From copywriter to CEO, Charli Nordone is an icon at The Writer.
With 19 years' experience in brand language, she’s worked with some of the biggest global brands including Unilever, American Express, Cisco, HSBC and many she can’t mention.
We sat down with Charli to ask what advice she has for brands, now and in the future. And a little on what she hopes her future might hold.
Let’s start with three quick-fire questions.
1. What wakes you up in the morning?
The new products we're developing. The change we create for clients. The people I work with. Although the most accurate answer would be...my toddler.
2. What keeps you up at night?
How I can show brands that their language is their secret weapon. Their secret sauce. The thing that, given even a small amount of attention, can bring them insane results.
3. What do you wish all your clients knew?
See #2
The Writer works with global, Fortune 500 brands. What advice would you give to companies that need to communicate across borders and speak to lots of different audiences?
I think it’s less about crossing geographical borders. It’s more about the accessibility of language generally. Is your writing easy to understand for the broadest audience possible?
It’s easy to underestimate how transformative accessible language is. You want to attract talent, retain people, sell more, save money, save time, win fans…getting to a baseline of good writing is the key.
Any organisation that has a responsibility to communicate clearly with customers, clients and employees should be taking action to up their language game.
So everyone then?
Exactly.
We’ve often talked to clients about using language to create ‘culture change by stealth’. Which is true, it does. But I think we can be loud and proud about finding the writing that’s doing a brand and business a disservice, fixing it, and putting a figure on the impact we’ve made.
We’ve saved HSBC £1.4m after rewriting 150 pieces of customer comms. For another client, we rewrote one letter and increased the response rate by 800%. We got Cisco +150% more click throughs on their website overnight.
In our ten biggest clients there are about 1.5m people. The average person spends 9 hrs a week writing emails alone (according to a study by Slack). That’s 13.5m hours a week. If we helped just 5% of those people save just 5 mins a day, we’re talking 7+ years’ worth of writing time saved every week.
How would you do that?
Training. Training your teams to write is an absolute no-brainer. It’s good for business. And writing is a life skill that massively benefits the individual, in and out of work. Plus, it’s the thing that’ll help make accessible writing the norm.
And what about things at a brand level?
I’ve always believed that language can be the solution to any business problem or any brand aspiration.
I want to show what’s possible when brand language is thought about at the start of brand strategy conversations. So that brand personality, voice and tone is the first thought, never an afterthought.
If a brand wants to do better with employees, customers, and clients, we’ll use language to get them to that baseline of good writing and communicating consistently well.
If they want to be consistent and distinctive, then we’ll do the above, and help them stand out from (and potentially take business from) their competition.
All with what they say and how they say it.