Two Words That You Should Never Use…

If you don’t know what you’re talking about you can get into terrible trouble, because if what is said is not what is meant you end up doing the wrong thing.

One great curse in this respect is jargon. All professions and industries have special jargon to confuse and impress outsiders whilst giving insiders a comforting feeling that they belong to some special group and are doing something important.

At the same time it confers an air of mystery to proceedings, enabling those in the know to charge more money for doing what are usually quite routine and simple tasks.

Marketing, I often suspect, has more than its fair share of this hocus-pocus, which comes in handy for those drones who, rather than doing a proper job, spend their time acquiring titles (which often include the words “strategic” and “officer”) attending meetings and exchanging memos.

I have long suspected that most of these parasites were utter phonies; a suspicion confirmed when a few years ago I read that a substantial percentage of people in business admitted to using jargon they did not understand in meetings.

Two expressions that crop up far too often are “awareness” and “building a brand”.

Millions are wasted on both by people who don’t know what they mean, or what it costs to achieve awareness, let alone build a brand.

For instance, as few years ago I went to give a seminar to a well known wine firm in California, whose brief said they wanted to build a brand. Ignoring the fact that they had many different labels, I asked my associate in San Francisco what they were doing currently.

They were renting one illuminated poster near the airport. Cost: $250,000 a year. With their budget (even assuming this was the right medium) it would take two light years to build a brand.

This is the sort of woolly-minded nonsense that comes up when the word brand pops up. The same applies to awareness. It is good to be known – but for what? I was actually discussing this with someone the other day in Facebook. I had been rude about an ad, and he said, “Yes, but you noticed it”. In other words, the ad had created awareness. But as I pointed out, everyone knew who Adolf Hitler was, but that didn’t mean they want to ask him to visit.

I have long valued a book called ‘How to become an advertising man’ written in 1963 by James Webb-Young, a former creative director at J. Walter Thompson in Chicago.  I think it is one of the best books on the subject, with Ogilvy on Advertising, Claude Hopkins’ Scientific Advertising, and Rosser Reeves’ Reality in Advertising.

In it Young defines five purposes of advertising:

1.     To familiarise
2.     To remind
3.     To spread news
4.     To overcome inertia
5.     To add a value not in the product

Most marketing manages to fail gloriously on all five counts.  This is something to cherish, but also something to be sad about.

Because if things are not promoted properly, it takes far longer for them to benefit mankind than it should – and wastes money that could be better used elsewhere..

But first, ask yourself what YOU are trying to do – and is it wise?

– Drayton