Make it concrete: why specific words stick.
Why concrete words are easier to picture, and to remember.
Brands love abstract words.
Better. Smarter. Seamless. Innovative. Premium.
They communicate an idea quickly but give the reader little to hold on to. Compare an abstract promise with something you can actually picture, and reading it feels different.
There is research behind that. Psychologists have long found that concrete words are remembered better than abstract ones, an effect often explained by dual coding: we store a concrete word both as language and as an image.1
For copywriters the lesson is practical. Don’t only tell people what something is. Help them see what it means in their world.
AbstractA smarter way to manage your work.
ConcreteFinish the admin before your coffee gets cold.
The second version gives the reader a situation to imagine. The benefit is no longer just efficiency. It has become something tangible.
That doesn’t mean concrete copy is automatically better. Brand, audience, context and purpose still matter. But when a message feels vague, making the benefit more specific is a good place to start.
Features rarely carry the message on their own. A product may have impressive specifications and a service sophisticated functionality, but the reader still has to understand why any of it matters. A technical feature can become time saved. A material can become something that survives everyday use. A complicated process can become one less thing to think about. The information is still there, now with a reason to care attached.
This gets more complicated in translation. Concrete language often depends on situations and associations that feel familiar in one market. Translate them too literally and the picture may stop working. Remove them entirely and the copy loses what made it memorable.
This is where transcreation earns its place. The job is not to preserve the exact metaphor or example, but to understand what it does and recreate that effect naturally for another audience.
Sometimes preserving the meaning means preserving the picture, not the words. And sometimes the strongest translation is the one that looks least like a translation.