Carefully built, visible for miles, and never lit.
This year there will be no fire.
Heat, drought, cantonal bans: across much of the country the bonfire will stay stacked and cold. What remains of the evening is the soup, the brass band, the paper lanterns — and the speech.
For readers unfamiliar with the ritual: on 1 August, Switzerland's national day, every commune holds a celebration, and someone — a local official, an invited guest — gives an address. It is a remarkable communication object. It is delivered hundreds of times on the same evening, to an audience that is already on your side, under conditions any speaker would envy. And it leaves almost no trace whatsoever.
A genre of its own The brief, whether stated or merely understood, comes down to a single word: unite. Offend no one. Remind us of what we have in common. The result is entirely predictable — 1291, the founding pact, federalism, diversity, hard work, the young, our roots and our future, the responsibility of each of us.
I have written and worked across all three of my languages for thirty years, and I spent some twenty of them on the German-speaking side of the country before returning to the French-speaking one. So I can say this with some authority: the German version of this speech and the French one are the same product. The language changes, the structure does not shift by a comma. And anyone who has sat through a Fourth of July address, a Bastille Day speech or a Canada Day ceremony will recognise the genre instantly. This is not a Swiss failing. It is a structural one.
The mechanism: the average of every sensitivity in the room It is not a problem of delivery, and it is not a problem of talent. It is a problem of arithmetic.
Every time the writer cuts a sentence because it might displease part of the assembly, they cut precisely the thing that might have been remembered. The anecdote that is too local — it excludes newcomers. The firm position — it divides. The precise figure — it commits. The proper name — it exposes.
Line by line, the text converges on the average of every sensitivity present in the room. And that average, by construction, belongs to no one.
A message calibrated on what offends nobody catches on nothing. What catches on nothing is not retained. There is no rhetorical inevitability here: there is a chain of perfectly rational individual decisions whose sum produces the exact opposite of the intended effect.
What survives, when anything survives I served two terms on the legislative council of Forel-Lavaux and one on the executive of Montet. I have listened to my share of these evenings. The few speeches I still remember all did the same thing.
They took an angle. One.
A farm, a year of frost, a family name, a village dispute settled thirty years earlier that half the room believed forgotten. Concrete, dated, located, named. And therefore contestable: part of the audience disagreed, and that is exactly why people were still talking about it the following day.
Memory is not triggered by consensus. It is triggered by precision, and by a small measure of discomfort.
The same mechanism, 365 days a year You can see where this is going.
Open the homepage of almost any small or mid-sized company. You will read, give or take a word:
« Tailored solutions to meet your needs » « Quality, proximity, trust » « Your trusted partner since 1987 » « A passionate team that listens » These sentences are not false. They are worse than false: they are unverifiable and entirely interchangeable. They were written to the brief of a national day speech — upset no segment, close no door, give up no possible customer.
The difference being that they run all year round.
The competitor test There is a very fast way to find out whether a sentence in your communication says anything at all. One question:
Could your direct competitor sign this sentence without changing a word?
If the answer is yes, the sentence says nothing. It occupies space, it consumes the attention of a reader who grants only a few seconds of it, and it delays the moment they learn what you actually do.
Run the exercise across your homepage, sentence by sentence, striking out anything a competitor could lift unchanged. The result is almost always a surprise — and what survives is the real raw material of your positioning.
Three questions to make a message specific again 1. What do we refuse to do that our competitors accept? A position is built as much on what it excludes as on what it promises. A mandate turned down, a segment deliberately left aside, a method ruled out: these are claims nobody else can copy.
2. Which specific client proves our promise better than the adjective we are using? Replace « responsive » with the dated situation in which your responsiveness actually saved something. The adjective is an opinion you hold about yourself; the case is evidence.
3. What in our message would cost us part of the market? That is the uncomfortable question, and the most useful one. A position that costs nothing is worth nothing. If your message loses you no prospect at all, it is attracting no particular one either.
The bonfire that stayed cold This year there will be no fire. In many communes the stack will remain on the hill: well built, visible for miles, and completely useless.
It is a fair enough picture of most homepages.
