The BV Blog

My iPhone is paying off already.

I had to cut open a man’s chest earlier today to perform emergency, on-the-street cardiac massage. Thank goodness for the iPhone’s laser scalpel feature. It made a quick, clean incision in the chest wall, allowing me to squeeze the man’s heart and restart his circulation. Minutes later, I was showing him digital pictures of my new boat.

The iPhone has proven handy in the kitchen as well. It dices and slices fresh produce with ease, presses garlic cloves, and makes more ice than a polar bear with a small bladder and a thing for ginger ale. Because my iPhone gives me Internet access and a nice selection of razor-sharp cleavers, I was able to watch the podcast of Sports Center while preparing a meal of fresh zebra steaks.

And the new iPhone offers so much more. It’s a taser, telescope, corkscrew and nail file. Its built-in NASCAR simulator is the best I’ve seen. It comes with a 64-color digital crayon and a sharpener in the back. It can even analyze your golf swing and tuck the kids in at night.

I guess it’s a phone too.

BusinessVoice president Jerry Brown sent me a blog post today about a topic many of us can identify with: trying to buy a product you know relatively nothing about.

It’s called “Excuse me, do you speak English?” and it suggests another way marketers can stress benefits over features to help consumers make good buying decisions and, in the process, create customer loyalty.

The word ‘everyday’ seems to be everywhere lately, but in all the wrong places.

In the last few weeks I have seen the word ‘everyday’ used incorrectly on the menu of a regional restaurant chain (”Our lunch specials are just $6.95 everyday”), on the binding of a pad of notebook paper (”Value Plus. Your Best Value…Everyday”), on a digital billboard for a local newspaper, on a P-O-P sign at a national pizza chain, in a script for a TV commercial, on a T-shirt, and twice on the homepage of a website.

According to the book Common Errors in English Usage:

“Everyday” is a perfectly good adjective, as in “I’m most comfortable in my everyday clothes.” The problem comes when people turn the adverbial phrase “every day” into a single word. It is incorrect to write “I take a shower everyday.” It should be “I take a shower every day.”

At BusinessVoice the words we write for our clients are most often heard, not read, but if you’re going to print or online with new marketing copy, remember to run it past several pairs of qualified eyes.