Useful digital marketing info.

Monday 22 April 2013

To speak, perchance to dream ..

Invariably, "live chat" with a customer service person or thing on a website results in anything but liveliness. Deathly boredom or utter frustration is more like it. But not today. The following "conversation" has just taken place with a chap at a new company called Nutmeg, which is taking the low-cost, self-service model of a Zopa to the fat-cat, fusty old fund management industry:

Love-haytch relationships

In my day, when I were a nipper, where I come from, etc. etc. the number of people who pronounced the letter H as "haytch" was small. All right-speaking folk knew it was "aytch". So who'd've thunk the day would come when I too became a haytcher ?!

The reason is simply that "aytch" is not quickly enough and easily enough understood over the phone, where we spend so much of our semi-automaton lives these days, repeating ad nauseam our personal letters and numbers. Aytch can sound too close to "eight".

I related this life detail to the woman from M&S Bank this morning, as I robotically spelled out my postcode for her, complete with a penultimate "haytch" and she said: "Ooh, I do that too, never used to, think it's for the same reason as you." The ghost of a journalist in me said, Aha, me-plus-one-other-person-changing-our-verbal-habits-equals-an-important-new-social-trend.