Here's one way not to market your airline...

And "annihilate" is a good word to use in your messaging

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going? First, a hearty congratulations to Ohio State for winning the college football championship. They were better than every other team. Except the team they lost to. Hahahahahahahahhaha. Go blue!

In case you forgot, I help software companies with their messaging - in a 2 day workshop, we’ll transform how you talk about what your product does. What’s a better way to spend 2 days? (I’ll provide a list of better ways if you’d like). I’m at jared@sagelett.com or book some time here.

This week in Gobbledy:

• What’s the money word?

• A nonstop flight into Paris

• Rocket’s new logo

Obviously, I’d love if we could work together. But the other way you can support Gobbledy is to tell other people about it. Drop a note in a Slack group, or send an email, or mention it on a podcast, or tell your grandmother. That’s not an exhaustive list. Or if you have a Substack, recommending Gobbledy is super helpful. Thanks in advance. End of groveling.

---

One Word Can Make All the Difference

A few weeks back I mentioned how a friend’s poetry professor used to talk about the “money word” in a poem - the word that does much of the heavy lifting and draws attention to a key theme (or, y’know, whatever).

Behold this email from Chirp, a purveyor of some sort of massage table that helps relieve back pain:

Read that copy. What’s the money word?

No, not “to.” That’s not the money word. What in God’s name is wrong with you?

It’s “annihilate.” The product they’re introducing will “annihilate your back pain.”

It’s a great bit of copywriting, and it’s something you can steal if you’d like to, ahem, annihilate the boring in your copy.

Here’s a tagline that AI somethingsomething Instabase uses on their homepage:

“Unlock the potential of your enterprise data with AI.”

But you know who also uses that phrase? Lots of companies:

What could be the money word here?

How about:

“UNCORK the potential of your enterprise data with AI”

“LIBERATE the potential of your enterprise data with AI”

“UNCHAIN the potential of your enterprise data with AI”

“EXPLODE the potential of your enterprise data with AI”

“UNSHACKLE the potential of your enterprise data with AI”

Your homepage headline or subhead should have a money word that you can own.

Here’s a fun (“fun”) exercise: Gather the marketing team around. No - first, send a calendar invite for 10 minutes from now. Have the meeting title be “Team Update.” Or “Marketing Changes.” Watch how nervous they all are. Ha ha ha. That’s hilarious.

Then when they arrive, give them a little “Hey guys, you may be wondering why I gathered you here with only 10 minutes’ notice.”

Hoo boy, won’t they be relieved when you tell them you just want to do a little exercise.

Anyway, ask them to brainstorm a change to 1 word in your homepage headline or subhead. Just 1. They’ll be pleasantly surprised that you didn’t quit and they weren’t being let go. Suddenly doing a little work seems fun! You’re a good boss.

I promise there’ll be a word that they come up with (besides the word where they describe you as an “asshole”) that is a giant leap better than what’s on your page now.

(Thanks to reader/student Jordan C. for the heads up on Chirp…)

---

Nonstop Flight Into Paris

Let’s imagine for a moment that you’ve gotten a new job. Congratulations!

That new job, I neglected to mention, is running marketing for an airline.

Congratulations! (In fact, there was a point in my life where that was the job I wanted. It’s probably still the job I want. Anyway, congrats again!).

I have some good news, and I have some bad news. Which would you like first?

The good news? Sure! Congrats a third time, this is your dream job!

The bad news? The airline is Pakistan International Airlines (PIA).

PIA has had a host of, let’s see, weird - yes, I think “weird” is correct - incidents that may make your job challenging in a unique way.

Oh, what’s an example of a weird incident? Here’s one:

After a plane crash 9 years ago, employees sacrificed a goat on the runway to ensure the safe return of their aircraft to the skies. A spokesperson, however, said that the airline’s workers did not sacrifice the goat as a safety measure. That would be crazy! Instead, he said the goat sacrifice was a “gesture of gratitude.” Makes sense.

