“Brilliantly boring since 1865.”
That’s the tagline for a campaign PNC Bank introduced in 2024. Most marketing campaigns make me cringe, but this didn’t. I loved it the moment I heard it.
Why?
It shows how a single word can change the tone and impact of a message.
There are at least a half a dozen ways you could express the same core idea:
-Remarkably reliable.
-Dazzlingly dependable.
-Truly trustworthy.
None of those grabs your attention the same way. Some are too cheesy. Others are too…normal.
We expect businesses to tell us how reliable they are.
We don’t expect anyone to brag about being boring.
When PNC does, it’s enough of a surprise to trigger our brains to say “Wait, what?”
That moment of attention may not make me choose one bank over another, but in today’s attention-starved world it’s a critical step.
You can’t start a conversation with someone who doesn’t notice you’re there.
This idea isn’t just useful in marketing.
I’m working with several clients right now on presentations they will give at a corporate all hands or kickoffs to launch new strategic programs. As we review their decks, I look for an ear-catching word or idea to break the audience out of the “death-by-powerpoint” lull so common at these events.
That “hook” is often hidden in a sea of buzzwords, so I close the slides and ask people to answer three questions:
1.) What’s one thing your audience doesn’t know now that you want them to know after your talk?
2.) What’s one thing they don’t believe now that you want them to believe after your talk?
3.) What do you want them to say when others ask, “what was that talk about?”
With these questions, we reduced a multi-slide discussion of data quality into a single phrase, “Our data isn’t wrong, it’s incomplete.”
Another client wanted to drive home the need to be more intentional about customer experience. It’s an operations-obsessed culture so we posed a rhetorical question: “What would happen if we managed customer relationships as diligently as we manage operations?”
In a third scenario, we wanted to challenge leaders of a CAB to do less talking and more listening. Rather than say something generic like “These meetings are about gathering feedback, not touting our next release,” we used a play on words: “This is a Customer Advisory Board. What are we looking to get their advice on?”
None of these phrases was a silver bullet, but they made an impact. Conversation happened that never would have if clients had stuck to the traditional way of saying what they were trying to say.
If you’re working on a presentation, too, I encourage you to spend a little more time on word choice than you normally would. Try to punch up the point you’re making with unique, surprising, or counterintuitive words.
A little more time now can mean less time repeating yourself down the road because people don’t remember what you said.
