motley fool us — the pronoun the brand chose

motley fool us, parsed at 4:47pm on a friday with the cursor blinking like it has a question, looks less like a regional address and more like a grammar tip. us. the pronoun. nosotros. somebody at a meeting picked it.

i am at the desk. carla is in an annual planning meeting two floors above me, the kind that has snacks i was not invited to, and i have what i estimate to be the rest of the morning to figure out what motley fool us is doing with that suffix. the answer, written with the small remaining caffeine i have, is that it is doing more than geography.

the receipt wallet is on top of the unopened mail pile to the left of the keyboard. it is, by my own measurement, embarrassingly thick. inside it, somewhere, is a receipt for two coffees from sunday with mom. mom said us a lot on that call. she always does. that is not a coincidence. that is the whole investigation in two letters.

motley fool us, the regional version

so first the literal thing. motley fool us is the north american arm of a brand that also has a uk version (.co.uk) and an australian one (.com.au) and probably more that i have not investigated because the rest of the morning is finite. the us site has its own newsletter, its own stock picks, its own promotional language. the cost is in dollars. the disclaimers are in american legalese. the tone is slightly louder than the uk one. that is the regional difference, summarized.

but the address bar, where you type the thing, has the word us at the end. and the word us, in english, is also a pronoun. it is the pronoun that means “you and me”. which is what the brand wants you to feel when you click subscribe. that is not a stretch. that is just reading.

i am not the first person to notice this. i am, however, sitting at this desk on a friday with no other task assigned to me, and that gives me the standing.

why the us suffix doubles as the pronoun motley fool us made famous

here is the thing about brand names and pronouns. when you put us in the name, the reader, in the half-second before the eye moves on, does a small unconscious thing where it absorbs the word as both a country and a relationship. that is a free piece of persuasion. it costs the brand nothing. it costs the reader the same amount of nothing. but it is doing work.

the suffix .us is not really geographic anyway. nobody has ever typed .us on purpose. i am fairly sure there is a research paper somewhere, possibly in a magazine that has subscribers, that confirms .us is the most underused country code on the internet. but in the brand name, written out, motley fool us, with the us not as suffix but as word, it lands as nosotros.

this is a nicer move than it deserves credit for. the brand is, technically, telling on itself. it is admitting it is selling membership. it is admitting that the deal, when you sign up, is that you are now part of an us. and they are part of the us. and the picks are part of the us. it is the most honest naming choice in the financial newsletter category, and i am giving them credit for it from a desk where i am not even subscribed.

none of this is investment advice. i would not know what to do with investment advice. tipping should be a flat 12%, mike at the corner bar told me once, and i have never once had the cash to honor it. that is the level of financial sophistication operating in this room.

mom on sunday said us a lot, mom is the original us

sunday call with mom. she said us approximately, by my own running count, fourteen times. “do you think we should get the kettle fixed”. (we means me, she lives four hundred miles away.) “we have to get serious about the dentist”. (we means me again, same reason.) “us, what we do, is we keep going”. (us is, frankly, also me.)

mom is the original us. she invented the brand. motley fool us is doing, on a website with stock tickers, what mom does for free on a sunday at 1:38pm with the kettle clicking off behind her. they are saying we are in this together when actually they are saying you are responsible for this and i will narrate.

i am not complaining. i find it comforting. the call ends and i still don’t have a kettle and the dentist still hasn’t been called, but i feel briefly less alone because somebody used a plural pronoun about me. mom knew this would land. mothers know. it is their power.

the receipt wallet, opened on the desk, contains a receipt from that sunday for two coffees. one for me. one for, technically, nobody, since mom was on the phone. but i bought two anyway. i did this without thinking about it. i did it because she was using the word us. that is the wallet’s seventh receipt-for-two of the year. by the count i keep on the back of an envelope, it is also the most expensive habit i have not noticed having.

the 9-minute snooze is also an us moment, briefly

the 9-minute snooze, set twice on a friday morning, is a small private negotiation between two parts of the same person. the part that wants to sleep and the part that wants to keep the job. that is a small us. it lasts eighteen minutes. it ends in compromise that satisfies nobody.

i bring this up because the brand-pronoun trick works on the same machinery. the part of you that opens the email and the part of you that closes it without reading both belong to the same person, briefly negotiating. motley fool us is betting that the pronoun in the address bar will tilt the negotiation toward open. some mornings it works. some mornings the snooze wins twice.

this is why, by the way, the toilet paper roll goes UNDER, over is for monsters. it is the same principle. the small private decision, made when nobody is watching, reveals what kind of us you are running internally. i submit this without further comment because the snooze is going off again and i am only typing one-handed.

the receipt for two coffees confirmed the pronoun

i pulled the receipt out of the wallet. it has the date. it has two coffees on it. it has a tip line that i, in the moment, did not know how to handle, because i was on the phone with mom and the etiquette of tipping while half-paying-attention is a topic for another investigation.

the receipt is the proof. when somebody uses the word us about you, you behave as if there are two of you. you buy two coffees. you nod at the wine guy. you wear the one tie you own to a wedding because the brand says us and you do not want to disappoint the us. tom went to a wedding venue last spring with a wife and a planner and a registry. i went with the one tie i own and a gift card i forgot to fill out. we are both valid. mine has more naps.

motley fool us is, in this reading, the most efficient pronoun-trick in financial publishing. it is also, possibly, why i keep accidentally subscribing to things. an idiot abroad taught me the same lesson with travel — when somebody else uses the word we about your trip, you start packing for a trip you did not agree to. abroad or domestic, the pronoun gets you. that is the playbook.

verdict, us is the most honest suffix the brand could pick

so what does motley fool us do for the brand. it does what mom does on a sunday with a kettle and a dentist. it folds you into a we without asking. it is, as far as branding moves go, the most honest one in the category. they could have called it motley fool north america. they could have called it motley fool dot com. they picked the one that is also the pronoun, and i give them credit for noticing.

if you want to see how far this kind of thing goes, the cluster pillar at the fool overview walks through what fool means as a word and as a brand and as a self-description, and there is a similar small linguistic trick at the heart of every newsletter that survives more than a year. it is, watch frasier for half an hour and you will see the same move — somebody uses the pronoun us and somebody else accepts it without arguing, and the next thing you know they are sharing a recipe.