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Well, ‘in the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate’ would be one. It’s becom­ing almost impossible to pick up a news­pa­per or read any mar­ket­ing copy without encoun­ter­ing word­ing to this effect – ‘in the cur­rent down­turn’, ‘in these chal­len­ging times’ etc.

Of course, the reason for using them is empathy – we get it, we under­stand, we feel your pain. The prob­lem is that cus­tom­ers don’t really care that much whether you feel their pain or not. They’re far more inter­ested in actu­ally deal­ing with that pain.

No one needs remind­ing of the prob­lems the global eco­nomy faces at the moment. So dwell­ing on it in your mes­saging is at best a waste of pre­cious space and at worst set­ting the cus­tomer on a downer before you even begin.

It is far bet­ter to go straight in to telling them why your product can solve real prob­lems right now than, in the words of John Cleese, wast­ing time on a ‘state­ment of the bleed­ing obvious’.

And let’s be clear, the real prob­lems to fix for your cus­tom­ers are not the eco­nomic cli­mate and a global reces­sion (although I’d give you a round of applause if you could). The real prob­lems are that they need more cus­tom­ers, more prof­it­able ways of work­ing and more rev­enue. Simple really.

Sprint has put up a page full of wid­gets to sup­port its This is now pos­i­tion­ing. It’s a fant­ast­ic­ally eclectic mix show­ing everything from from the cur­rent world pop­u­la­tion through to the num­ber of cof­fee cups being pro­duced. You can even down­load a pre-determined selec­tion for your own use (shame they didn’t let you simply pick from the whole lot).

There are so many mar­ket­ing oppor­tun­it­ies with wid­gets right now. Bey­ond simply using them to reflect a pos­i­tion­ing, as Sprint has, the oppor­tun­ity to cre­ate stuff that’s really use­ful for cus­tom­ers is just immense.

NOTCOT points to a present­a­tion by designer Chip Kidd who is respons­ible for, among other things, some of the love­li­est book jacket designs I’ve ever seen.

In the talk at Uni­ver­sity of Michigan, Chip takes the audi­ence through a num­ber of his designs. He talks about the reac­tions they received from his cli­ents (both good and bad), the com­prom­ises and the end results.

As an insight into the cre­at­ive busi­ness, it’s price­less with some laugh out loud moments.

The present­a­tion is avail­able free for down­load via iTunes (sadly not on You­Tube so I can’t embed it).

Take a look.