The blog

At Schwa HQ, hardly a day goes by without someone talking about the rhyme-as-reason effect. In a nutshell: if a statement rhymes, you’re more likely to think it’s true. (Think: A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play.) But is the phenomenon limited to rhyme? We had a sneaky suspicion the effect of […]

When I started as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed business writer, my tone of voice projects felt different from how they feel today. Back then, it was often about proving that almost everyone prefers natural writing to formality, or explaining there wasn’t really that much of a distinction between ‘B2B’ and ‘B2C’. Fast forward to 2019, and […]

Knowing ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’ might encourage you to eat more healthily. But could a mantra change the way people behave at work, too? We think it could. What’s a business mantra? It’s any phrase or saying that’s easy to repeat and sticks in people’s heads. Used well, it’s a subtle […]

You’ve got your employer brand. You’ve got your EVP (employee value proposition). You’ve got potential candidates. So why, just as those candidates delve deeper, do you cool off? Perhaps you don’t even know you’re doing it. But if the personal, upbeat style of your careers pages or recruitment campaigns (join the family, be part of […]

A tone of voice is a way of communicating that’s unique to your brand. Think of Innocent’s friendliness, First Direct’s straightforwardness and Virgin’s naughtiness. The idea is that by using the tone of voice consistently, from TV ads to Ts & Cs, people always get the same impression of who you are. There are all […]

At the start of their book ‘Nudge’, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein make a distinction between ‘Econs’ and ‘Humans’. Econs, they say, make decisions rationally, never letting their emotions get in the way. However complicated a decision, they’ll always think it through logically and end up making the perfect call (unlike Humans). That distinction’s based […]

If you’ve ever Googled around for naming advice, you’ll have seen all the usual tips like ‘don’t choose a name that’s hard to pronounce’ and ‘make sure the domain name’s available’. Those are fine, and you should absolutely follow them, but they won’t really help you decide your company name. The fact is there’s only […]

Do you remember going out on Christmas morning into the freshly fallen snow? Wearing matching hat, scarf, and gloves? Making snowmen and angels, having snowball fights, and sledding? Seems familiar right? Actually, white Christmases are very rare. So rare (and so heavily bet upon) that the Met Office had to change its definition of a […]