The New York Times’ guide to a quick tour of Copenhagen.

By Jonathan Winch, Partner & Co-founder

The telecom provider Telia has spent a lot of time and money on such statements. But their customers rate them at the bottom of the customer satisfaction scale (Markedsføring magazine, 23.03.10).

I visited a Telia store recently and became highly irritated with their service. They refused to bend a harmless rule to help fix a problem they themselves had created for me. The difficulty was one of having the wrong attitude toward their customers.

Leaving that store, I decided to sneak into another Telia store to see if they might be more flexible and the girl behind the counter helped me immediately. Her attitude made all the difference.

When people ask me to create a vision/mission that consists of a bunch of statements (something they often do), I just can’t see the value. And I typically advise them not to do it. Unless they do it right, that is…

There are essentially two types of vision/mission projects: The first are highly creative efforts that result in something most people like and think was worth it. They are the results of big, expensive processes and get implemented in companies like Carlsberg, LEGO or Nike. I can recommend them if you have the cash and time.

The second is the text-by-the-meter model where you write a lot of stuff from the company’s “We” perspective. That always results in paragraphs that you yourself would never read and which you therefore can’t expect others to want to read, either.
Without the big process, the only thing you can do is to string a lot of clichés together in prose – i.e. the second type. And that’s what we can do for you if you want us to, of course. It would take about 4-5 hours. No input is required – we just pull the clichés out of a rather worn old hat. Of course, I believe that it would be against any good brand to do so.

But there may be other internal or external pressures that require it to be done this way. The reason I’m so tough on this is that times have moved far away from long paragraphs of blowing the company’s own trumpet. People don’t believe it like they (maybe) used to. It’s just another sign that the company is not a leader – because leaders are action-focused, have a simple but powerful attitude, show that they know the customer’s time is short. Employees don’t get behind this stuff, either. They get motivated by the excitement of working with a company, not by management statements and rules.

It’s not about looking like everyone else, but about looking different in an interesting, exciting way. So let’s cut to what is really important. Let’s drop those stiff corporate statements that waste management time and no one can remember anyway. And let’s focus on expressing and living an attitude instead. So the answer is? Create an attitude with edge and express it via text, images and interactions. That works much better!

If you want to see how, just ask us.

A quick glance through the job pages in the Norwegian newspaper AftenPosten on a Sunday, and you soon notice something similar about around 75% of the companies seeking new employees. They are all one of the largest or leading companies in their field.

There are some variations. They may be the largest in Norway, Scandinavia, Europe or the world, or the leading transporter, pipe producer for the oil & gas industry or IT consultants focused on the communications industry. But they are the largest somewhere or lead something.

These companies usually state this fact in the first line of their boilerplate text – and as a reader, you soon learn to ignore it. Because it’s boring. And because it doesn’t tell us anything about the company’s personality. Perhaps it’s time for communications people to rethink what people want to know about their company – and put that up front.

Here are some opening lines from boilerplates that I think connect with the reader, and give you an immediate idea of what the company is like:

“Innocent is the UK and Europe’s favourite smoothie company, selling natural healthy products in over 13 countries and employing over 220 people across Europe.”

“GE (NYSE: GE) is a diversified infrastructure, finance and media company taking on the world’s toughest challenges.”

“Apple ignited the personal computer revolution with the Apple II, then reinvented the personal computer with the Macintosh.”

World number three Caroline Wozniacki was sent crashing out of the French Open quarter-finals after a stunning display by Italian Francesca Schiavone.

Starbucks is set for further expansion in Europe - and Arla is a key partner. The Esbjerg-based company will manufacture, market and distribute Starbucks’ ready-to-drink coffee beverages for the European market. Arla subsidiary Cocio Chokolademælk has already increased plant capacity and is ready to begin production. I know quite a few Americans who will be happy to have their Starbucks back.

New York has long been a popular destination for Danes. And now, it looks like the New York Times is trying to return the favor. A few weeks ago, on the heels of the COP15 climate summit, the Op-Ed columnist Thomas Friedman posted a story about Denmark’s many green initiatives and how the country is working hard to become a low-carbon economy. It positioned Denmark well - despite the summit’s inadequate results.

And that’s not all. Just last week, the same paper published a feature on “The 31 Places to Go in 2010″. And guess who came in at number five? Yep, Copenhagen. That’s right, Copenhagen is described as “one of the world’s greenest — and maybe coolest — cities”. Maybe it was all that Oprah-gushing?

Do you send a million text messages a day? Or do find yourself spending all your free time in the Twitterverse? If so, you might be putting your ability to spell in serious danger – at least according to some critics. OMG, you say!

Short Message Service Language, aka textese or chatspeak, might actually be the fastest growing dialect in the world, but is it leading us to pathological sloppiness? Some are even calling it the death of the English language. Really? 

Well, turns out shortening English into cryptic phonetic bits doesn’t impact our ability to spell ‘real’ English. Recent research shows that if you’re a good speller of the Queen’s English, you’re also a good textese speller. In fact, those who used more elaborate codes while texting where actually better spellers of normal English. Srsly. And, as good logic would have it, if you are a poor speller in ‘real’ English, you’re more likely to make errors in textese. So bware!

Previous DHL Relay Race experience tells us that we don’t run quite as fast as we write, but we never give up trying.

So you can find us in Fælledparken again this year, in better shape than ever! One of us has been training hard high up in the Norwegian mountains, two of us have run the Copenhagen Marathon, and the rest of us have been conserving all our energy for this year’s DHL run.

If you’re running on Wednesday 2 September 2009 – or if you’re going along to cheer for your colleagues – come and meet us in Blok 48 (find us on the map).

Happy racing!

Check out the action from last year’s race…

We always ask our customers what unique selling point their product has. What can it do better, faster, simpler, cheaper or more efficiently than the competition. But sometimes the answer is, “We don’t really have have one. All the products on the market are pretty much the same.”

I recently came across this quote from Joel Raphaelson about parity products and thought I’d share it:

“In the past, just about every advertiser has assumed that in order to sell his goods he has to convince consumers that his product is superior to his competitor’s.
This may not be necessary. It may be sufficient to convince consumers that your product is postively good. If the consumer feels certain that your product is good and feels uncertain about your competitor’s, he will buy yours.
If you and your competitors all make excellent products, don’t try to imply that yours is better. Just say what’s good about your product - and do it a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it.”

After surviving the inevitable phone and internet issues during the move, everything is now up and running and it’s business as usual for the Eye for Image team. Our new office is on Pistolstræde - just a stone’s throw from Strøget and Kongens Nytorv. A few of us are having some trouble staying away from the shops, but the office is great and, since we’re all scattered around Copenhagen, the central location is a big plus. 

We’re all really looking forward to summer in the heart of Copenhagen - stop by for a visit sometime!