So that’s who you’re working for - a company that definitely sacrifices goats, though there’s some confusion about why.

One of the first things you’ll do as the head of marketing is to celebrate - after being banned by the European Union in 2020 for safety violations (did I forget to mention that before you took the job?), PIA will resume flights to Paris this year. That’s just great news - you’ll want to let people in Paris know.

But there’s also something of a marketing challenge with PIA that goes beyond “we’ve been banned by both the US and the EU for a bunch of years.” I mean, don’t get me wrong, that’s a marketing challenge. And you can’t just overcome that with an Instagram post saying, “You shouldn’t have any safety concerns because we’ve sacrificed a goat to ensure your safe flight.”

No, the additional marketing challenge is that Pakistan, itself, has been implicated in some terrorist acts, and let’s be honest, it’s not like Americans are so well-versed in foreign affairs that we (collectively) can remember where various hijackers came from, and also this ad from 1979 seemed a little ominous:

Yeesh.

Anyway, as you’re thinking about your marketing campaign to announce your new service to Paris you’re also thinking about the safety stuff, and the goat sacrifice, and how the country is perceived in other parts of the world, and the in-hindsight-quite-unfortunate ad from 1979 that has been floating around the internet, and so you somehow want to take all of that into account when you create an ad announcing that you are flying to Paris.

Just make sure nothing is flying into a building, and nothing comes across as threatening. Easy peasy.

And this is what you come up with:

Oof, so close.

(Thanks to Ben at One Mile at a Time for that).

---

Rocket Man

Yeah I know that you’ve been excitedly waiting my promised discussion of another logo change, and who am I to disappoint Gobbledy readers?

Keep in mind the rule of thumb we discussed last week: the larger the company, the less they can safely do to mess with their logo. I was quite possibly the only human on Earth who thought that Walmart did a good job with their refresh. I often lightly suggest that heads of marketing mess with branding just because it’s something they can do, but Walmart’s business had changed pretty significantly over the past 20 years since the last refresh - that made it ripe for a fresh coat of paint.

Another reason why you might want to undertake a brand refresh is that your company has acquired a whole bunch of other companies in the past years (or rolled out a whole bunch of new products) and you’d like a way to unify the branding.

This was the case with Rocket Companies, the owner of Rocket Mortgage and a whole bunch of other mortgage-adjacent companies it has acquired.

As it rolled those other products into the company, it changed the names to include “Rocket” in it - for example, they changed the name of Rocket-owned Amrock Title Insurance Company to Rocket Title Insurance Company. Makes sense.

So they wanted to update the logo to reflect that the company has changed from a one-product company to a company that offers a suite of products to help with buying a home.

Behold:

That’s some solid work there, Rocket. They’ve followed all of the advice we’ve given away here for free (what a value!):

• They kept the not-closed circle thingy (they call it a halo), because as we’ve discussed, people hate it when you drop brand iconography.

• They changed the font to a new custom font, but it’s hardly a massive departure. They changed it by going from all upper case to title case.

• They got rid of the black, but took the red from the halo and used it for the font.

All of which is to say, it’s new but it’s rooted in the old. And for a large, established company, that’s about as good as you can do.

That said, if you ever find yourself in a position where you need to change your logo, but nobody has handed you $750,000 to go get a custom font designed*, I have a secret. Want to hear the secret?

(*Getting a custom font designed is fun. You know what’s not fun? Getting that custom font onto every computer in your office and in the hands of every single agency you work with. That sounds terrible.)

Oh yes, the secret. The secret is that you can always just change your font to Helvetica.

To wit:

That took me 4 minutes.

If you haven’t seen the documentary Helvetica, it’s shockingly good (I mean, it’s a documentary about a font) and once you watch it, you will see Helvetica in use everywhere.

---

As always, thanks for reading to the end…I love chatting with my readers about airline marketing and other stuff - please feel free to set up time for us to chat here. It’ll be fun, I promise*.

(*Also as always, not legally binding.)