Actually, I’m going to tell you how to get your marketing group to create brochures that actually help you make sales. The fact that the technique drives marketing geeks crazy is just an amusing side benefit.
I worked in marketing for six years in the early 90s. I learned (the hard way) that there are two types of marketeers:
- Trained professionals who use multiple demand creation techniques to generate sales leads that quickly turn into real customers
- Marketing geeks who are well-meaning, but completely clueless about sales and the needs of a real customer.
(Note: anyone from marketing who complains about this segmentation automatically belongs to one of these two categories. Guess which one.)
The main problem with geeks is that they create marketing materials (like brochures and mailers) that are supposed to generate sales leads, but which simply cause prospects’ eyes to glaze over. The reason is simple: they splatter buzzwords and meaningless jargon into documents because they’re don't know what’s actually interesting and unique about a product.
Here’s how to stop the insanity.
Each time you get a document from marketing, circle or highlight the following buzzwords: award-winning, collaborative, convenient, customer-focused, cutting-edge, easy-to-use, economically-sound, efficient, empower, enhance, enterprise-wide, fast-to-deploy, globally-focused, high-payoff, high-quality, industry-leading, inexpensive, innovative, instantaneous, interactive, leverage, market-driven, mission-critical, multimedia-based, next-generation, paradigm, performance-based, proactive, revolutionary, robust, scalable, seamless, sophisticated, state-of-the-art, synergistic, value-added, and world-class.
When you sit down to review the document, for each circled term, ask the geek: “what does this term actually mean?” You will get two types of responses.
- If the buzzword is meaningless padding, the geek will subject you to circular blather along the lines of “well, there are multiple product generations and ours is the next one.” After listening to as much of this as you can stand, say: “So it really doesn’t mean anything then…” and, with a visible flourish, draw a big “X” through the word.
- If the buzzword has some actual meaning behind it, the geek will give you a specific example. For instance, the term “award-winning” might refer to a specific award, or the term “instantaneous” might actually mean “within 5 milliseconds.” In this case, scratch out the buzzword and write in the specific information.
Hand back the marked-up document and request it be rewritten as amended.
