The Client Who Wanted to Sound Friendly

There is a word that ends careers. Not loudly. It just shows up in the brief, third paragraph, underlined, and from that point forward the copy is already dead.

The word is approachable.

I have seen it kill a financial services rebrand. I watched it sanitize a luxury hotel group into something that sounded like a LinkedIn post from a mid-level account manager in Cincinnati. I once read it in a brief for a heritage spirits brand—Scottish, 1887, a distillery that survived two wars—and I sat with it for a long time before I wrote back.

The problem is not the word itself. The problem is what the client means by it: they mean they are afraid. They have been in a room with a consultant who told them they needed to be more human, more warm, more real, and now they want copy that sounds like a person at a party who is very, very eager for you to like them.

That's not approachable. That's desperate. And readers feel the difference immediately, in the same way you feel it across a dinner table.

What I wrote back, diplomatically but without much room for negotiation, was this: the brands people actually approach are the ones that don't seem to need it. They have a point of view. They hold it. The audience decides whether to close the distance.

The client said that was interesting and asked if we could just punch up the CTA.