8 Syllables or you’re out

By Clark S. Judge, managing director.

“Recovering a company’s reputation” leads the case list on our landing page. The case is of U.S. Sugar. With activist incitement, the media had branded the company a “slave labor” employer and an environmental polluter. All wildly false, but no one was listening to the company’s protests. 

Remember this: When trust in you is zero, you have eight syllables to recover it. 

Not eight chapters. Not eight sentences. Not eight words. Eight syllables.

 Four is better.

• For U.S. Sugar, it was four: “Open Harvest”.

• For Verizon (another landing page case), it was eight: “Old wires, old rules; new wires, new rules.”

• For Poland (yet another landing page case), it was seven: “National Security”.

Because in different ways each statement was self-verifying, non-listeners started listening. After all:

• Would a “slave laborer” declare an “Open Harvest”?

• Visualizing the new (non) wires of mobile v. the clunky old black cords of landline telephones, made the need to revisit regulations instantly compelling.

• Did it really make sense uncritically to credit grotesque mischaracterizations about a frontline NATO ally and homeland of Saint/Pope John Paul II without a second look?

 Eight syllables. Tops.