Dont mention ‘green shoots!’

There is a funny thing going on, and no one wants to talk about it!  Over the past month Appeal has won four new client accounts, good Yorkshire businesses that are doing well and want to tell potential customers what they are doing.  We continue to see new business enquiries every week (three in the last 7 days) and we know from our suppliers and colleagues that we aren’t the only ones experiencing this. 

Many clients we work for are doing a great deal of business too, and we have recently written a number of stories that prove that corporate banks are starting, just starting to lend money again.   But there is a phrase that’s a real no-no, like the mentioning the war at Faulty Towers, words that we just can’t use – green shoots of recovery. 

Its a cliche political soundbite that was coined by Norman Lamont, and worked in 1991, but that seems wrong in the post banking meltdown Noughties, and was prematurely revived by Baroness Vadera at the start of the year to much hoo haa, but we need to say something, because its good news that there is even a glimmer of hope, and hope becomes optimism and then confidence. 

In the first quarter a lawyer client I worked with said we were ‘bumping along the bottom’, that describes well the little ups and downs we have been seeing for some time, but what about something more positive now that we seem to have seen the worst of the fallout- something that sums up a little of the optimism and front foot business we are seeing in the past month or so? 

I heard another client last week say that we didn’t have green shoots yet, but ‘there were signs that the seed was germinating!’  Very descriptive, but a little too technical to ever be adopted as a new turn of phrase. 

I have been trying to sum it up for a few weeks, and ended up saying that it looks like people are ‘coming out from under their beds’ but this still doesnt capture the mood.  I think we need a new phrase, something we are allowed to say that sums up the positive glimmers we are seeing, and stops the rot on this 18 month period of media gloom…

Any suggestions?