will have and the words you can use. Trademark ownership is the biggest hurdle to any brand creation project, and it’s proving more of an obstacle all the time.

“The point to remember about selling things is that, as well as creating atmosphere and excitement around your products, you’ve got to know what you’re selling.”

Stuart Wilde

Method Home Product’s bloq toiletries (see pages 90–1) have eight main elements, the brand name (Method), the product-range name (bloq), the product descriptor (body wash), the product name (go getter), the key ingredient (for instance green mint), the body copy (in one sentence), the brand statement (always ending in the same basic sentence – “Relaxing [or another word] + always skin friendly. Naturally derived”) and size (in fluid ounces and milliliters). Using a minimal number of words it creates a strong brand voice. It looks simple, but is difficult to achieve.

When you are the writer on a product development and marketing team it is important to maintain close contact with others working on the project team, from product managers to formulation experts, 3-D product designers to brand guardians. These people will be able to give you vital information to help you shape your copy, from detail on the specific benefits (the formulation experts will tell you about these in great detail – lap it up) to word counts (production artists should be able to give you exact word counts for each product, based on the typeface and typesetting criteria and the space available for text).

The availability of new brand names is so sparse that you must check your proposals for trademark availability before you show them to the client.

A basic trademark search is free and straightforward. Visit www.uspto.gov or www.companieshouse.co.uk and you’ll find a search engine for trademarks. Be clear on which of the 50 or so categories your brand falls under (it may be more than one and you can search for free) and plug your initial proposals into their search engine. This will show you which of your suggestions are already taken, but be careful – clearance of your proposed name at this stage is not definitive. For a full trademark clearance you will need the help of an experienced trademark solicitor (and see Chapter 8, page 192).

Launching a new product brand requires you to create:

Begin by creating a shortlist of your proposed brand names, and then develop some ideas for range and product names that relate to the main brand. The sky is the limit at this stage. Abstract names (Aquafresh) are better than descriptive names, as they can be registered as trademarks and protected, whereas purely descriptive names (Whiter Teeth) will be too generic to protect.

Try to make a composite word from key words associated with the product range (Goretex), or steal a word from the language used by the target audience (Yo! Sushi), or make up an entirely new word to which you can attach brand values (Wii). There is no right or wrong way to create proposed names, but

it makes sense to group your ideas into distinct categories, such as “formal,” “creative,” “safe,” “hard-hitting,” highlighting the preferred options and summarizing your thinking for each approach.

Once you have a shortlist, show this to the client or your colleagues and boil this down to a few main options (two or three may be enough). Your proposed names can then be transformed into powerful brand proposals by the design team. It is always difficult to know at what point to give the proposed names a graphical interpretation. Good design can transform a plain word into a strong brand, but it is best to start with a word that already has impact and resonance.

Once the product brand name has been approved, your next task is to create range and product names. Larger brands may have a number of ranges within them, which will need identities of their own that fit in with the main brand. All brands will require specific product names. Be careful not to do yourself a disservice, though: there will always be some easy wins that work beautifully, but you have to maintain consistency across the products and may not be able to roll out the concept to every one. It might be worth sacrificing a few brilliant names in order to maintain a consistent balance of good names. Put all the brilliance into the main brand. It can help to work with a colleague on these names, as the brainstorming process will be greatly enhanced by bouncing ideas off each other.

Consider the scope of the brand, as it may be international. Be sure your brand names work in all the countries in which it will be sold. The design industry is littered with unfortunate mistakes such as the Vauxhaull Nova – “no va”

just happens to be Spanish for “doesn’t work”!) Suddenly it became the Corsa.

Presenting your copy during its early stages can be a tough job, as the client, or your colleagues, are unlikely to appreciate your fine balancing act between proposed names and pack copy. It is too easy to criticize and too difficult to create these names, and you will need to be able to justify each of your proposals and back them up with some clear thinking. You also have to be prepared to fight your corner to a certain extent, and the best way to do this is to explain all of the parameters and restrictions under which you are working. This process requires a combination of confidence and sheer nerve.