Now let's change the kerning!

I’d forgotten how irritated I got by constant rewrites. All that tweaking of minor details and arguing about which of three synonyms is the best choice.

I have a client that asked for a Unique Positioning Statement, which I was perfectly willing to give him. One hitch was that I use UPSs as an internal document to inform the rest of the marketing efforts, and he wants to use it as an external document, like a Mission Statement or something.

In the course of doing this thing, I created a very easy, very powerful instrument for generating marketing hooks, taglines, etc. It’s a simple, beautiful, one-page form, and I impressed all hell out of myself in bringing it to life.

So I filled out this awesome page, and sent it to the client, explaining that he now had five hooks and at least ten taglines – all consistent with each other (for campaigns) as well as being true to his focal group and his strengths. His reply was to say that it was nice, but it didn’t have a UPS anywhere.


Nice? Nice? Dude, the only way this could be any easier would be if it had a handle on the side that spun the sections into alignment for you. And you’d have to strap C-4 to it to get a bigger bang out of it.

No matter. I wrote a short paragraph for him – three or four sentences –and sent them on (also identifying the section of the form they were pulled from). He tells me in his reply that he wanted one sentence.

Now, I knew that if I replaced the periods with semicolons and sent it back, he’d be pissed, so I broke out the kettle and the thesaurus and boiled it all down into one well-balanced sentence. It’s a sentence that could be tweaked endlessly, so I don’t anticipate a laurel and hearty handshake in the next reply.

I’ll keep at it until he’s happy – after all, that’s what I’m in the business for – but man I hate constant rewrites.