While the “second hand” clothing market might not be exactly a highly profitable business that would care too much about its marketing and value proposition, this poster made me pause and think about the words and their immediate associations.
“Pre-loved” communicates the same meaning as “second hand” would, yet with a layer of affect that nudges me in a direction towards making a purchase, or even considering checking out the market. It also potentially signals the condition of clothing, with the word “love” implying being well taken care of.
“Second hand”, on the other hand (no pun intended), is a little more straight to the point but also potentially holds the unfavourable associations that may vary from person to person. The affect in such way is immediately absent from the word itself and left to be created by each person individually.
And here I can admit to why the name Second Cup Coffee never quite made sense to me. It always sounded too close to “second hand” in my mind, and I have a suspicion that nobody wants a second hand coffee.
Affect while may seem as universal in some cases - with the use of words such as “love”, doesn’t however exist in a vacuum and is always connected to social context - to the bigger picture that we find a given described object in.
This is also why I have never wrote a big exposé on the bad naming of Second Cup Coffee and have been quietly watching and wondering how it is still in business.
I wonder if there is context - Canadian, or perhaps more local Toronto one, that I am simply not aware of for having not been here long enough.
Note to self: This could be a research project.
Questioning the unquestionable
“Second hand”, while may not make a great business case, it is a good example of a word that is open to interpretation. It is a reminder not to take such common and simple words for granted.
Seeing its ordinariness as not a given and something that could be reinvented, creates a possibility for a reframe. A reframe that doesn’t only create a positive affect and communicates more meaningful information, such as the quality of the clothing in this case, but also a reframe that allows one word silently tell a bigger story. A story that our mind inevitably creates in the absence of information. The information that is present then becomes even more important as it lays the building blocks of associations in our minds.
The idea that language and words in it do not only carry their direct meanings but also stories and even history is not a new one. It has really made waves with feminist movement and our somewhat recent attention to the gendered words English language inherited from the culture (Policeman; fireman etc are some such examples)
With English being spoken by such a huge population in the world, there is also a certain construction of Western centricity and its version of “native speaker” English. This is also why we can so easily take the meanings of the words for granted, and at the conscious level at least, forget the associations they carry.
For non-native speakers (as myself), arguably of course, it is easier to step out of the assumed paradigm of common sense and access the literal meanings of the words and what might be unintended associations. I still remember when I was 16 and just moved to the UK, with my level of high school basic English, I was puzzled by the word “Pay as You Go”. It seems very common sense now, but at the time I couldn’t quite understand that ‘as you go’ means per usage rather than literal going somewhere and paying.
Now it seems funny but it does remind me that common sense has too been learned and not always so common.
What does it mean for the discussion of this example and marketing and UX at large? Apart from not taking things for granted, it creates an opening - the very opening which would allow us to step outside the box and find new creative ways of articulating something beyond its matter-of-factness.
The matter of factness of such commonly used words seems to imply their simplicity. “Pre-loved” seems more complex, perhaps because it does require some extra thought - a pause on the part of the copywriter as well as the consumer. But what if not such intentional pausing in the world of so many distractions and overwhelming amounts of information we want people to do?