It doesn’t enhance, challenge, or inspire, and it certainly doesn’t clarify. Burying your meaning is bad enough in everyday communication – but in advertising, it’s particularly heinous.
Oak Tree Inn is a hotel chain that operates primarily in small railroad towns in the western United States, catering largely to train crews. Oak Tree Inns are hardly ostentatious or luxurious, but they’re clean, quiet and cheap, easily accessible and blessedly smokefree. Engineers and brakemen often put in uncommonly long shifts that end at bizarre hours, meaning they probably crave a good night’s sleep more than the rest of us do.
It’d be natural for Oak Tree Inn to embrace its position as the first choice of railroad workers. Instead, Oak Tree apparently feels the need to downplay that distinctive selling point and fashion itself as something else – although what that something is, the company staunchly refuses to define.
Oak Tree Inns might not have the slick marble lobbies of a Westin, or the delectable room service of a Hilton, but here’s what Oak Tree does boast:
‘…a unique “Oak Tree Inn” hotel lodging product with hundreds of special design features that produce a superior guest experience for all types of guests.’
Never mind the mystifying use of superfluous quotation marks, this company actually refers to its hotels as “lodging product(s)”.
Ask yourself before committing anything to the printed page, or the computer screen:
“How ludicrous would this sound if I used it in conversation?”
Wife: I can’t keep my eyes open. Let’s pull over and get a room.
Husband: This exit…Hampton Inn…Super 8…America’s Best Value…
Wife: How about this one? Oak Tree Inn?
Husband: Yes! I read their website. They offer an outstanding lodging product.
If you’re so uninspired by your own business that you can’t refer to what your company provides as, for instance, even a “restful stop after a long day” rather than a “lodging product…that produce(s) a superior guest experience for all types of guests”, then what can you get excited about?
Oak Tree’s Elko, Nevada hotel is an oasis of clean air in one of the smokiest towns in the Pacific Time Zone. Why the company wouldn’t showcase this to the 81% of potential customers who don’t smoke is a mystery.
Either Oak Tree management doesn’t care about attracting new business among non-railroad people, or delegated the web copy as an afterthought. Forced to choose, management would presumably cop to the latter.
(In the interests of correct usage, Oak Tree doesn’t even sell a “product” anyway but a service. Oak Tree is obviously just renting out its hotels to its guests, not selling the hotels.)
The words get even less informative as you continue.
“Hundreds of special design features”?
That presumably means at least 200 “special design features”, possibly 300 or 400. What might that entail? Let’s posit:
- thick shower curtain
- sturdy chair
- workable mattress
- glazed windows
- framed paintings
- deadbolts
- do-not-disturb door hangers
- laundry bags
- those folding pseudo-stools that some people like to lay clothes on
- numbers clearly emblazoned on doors to rooms, making finding them a snap
Even Oak Tree’s architects couldn’t possibly think of 190 more items to add to that list. In other words, “hundreds of special design features” is a null phrase written by a lazy copywriter – or more likely, by an employee who had nothing better to do and was commandeered to write website copy.
As long as we’re parsing:
“…that produce a superior guest experience for all types of guests”
There’s tiresome use of English, there’s exceedingly tiresome use of English, and then there’s using “experience” as a noun. Again, if you can’t define it, describe it, or even pretend you know what it means, don’t use it. If asked what a “superior guest experience” refers to, Oak Tree’s CEO’s only reasonable answer would be a prolonged stutter.
If you’ve got big heated swimming pools (which Oak Tree doesn’t), say so. If you’re got the finest concierges in all of hospitality (which Oak Tree doesn’t), say so. If you’ve got oversized rooms and quiet surroundings (which Oak Tree does), say so.
Callaway Golf sells technologically advanced drivers with generous sweet spots – clubs that are easy to swing and fun to play with. What Callaway doesn’t sell, at least not explicitly, is “an outstanding golf club experience.”
Paying only passing attention to Oak Tree’s redundant “clarification” of its lodging product as a “guest experience for all types of guests,” it’d be bad enough if this appeared on a corporate site not intended for guests’ eyes. But no, each visitor to OakTreeInn.net is reminded that she’s no individual, but rather a “type” of guest. Because nothing gives the personal touch quite like categorization.
In Motel 6’s unforgettable radio spots of the ‘90’s, a folksy Tom Bodett placed his thumbs in his suspenders and proudly let American travelers know what the company offered – “a clean, comfortable room” for people looking to save a few bucks on the road.
In what’s certainly a completely unrelated development, Motel 6 operates 30 times as many hotels as Oak Tree does.
