Copywriting UK | TENFOUR blog

TENFOUR really likes the Love’s Fish Restaurant website.

Love’s is a Brighton eaterie that featured on Channel 4’s Kitchen Nightmares. What we appreciate is the fact that the site does the basics well. A bit like the advice you’d get from Gordon Ramsey, we’d imagine.

It leads with food. Fish chowder, crumbed fish cakes, fish cooked whichever way you like, and the posh fish and chips deal from 12-5pm. They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Well, TENFOUR’s is rumbling.

Above and beyond that, there’s a super-clear map to find the restaurant and a simple booking facility. Without even speaking about the more fun features, it’s a site that truly works. It gets you hungry enough to snap up a table.

Well, we hope so. Owner Allan Love seems like a nice chap - one of those people you’d like to do well in business. It’s just a shame that TENFOUR writing is based in London, that’s all we say.

TENFOUR has seen some great sales and marketing initiatives that play with price recently.

An article written by NME on the ‘pay what you like’  release of Radiohead’s In Rainbows album started us thinking. According to a band representative, online download sales generated more money than the total takings from previous album Hail to the Thief. Particularly amazing, considering a lot of people decided to pay nothing for the recording at all.

Another two other examples:

A reader of Devon Life Magazine recently ran a competition to win his country house. Entrants buy raffle tickets at £25 a pop and the draw is made once a certain amount of tickets had been taken - presumably covering the market price for the property. A creative way of selling in difficult property-selling times, don’t you think?

In a sushi shop, TENFOUR saw punters piling trays with raw fish and sticky rice. Everything on the shelves was buy-one-get-one-free: two packets of two sushi for £1.50 or so. You need a tonne of the stuff to touch the sides, of course. But, by selling two packets of two rather than one packet of four we presume customers will be more likely to pick up a tray and start a collection. What do you think?

Why do some words work and others don’t? It’s a fine line sometimes.

TENFOUR was reading film posters on a tube journey home the other day. Here are two of them: Bangkok Dangerous and You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.

Both names are arguably bad. Though, while Bangkok Dangerous seems truly brainless to us, we thought there was something redeeming about the other.

What do you get from the ‘Bangkok Dangerous’ title? (1) The film is set in the Thai capital. And (2), there might just be some danger. We’re guessing guns, some cars and another sketchy Nicolas Cage haircut. It’s a title that’s super-clear about its audience, but no more.

‘You Don’t Mess with the Zohan’, on the other hand, is a bit more intriguing. Zohan, that’s an unusual name. Who is this man, Zohan? Why shouldn’t we mess with him exactly? Then there are all the hairdressing references. We might be clutching at straws, but at least the title makes us use our brain.

Therein lies the difference perhaps: it gets us thinking, even if that’s just a little. What do you reckon? And, have you got any favourite film titles… good or bad?

By the way, the TENFOUR jury is still out for ‘Snakes on a Plane’.