Lets drop the marketing buzzwords
I get it, marketing words are there to help sell your product, inspire customers to take up your offers and convey exactly what your service delivers.
But why do all marketing terms sound idiotic?
To marketers themselves they may seem fine, even if you can see through their meaning. But to your average customer – be it a member of the general public or another corporation – these words just make you sound rather clueless.
Instead of telling your customer what your service does, you just ‘dazzle’ them with largely meaningless words.
Comments
Thanks. I think you ran out of ideas and just vented on the last one. There’s really nothing wrong with webinar and workaholic. They are both expected terms. Here’s tip for you: when you have only 5 terms to avoid, don’t try to cook up 7!!
Overall, great list. I loved solution, users, incentivize and am oftem guilty of the same. Revolutionary was also a stretch and i think you can create a revolution in ways that are different than domestic or political use cases. Search, social, email, VoIP, are all revolutions in my view. You can call them innovations as well but credit must be given where its due.
Hi Manish, cheers for your response and thoughts.
The portmanteaus was a slight bit of a rant as they do really irritate me, but a webinar is – by the vast majority of people – considered to be a rather meaningless term. Seminar does mean exactly the same thing, and doesn’t garner the same disdain!
And yes, revolutionary can mean more than just the political and cultural, but the real issue is that it’s overused in marketing terms for services that really aren’t revolutionary.
But, by all means use it if you have a product that is revolutionary =D
Great list though. Makes you think of so many other things we should avoid or principles we should stick to.
On Webinar, it’s an accepted term now (I use it too in my marketing work so am pushing for it!) http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/webinar?s=t
Haha, I’ll let you off with webinar then! Still I can’t help but feel my stomach churn whenever it’s used. Largely because some people using it aren’t quite aware of what it means (i.e. just streaming a video discussion doesn’t make it a webinar 😉 )
Interesting list! Agree with most except ‘proactive’. Many organizations fail because they are reactive. I went to a talk by John Adair a few years ago. Although he was in his 70s he talked a lot of sense. In his view, organizations fail for three reasons – complexity complacency and arrogance. Hence … lack of proactivity in the right areas. I put these three reasons to another speaker… at another seminar and asked did he agree? He added one more …ignorance.
Interesting discussion points… your views on why organizations fail?
Best regards,
Michael Lorrigan
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