Number 85: January 26, 2005

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This week in Katydid:

• Putting Back the Buzz
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Putting Back the Buzz
A recent editorial from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer takes marketing to task for its role in the introduction of 'buzzwords' - a word, which here means a trendy advertising word for a trendy advertising word. The article quotes a technology analyst, Alan Freedman:

"The marketing people are so bad at hyping their products that, with all my experience, I'll have to read and reread and reread just to figure out what this thing does."

I'd like to take exception to the notion that marketing needs to take the blame for all this jargon. Good marketers use words that their audience understands and uses. The expansion of jargon has much more to do with the rapid growth of technology. New things need new labels. Some will be elegantly intuitive (e-mail) and some not (ruggedized).

Those buzzwords come organically out of the environment. Their etymologies are often impossible to track; no one even knows where the word 'buzzword' came from. The jargon is so ubiquitous, some have even taken to surreptitiously playing buzzword bingo during meetings.

Perhaps my favorite employment of the word is 'buzzword-compliant,' an adjective describing a resume laden with the appropriate jargon for an open position.

Sure, there is a lot of bad marketing out there, where products are hyped with jargon. You can usually spot them by their long string of noun-adjective phrases uninterrupted by hyphens or commas:

"This intuitive best of breed leading edge TCO reducing enterprise solution empowers IT administrators to forward thinking standard based performance analysis."

However, in the Darwinian world of marketing, you hope that your competitors are using that kind of bloviation because you will certainly have an advantage. In the hands of a skilled writer, jargon grows in meaning. The skillful handling of context makes all the difference.

'Scalable' may just mean 'able to grow,' in a literal sense, but to an IT administrator, scalable suggests an infrastructure that expands with growth while retaining its form. So a scalable architecture does not grow in the way a tree grows through stages from seed to sprout to sapling to tree; a scalable architecture grows the way successive production models of a jet each look like the final full-size product at every scale.

'Enterprise' may mean, simply, an undertaking, but already that carries a number of associations that make companies want to call themselves enterprises rather than businesses. In fact, while some IT vendors think of enterprises as large companies, many mid and small-sized companies think of themselves as enterprises because of the connotations of the word: industrious, free, open, and moving forward.

Words become jargon when we use them unconsciously, without stopping to savor their qualities, the way one would taste wine. Just like a sommelier seeks to place a wine in the proper context of a meal to set its subtleties in relief against a new background, a marketer can take that house wine, jargon, and make it a fine complement to the right meal. At least, enterprising marketers will.

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Kind regards, 
Kevin Troy Darling

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