October 31, 2014: Happy Halloween, and welcome to the latest installment in Didit’s Lame Marketing Phrases series. Here we call out marketing pundits, industry analysts, and bloggers for using phrases that are tired, warn, hackneyed, rusty, and icky. We’ve been doing this series for just over a year now. Eventually we’ll compile our collective lameness into an e-book, but right now you can read our archival entries here: top-10-incredibly-lame-marketing-phrases, more-lame-marketing-phrases, lame-marketing-phrases-part3
On to the latest lameness:
LAME MARKETING TERMS AND PHRASES FOR Q4 2014
Awesome/Awesomeness – OMG. This phrase (often combined with “marketing” or “campaign”) is often spoken semi-ironically, but that’s not enough to excuse its use by anyone over 14. The term has recently become endemic among gamers, Apple fanboys/fangirls, and tech journalists writing about tablets and phablets (many of whom may indeed be under 14). If this is how Millenials speak, we’re removing the batteries from our hearing aids.
Data-Driven. Any firm (or worse, any human being) describing itself as “data-driven” should immediately cause you to raise a skeptical eyebrow. “Data-driven” is a hackneyed, thoroughly lame way of distinguishing yourself in a world where data drives everything. One highly useful tactic for understanding the real motivations of many “data-driven” entities is to substitute the word “money” for the word “data,” for example, “Money-driven agency with Big Money infrastructure seeks individuals who eat, live, and breathe Money.”
Thought Leader. Some anonymous thought leader thought that making “thought leadership” a respectable content marketing category might be a good idea, enough “thought followers” chimed in to make it so, and so we’re stuck with this elitist, pretentious, obnoxious term. The truth is that there’s very original thought or meaningful leadership on the Internet. “Opinion Monger” or “Idea Recycler” are generally much more accurate ways of describing those guys on stage.
Leverage. A familiar term on Wall Street, “leverage” is used indiscriminately as a verb in the digital marketing business. (“let’s leverage our reviews,” “we need to leverage social,” “can we leverage our SEO?”). Fulcrums and thrust vectors aren’t necessarily terrible ways of looking at business processes. But enough already — obviously, using this term is supposed to make you seem smart and rich. It doesn’t anymore.
Embrace. Look, we all need a good hug once in a while. But writing, for example, that “brands are embracing progressive geometry” or “farmers embrace indigenous chicken breeds” will just create a cartoony mental image that’s a ridiculous at best and menacing or obscene at worst. The worst use of “embrace” comes in connection with the word “change.” Don’t embrace change — think like a true Thought Leader and “leverage” it!
Meteoric rise. This term got a lot of play thanks to AliBaba’s recent IPO, and has also been applied to the growth of several social media networks. But as several linguists have noted, “meteoric rise” implies that the arc of the object will be spectacularly brief, followed by sudden oblivion. Don’t ever include this term in a press release, unless it happens to be the last one your company ever issues.
Customer-Centric. Proof that this term is 100 Percent Lame comes from the fact that no business in the world has ever described itself as anything other than “customer-centric.” We’d love it if a big brand would come forward and say “we’re passionate about our distributors” or “we’re a shareholder-centric organization.” But until this happens (and it never will), “customer-centric” will remain among the very lamest terms banging around inside the warped centrifuge of marketing phraseology.
Insider. Everybody claims to be an insider (“Business Insider, “Programmatic Media Buying Insider”, “C-Suite Insider,” “Social Media Insider,” etc.) But if you seriously think that there’s a single bona fide industry insider who’s publishing any information of value to the Internet, you need a refresher course in how the world actually works (and yes, an actual insider told us this.)
Strategies (plural). Yes, you need a strategy. No, you don’t need 14 of them. Too many marketing writers write listicles that promise readers exactly the wrong thing (“9 social media strategies to improve your bottom line”) — a group of strategies that might be nice, not the one you necessarily need. You can use as many tactics as you like, but should be able to count your strategies on one finger.
Killing it. We used to love using this phrase around here, but then Ariana Huffington declared total war against it (and we’re smart enough not to tangle with anyone with so much Page Rank). So from now on, we’re going to either “embrace it” or “awesome it.” Seriously.
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