A War of Enlightenment Against Marketing Jargon

by Hunter Richards

Accounting Market Analyst
Apr 04, 2011

Streamline business processes. Enhance workflow. Increase visibility. Do these really mean anything? Let’s face it – ERP, CRM, and accounting system vendors talk a lot of nonsense about their products. Inspired by Gartner's magic quadrants, I've decided to put this marketing jargon in its place. The quadrant below classifies the most common phrases, sorted by degree of overuse and lack of meaning. Hover your mouse over a given phrase to see my snarky comments.

Note that we find a lot of straight-up gibberish, a fair amount of creative garbage (my favorite), a little bit of acceptable marketing, and no helpful description whatsoever. No wonder the software selection process is so grueling. But hey, that's what we're here for – to dig through all the fluff. So, what methodology did I use, you ask? Well… it was purely subjective. Don’t like how I judged your favorite phrase? Leave me a comment.

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http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk Doug Kessler – B2B Marketing

Nice one. This manages to streamline cloud synergy while maintaining a scalable, robust ROI model. And that’s hard to do.
http://sunnytalkstech.blogspot.com Saptarshi Purkayastha

Interesting indeed! Where have you collected the gibberish from… Is there a dataset of all the vendor websites??
http://www.shapiramarketing.com/blog Nancy Shapira

Brilliant–I love it and will post on our blog, linkedin and FB page…
http://www.simonrudge.co.uk Simon Rudge – B2B Copywriter

Thanks Hunter, a definite for my blog.

Here’s a gem that landed just now in my inbox:

“Highly-repeatable, best practice IT management in a highly-integrated, single pane of glass interface”

Or am I missing something?
http://www.360cloudsolutions.com Jordan Krizman

Yes, this is exactly what I noticed as I looked at our competition when I started constructing our marketing campaign. Our focus is to speak to our potential clients clearly and give them all the tools they need to make educated decisions. Lose the corporate speak. Nobody (you have a rapport with) actually talks like that to each other.
Jpilantrose

Test
http://www.juice-marketing.com VAR Marketing

Nice commentary. This meaningless gibberish has polluted websites, brochures, and data sheets for years. And the marketing departments at MAJOR technology companies are still cranking out techno-babble in droves!

For a great read on this very topic, take a look at David Meerman Scott’s free eBook “The Gobbledygook Manifesto.” Should be easy to find on Google. Opening sentence: “Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh.”

Cheers