Happy national day to all of you.
Heat, drought, cantonal bans: across much of the country the bonfire will stay stacked and cold. What remains of the evening is the soup, the brass band, the paper lanterns — and the speech.
For readers unfamiliar with the ritual: on 1 August, Switzerland's national day, every commune holds a celebration, and someone — a local official, an invited guest — gives an address. It is a remarkable communication object. It is delivered hundreds of times on the same evening, to an audience that is already on your side, under conditions any speaker would envy. And it leaves almost no trace whatsoever.
A genre of its own The brief, whether stated or merely understood, comes down to a single word: unite. Offend no one. Remind us of what we have in common. The result is entirely predictable — 1291, the founding pact, federalism, diversity, hard work, the young, our roots and our future, the responsibility of each of us.
I have written and worked across all three of my languages for thirty years, and I spent some twenty of them on the German-speaking side of the country before returning to the French-speaking one. So I can say this with some authority: the German version of this speech and the French one are the same product. The language changes, the structure does not shift by a comma. And anyone who has sat through a Fourth of July address, a Bastille Day speech or a Canada Day ceremony will recognise the genre instantly. This is not a Swiss failing. It is a structural one.
The mechanism: the average of every sensitivity in the room It is not a problem of delivery, and it is not a problem of talent. It is a problem of arithmetic.
Every time the writer cuts a sentence because it might displease part of the assembly, they cut precisely the thing that might have been remembered. The anecdote that is too local — it excludes newcomers. The firm position — it divides. The precise figure — it commits. The proper name — it exposes.
Line by line, the text converges on the average of every sensitivity present in the room. And that average, by construction, belongs to no one.
A message calibrated on what offends nobody catches on nothing. What catches on nothing is not retained. There is no rhetorical inevitability here: there is a chain of perfectly rational individual decisions whose sum produces the exact opposite of the intended effect.
What survives, when anything survives I served two terms on the legislative council of Forel-Lavaux and one on the executive of Montet. I have listened to my share of these evenings. The few speeches I still remember all did the same thing.
They took an angle. One.
A farm, a year of frost, a family name, a village dispute settled thirty years earlier that half the room believed forgotten. Concrete, dated, located, named. And therefore contestable: part of the audience disagreed, and that is exactly why people were still talking about it the following day.
Memory is not triggered by consensus. It is triggered by precision, and by a small measure of discomfort.
The same mechanism, 365 days a year You can see where this is going.
Open the homepage of almost any small or mid-sized company. You will read, give or take a word:
« Tailored solutions to meet your needs » « Quality, proximity, trust » « Your trusted partner since 1987 » « A passionate team that listens » These sentences are not false. They are worse than false: they are unverifiable and entirely interchangeable. They were written to the brief of a national day speech — upset no segment, close no door, give up no possible customer.
The difference being that they run all year round.
The competitor test There is a very fast way to find out whether a sentence in your communication says anything at all. One question:
Could your direct competitor sign this sentence without changing a word?
If the answer is yes, the sentence says nothing. It occupies space, it consumes the attention of a reader who grants only a few seconds of it, and it delays the moment they learn what you actually do.
Run the exercise across your homepage, sentence by sentence, striking out anything a competitor could lift unchanged. The result is almost always a surprise — and what survives is the real raw material of your positioning.
Three questions to make a message specific again 1. What do we refuse to do that our competitors accept? A position is built as much on what it excludes as on what it promises. A mandate turned down, a segment deliberately left aside, a method ruled out: these are claims nobody else can copy.
2. Which specific client proves our promise better than the adjective we are using? Replace « responsive » with the dated situation in which your responsiveness actually saved something. The adjective is an opinion you hold about yourself; the case is evidence.
3. What in our message would cost us part of the market? That is the uncomfortable question, and the most useful one. A position that costs nothing is worth nothing. If your message loses you no prospect at all, it is attracting no particular one either.
The bonfire that stayed cold This year there will be no fire. In many communes the stack will remain on the hill: well built, visible for miles, and completely useless.
It is a fair enough picture of most homepages.
Happy national day to all of you.