The Problem - How you cut through with your target audience

Corporate messages can be dry and without depth, when you need to engage with an audience on an emotional level and encourage them to engage with your message, beautifully written poetry or prose can cut through brains fogged with corporate messaging.

If you need engagement not resistance to your message, then the Rhymeologist can help. I can work with your campaign brief to create something highly tailored and unique, which changes the perception of your audience and delivers extra texture and great results to your campaign.

Lets discover your story - Tell your story - Live your story….

The Opportunity - Why rhyming works & the rise in spoken word

Whether your campaigns are aimed at raising awareness of local issues, celebrating people, or promoting places, you should consider a more creative approach to the words you are using.

People respond to the familiar and their ‘known’ environments, neighbourhoods & destinations in life. When creatively written, poems or prose will ensure your campaigns are received positively by your audience and understood clearly, because the words mean something to them. Rhyming poetry/language/ or ‘my style of lyrical marketing’ is heard everywhere - because it works.

In advertising jingles, football chants, birthday-card greetings, tabloid headlines, political slogans, and catchphrases. Rhyme makes the sentiments of a message more powerful and more memorable.

While rhyme may increase the memorability of a phrase, the authors of the paper attribute its power to our old friend, fluency (see, for example, Convince with Simple Fonts). Our brains don’t like to work, and things that are easier to process are preferred. In the case of the aphorism experiment, the apparent truthfulness of the rhyming statements was enhanced because they were more fluent – i.e., easier for the subjects’ brains to process.

When should you use rhyme in business or personal persuasion? First, like any verbal tool, a little goes a long way. One subtle rhyme in a slogan or a catch-phrase will make that phrase more believable. A rhyme could emphasize a product benefit or answer a common objection. You don’t want your whole pitch to be in verse – that will cause the listener to focus more on the mechanics of the delivery and wording rather than the message itself. 

These less conventional rhymes weren’t tested in the study, but it would be no surprise to find that they enhanced fluency as well.

Want to try adding a bit of rhyme? The free tool at Rhymer.com is a good place to start. And don’t forget about other strategies like alliteration, sensory words, and textural metaphors.