Marketers Can Often Sound Dopey. Here’s Why.

The cure for dopey

‘Incubate granular methodologies.’

‘Aces in their places.’

‘Matrix enterprise schemas.’

 Why do we have dopey jargon like this? Are simple words dead?

You get that feeling with all the Stanford Speak creeping in to communications these days

More and more marketing talk sounds like English but is often less understandable than Urdu.

What does all this business hokum mean?

And who actually cares? Could it be those determined to leave you by the wayside by impressing you with how clever they are?

After all, jargon puts the brakes on progress like some of those inner-city parking garages that kill your confidence with ramps that are perilously twisty and narrow.

Someone who was clever when it came to leadership commented, ‘Use simple words everyone knows, then everyone will understand.’ That was Winston Churchill.

Another with a bit of insight, Bill Bernbach, said, ‘Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product.’

More to that, the story of unbroken success is often written with fifth grade writing. The Doyle Dane Bernbach Volkswagen work is proof of that.

As to marketers and clear thinking, few are as plainspoken as the Harvard MBA who achieved more than most of us ever will.

Sergio Zyman, the former CMO of Coca-Cola.

In five years, when no one thought Coke could sell any more, he and his team increased sales by 50%. And the stock price quadrupled.

There’s success for you. Success based on uncomplicating marketing problems to drive profitability.

Sergio Zyman’s 2002 book, The End of Advertising As We Know It is still valuable for its look at right and wrong ways to pursue marketing.

It’s packed with straightforward, pragmatic, commonsense thinking.

Two hundred and thirty-four pages of relevant observation. With no expressions like ‘create Chinese walls’, ‘thought shower’, ‘administrivia’ or ‘pig in a python’ to describe a slow moving product.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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