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Baking pioneers? How this company blurb reveals a crackers copywriting trap 21 February 2025

Crackers… I was enjoying some of my favourite ones the other day when I noticed something strange. There on the packet, the company seemed to be saying in black and white that they have a penchant for cooking people: “We’ve been baking pioneers since 1831.”

I looked closer. Then I relaxed. The innocent cardboard rectangle was not actually a declaration of disturbing company practices. It was instead sharing the history of the business itself. Unfortunately, the content had fallen into the trap of ambiguous copywriting.

I can only assume that what the company wanted to say is that they have been pioneers of baking for a long time. Perhaps they wanted to make their copy sound snappier and more direct. But by phrasing it the way they have, they’ve inadvertently (one hopes) ended up implying that they practise bizarre culinary customs.

Sometimes these errors are quite subtle and only noticed by those of us obsessed with the way companies communicate. Well, I am a freelance copywriter, after all. But even if such ambiguities are subtle, why run the risk of being misunderstood?

These linguistic traps happen when companies become so focused on what they want to say that they miss how their message is seen. The secret to avoiding this type of pitfall is to focus as much as on how your wording is perceived as on what you want to say. Keep checking whether your intended meaning matches your external message. The result? What you want to say will be what others read.

It’s about looking at your content on two levels: what you write and how others will understand it. Doing so should prevent people from not only missing your message but taking it another way entirely.

Watch out for the trap of potential ambiguity in copywriting and you won’t run the risk of confusing your customers.