Bless Your Heart!

ell bless your heart.  Recently I’ve found myself using phrases and sayings I heard my older relatives and characters saying growing up down here in North Cackalacky. I’m always amazed that these things come out of my mouth so easily, like I’m channeling the redneck in me. Such as…

Somebody might say, “I heard of a barbecue joint down in Cackalackyville, where is that anyways?” And I’ll find myself saying, “That’s way down there where nobody never was.” Which in the south means to say, nowhere, you don’t need to be going down there.

Or the infamous… Someone might say, Did you hear Melba’s husband done left her?, “bless her heart”, meaning quite the opposite from concern usually, like, “she needed leavin'”.

Then there are words like, “dadblastit!” if I do something like spill the coffee. Or “Ya’ll ain’t right”, meaning, something is seriously wrong with a person. Usually used when a friend is being funny, or as we say, “funnin”.

I grew up talking like this, but for nearly 2 decades, I lived in Boston, adopting that strange dialect with it’s own special words and sayings, some I can’t say in public outside New England for fear of being misunderstood. I was there so long I still “shut the light”, I get water from the “bubblah”, I order “coffee reglah” and I know what it means to go to the “basement”.

What I’m getting at is that in direct marketing, we speak to folks where they live. Use their language, as if we were their friend. That’s especially true for copy, but also for design. To our audience, the place they live is with your product, or in the pages of your magazine, so we have to meet them and talk to them on a one-to-one level.

So next time you mail whether it’s print or digital, I hope you’ll hire IngramCS to create your next winning promotion. We speak many languages from north, south, east and west.

www.ingramcs.com

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Dwight Ingram |  Creative Director  |  IngramCS