Getting Around Marketing Speak
Sometimes it's difficult to figure out what marketing people mean. Marketing is not as challenging as, say, being an engineer or a file clerk, so some in the business try to make it sound challenging by using the words they think their clients want to hear.
If people understood what we were talking about, they wouldn't pay us as much as they do.. Sometimes, the folks at your agency use worn-out words and phrases. Here are 10 of today's most overused terms, along with a translation, so you'll know what that marketing person is talking about:
Best of breed.
Apparently “best in class” wasn't bad enough, so someone came up with “best of breed.” As a substitute, try focusing on concrete features that demonstrate why your product is best.
Branding (also, “advancing the brand”).
Beware when a noun is turned into a gerund. Branding, of course, was what cowboys did to cattle. So naturally, branding is really about creating a new logo. But the term can mean almost anything today. Do you really want to advance your brand? Wouldn't you rather increase sales?
Drill down.
This term has nothing to do with fracking. Once you've had a “high level” discussion, you may want to “drill down” a few levels and find out what your company is really doing.
High level.
For when you don't want to “drill down.” It's a superficial summary for those who either don't care or aren't smart enough to understand what your company is doing.
Mission statement.
Some jargon is unavoidable. Is there a better term to summarize what your company is all about? I wish there were, because I tend to think of someone with a white collar and rosary beads when I think of a “mission statement.”
Paradigm shift.
In all of history, the word “paradigm” has never been used without the word “shift.”
My dictionary says a “paradigm” is either ”an example that serves as a pattern or a model” or “a list of all of the inflectional forms of a word taken as an illustrative example.” Neither sounds like anything that shifts as often as marketing experts claim.
Proactive.
Being proactive is, of course, much better than being anti-active.
Solutions.
If you call software a solution, you have a problem.
Seamless integration. When we're integrating, how will we know if our seams are showing? What do they look like?
Thought leadership. Does thought leadership mean you have more thoughts than everyone else? If we really were smarter than everyone else, we'd come up with another phrase.
Vision statement. For companies that are too pretentious to have a mission statement.
Of course marketing professionals aren't the only ones who use annoying words like these, but we're the ones who should know better.
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David P. Kowal is president of Kowal Communications Inc. in Northborough. Contact him at Kowal@kowal.com.
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