Most people—and perhaps marketers most of all—want to be trendy and to sound important. In fact, marketers seem to perpetually be reaching for language that sets their product apart. This effort is perpetual because the effect is temporary—other marketers quickly adopt the new jargon, lest they be perceived as falling behind.
A recent New York Times article highlighted the lengths to which we can go (the comments are as enlightening as the article itself). Authors Tiffany Hsu and Sapna Maheshwari provide a glossary of the latest contrived terms. They take particular issue with a snack food maker’s term ”humaning,” which means connecting with humans (to sell something) instead of marketing to them. It’s supposedly not about using data to drive marketing tactics but instead discovering “what unites us all.”
A more ubiquitous term is “customer journey,” wherein customers undertake a heroic quest for the holy grail—or product—with the marketer as their guide on the path from ignorance, to awareness, to buying. Of course, the idea of a customer continuum from awareness to buying is far from new.
These examples are both funny and cautionary. No one is immune from jargon—words like pivot, unpack, hack, granular, and goingforward have wormed their way into regular business language with no particular harm.
With all businesses determined to make up lost ground and more in the coming months, look for a surge of sales-speak or, as a Stanford professor quoted in the NYT article dubbed it, jargon monoxide. But remember that insider jargon only goes so far, which, as we emerge from a pandemic, isn’t far at all—because jargon is often just talk smothering or substituting for strategy and action.
The organizations and marketers who emerge furthest ahead will be the ones focused on nuts-and-bolts action: implementing a strategy that reaches their best prospects and delivers quality and value, using partners and systems/tools most effectively. In other words, those who come up with better ways to actually do things, as opposed to new ways to describe what they do.
For print marketers (and experts agree that an effective strategy blends print and digital), there’s a wealth of potential partners—print management software and services—to connect you with the print suppliers offering the best quality, price, and service and to help you manage the complexities of the print process.
Finding the right partner or software-and-service provider to help you reach your goals is a critical post-pandemic choice you still have time to make. For technical and print expertise (but not humaning), contact info@elynxx.com or 717-709-0990.
Mike isn’t just the Director of Marketing at eLynxx Solutions – he’s a customer-whisperer, a growth alchemist, and a trend-spotting oracle all rolled into one. His passion lies in igniting interest in eLynxx’s innovative solutions, fueling the company’s customer base, and using client feedback to steer the industry towards a brighter future.
