Archives: DL cards and leaflets

Let me seduce you into trusting me by being so bland, so innocuous that I will easily lull you into a state of blessed relief.

One might think that the function of a logo and associated corporate branding is to stand out from the crowd, to do a little dance and shimmy in order to catch the eye and make a lasting impression. A good logo is worth its weight in golden arches, able to connect instantly with its target prey… err, audience, and engender all those positive feelings of association, desire and, ultimately, consumption.

But not in this case. It would be a challenge to come up with a logo any more insipid or meaningless – and if you did, it would probably, perversely, be quite a bit more interesting. This has just the right degree of instant forgettability, the design equivalent of a backbencher’s speech (or a blog), existing for its own sake but barely noticed by anybody. But why?

God knows there are enough boring logos out there without anybody deliberately trying to add to the pile, but this one is so anonymous as to suggest it is part of a calculated strategy. And what of the brand name? I defy anybody to tell me, from the name alone, what this company is selling. It really is a mark of genius to come up with a name that evokes almost no connotations at all, neither good nor bad, positive or negative. It exists in its own perfectly poised bubble of meaninglessness.

I could say something about the colours too – a dominant blue and a highlight colour which is another… I dunno, maybe another kind of blue? We all know about blue though. Calming, safe, secure, reliable – so perhaps this gives you a clue as to where this is all going.

Let’s open it up anyway (it’s an A4 roll fold to DL size) and see the reveal.

You see, that in itself is a kind of brilliance. Expert advice, solutions, experience… and still I have no idea what they are selling. It’s almost as if they don’t want me to know what they do. I might even have to call them up to find out. It’s got to be an arms dealer eh? Or a company that wants to take away my nuclear waste.

Opening up the whole piece gives the game away immediately with a cartoon image of a man kicking a wrecking ball of DEBT while his family safely make their way home to a little suburban house. It’s about money – or rather that largely taboo topic of personal financing: debt. Crushing debt. Debt that is about smash our lives and destroy everything we’ve worked so hard to accumulate. Debt that threatens to annihilate who we are. An existential level of debt that consumes everything in its path.

Now it all makes sense; the low-key approach, the deliberate avoidance of any razzle-dazzle or blowing of trumpets. The key word here is stress; this is already a highly-charged situation (if you’re the person to whom this leaflet is speaking) so the goal is not to inject more emotion into the proposition, to hype it up, but rather to drain it all away. Make it seem totally normal, boring, manageable. Unremarkable.

The rest of the flyer is just text in the form of a letter which, again, is quite noteworthy for what it does. Nobody reads this much, do they? Not in an advertising flyer anyway. Even with the inclusion of four bullet points to break it up a bit, that’s a lot of words to consume.

The whole thing is crafted to be quietly soothing, professional and authoritative. Peace of mind is mentioned a couple of times. It speaks of helping people ‘who find themselves in mortgage stress’ as if, lo and behold, they suddenly woke up one morning and found themselves surrounded by a thicket of missed payments. Shit, where did all this fucking debt come from?

One sentence in particular is worth quoting, just for the way it breaks all the rules of snappy, incisive copy writing:

We understand how stressful it can be to be under financial pressure so we’ve developed a completely different business model that puts you at the heart of the process to develop a solution tailored to your unique situation that really works to remove the stress.

Wow. I don’t know what it means exactly but at the end of it I’m too exhausted to offer any resistance. Whatever it is they’re handing out, I want some of it.

I understand, too, how such word assemblages work, if only because I’m equally guilty of writing swathes of similarly meaningless buzzword-heavy text blobs which sound as if they’re groping towards an insight of staggering significance without, ultimately, really saying anything at all.

Just a side note – it’s interesting how often hyperlinks are preserved in printed document these days, underlined and in a different font colour, as happens with the company website address here. It’s probably because the document was originally created as a pdf which kept the link and its styling. We’re so blinded to it now nobody notices to take it out even when the functionality no longer exists.

Overall, I now have a vague idea about what Soteria does although the main take-away I get from this leaflet is that they are expertly skilled in tackling something that people really don’t want to have to deal with and then simply boring it into submission.

Yeah, I can relate to that.

This is from the same people, I think, who brought us the duck in the bathroom.

This time around it’s a useful reminder not to leave wads of cash lying around on the floor when you move house. So easily done. You’re busy wrapping up Granny’s china in old newspapers, desperate to make sure the pot plants don’t get crushed in the kerfuffle and, before you know it, you’ve walked out the door leaving stacks of dough just sitting there on your impossibly shiny floor. It happens all the time.

So hats off to these people, whoever they are, for alerting us to a common and yet easily-preventable mishap.

Just look at the poor people in this real-life example. The removalist is practically on his way, wheeling his empty trolley into the back of his truck, but look what he’s forgotten to take with him. How much has been left behind? Well, there are six piles of nine bundles with, say, $10,000 in each bundle so that’s over half a million dollars just sitting there. An unexpected bonus for the next occupants, for sure.

One can only hope that, at the last moment, the removalist happens to glance behind him and notice half a million dollars neatly stacked in the middle of an empty room. Or perhaps he comes back for one final check, wandering around just to make sure, with that nagging, ill-defined presentiment he’s forgetting something – as you do, moving from room to room, checking and double checking but never quite able to put your finger on what it is you know you’ve forgotten. Ah well, it’ll come back to you. Can’t be anything very important.

Oh, but if you only knew…

So, stick this reminder on your fridge (assuming it hasn’t already been carted away), put it on the mantelpiece – whatever – and hopefully you’ll never have to suffer the embarrassment of accidentally mislaying half a million dollars.

So today I learnt that Koreans supposedly make good decorators. Who knew?

This flyer arrived in the letterbox and caught my eye, partly because of the syntax (placing the verb at the end of the clause- ‘Better looking property wanted?’ – as occurs in Korean) but also because it sells the idea of ‘reliable’ Korean painters.

I’ve never really considered the nationality of painters and decorators before, let alone whether or not Koreans have a reputation for being better than your average tradesman. It’s not the same as Japanese sushi chefs or Italian shoemakers – is it?

Perhaps it’s just an interesting marketing gambit – promoting a benefit that previously was unknown to be a positive – which is not that unusual as a ploy; think of all the ad campaigns that create a need for something which people didn’t even know they were lacking. European styling. Pads with wings. Moisturising strips

But, in this case, I don’t think that’s what is happening. Rather I think Jo Kang Painting is just alerting us to the fact that they are Korean and if we want to make something of that, well, that’s up to us.

These chaps look like real fellers.