Most positively, magnificently meaningless marketing mumbo-jumbo

As you know, our blog is about simple, straightforward marketing without buzzwords or waffle.  Today, I am pleased to announce I am adding “without gobbledygook” to that too.

I am doing some research at the moment (I won’t bore you with the specifics) and have found myself looking at marketing agency websites.

What has prompted me to blog today is this particular beauty:-

“Our unique, proven and collaborative approach of combining doctorate level theoretical analytics, strategy and world-class creative execution delivers ground-breaking, game-changing initiatives for ambitious brands.”

Why on earth put something so meaningless on a website?  It has caught my attention but for all the wrong reasons.  For what reasons did an agency try to bamboozle us with fancy, overcomplicated phrases?  Is it marketing?  I find it difficult to understand it’s about marketing.  At the heart of the concept, you put customers at the centre of what you do in order to understand their needs.  Call me old fashioned, but communicating with your customers is key to understanding those needs and you can’t do that effectively if you write in a way that they don’t understand you.  Worse still for an agency as they will be marketing to our customers too!  The mind boggles…..

Perhaps it’s showing their expertise?  Nah, I don’t buy that either unless it’s their expertise at writing daft sentences.  Obviously if my customers want a sentence lifted directly from a thesaurus, I will be in touch.

There are also lots of over-used phrases out there that are put about to “impress us”.  Perhaps some have almost a wallpaper effect that we don’t notice them.  An example is the prolific use of “very unique” to describe a product.  According to the dictionary, “unique” is “being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else”.  Why would someone therefore insist there are degrees of uniqueness?  A product may be different, slightly different or very different but, no, it’s very unique……

I would add “optimised”, “game-changing” and “finessed” to the list of words and phrases that really don’t mean anything at all.

Perhaps I am more aware of this issue today following the first airing last night of The Apprentice.  If ever there was a programme to show us the plethora of ridiculous-ness (as I am allowed a silly word too!) then this is it.  “A field of ponies” is coming my way (ref:  Stuart Baggs THE Brand).

What are your favourite gobbledygook phrases that belong in room 101?  Get “blue sky thinking” and let us have your favourites.