Every time you want to share a “helicopter view” (overview) of the “strategic staircase” (business plan) that your “S.W.A.T team” (staff) has “ideated” (brainstormed) to make your “omnichannel” (multichannel) “solution” (tool) the “best of breed” (top dog) in your “swim lane” (specific area of work), trust me, that annoying piece of marketing copy does not put your company on the “bleeding edge” (cutting edge) of “blue sky thinking” (original thinking).
It makes your readers gnash their teeth and want to staple your writing hand to the keyboard.<!–more–>
“Marketing jargon masks real meaning,” says Jennifer Chatman, management professor at the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “People use it as a substitute for thinking hard and clearly about their goals and the direction that they want to give others.”
Michael Sugden, chief executive of the advertising agency VCCP puts it even more succinctly: “For purveyors of meeting bingo this [marketing buzzwords] is good news. For the rest of us, business [communication] has degenerated into a quagmire of nonsensical verbal piffle.”
In other words, you’re not `shifting any paradigms’ with your `thought leadership’ because you don’t know your topic, have nothing new to say, want to play it safe or have hired a very bad marketing copywriter.
Some buzzwords, I have to admit, have passed into marketing lexicon and become trade shorthand that I too will happily use. For example, the word “onboarding” has gotten so nuanced, I’d use it to save myself the bother of explaining in three sentences a well-understood concept like hiring new people. It’s the gabby similes and windy catchphrases like “opening the kimono“ (“revealing information”) whose high-sounding pomposity I have a quibble with.
Below, is a list of my 29 pet buzzwords peeves. I thought it just might be fun to “socialize these”.
<h3><span style=”color: #ff0000;”>A CAUTIONARY LIST OF 29 MARKETING BUZZWORDS TO AVOID</span></h3>
• Cascading relevant information (speaking with colleagues)
• Idea shower (brainstorm session)
• Lunch and learn (working lunch)
• Diagonal-slice meeting (a meeting with staff from different departments)
• Let’s not boil the ocean (Let’s not complicate something)
• Give a binary answer (say yes or no)
• Run it up the flagpole (find out what colleagues think of a new idea)
• Dead-tree edition (a hard, printed copy)
• De-layer (fire a section of the staff without reducing the workload)
• Growth hacking (find the right thing to accelerate growth)
• Cone of silence (have a private meeting)
• Fail forward (learn from a mistake)
• Low decision latitude (inability to make any important decisions)
• Actionable insights (useful tips)
• Bake-off (comparison of two similar products)
• Rolling-thunder approach (creating a constant media buzz)
• Dial-in (include)
• Washes its face (breaks even)
• Hammock Task (easy assignment)
• 360 campaign (a brand that will be marketed everywhere)
• Single version of the truth (accurate financial data)
• Color outside the lines (Ignore company policy)
• Disambiguate (explain)
• Vector (move)
• Loose the bubble (forget)
• Mission critical (important to the company)
• Wallpapering fog (waste time doing something useless)
• Languaged (written down)
• Knowledge density (expertise)
