Do you think B2B marketers want to be the weirdo at the party that everyone avoids?
I’ve been thinking about the language we use recently. It started when I was idling away online last weekend; looking at cars in fact. And I came across this beauty: The new Audi A6 is an extremely progressive car, particularly in its impressive emotive qualities.’ In other words, it demonstrates its progressive character from the very first glimpse one has of its body – and when it is driven, this visual fascination is borne out by contact with its stimulating inner values.
Hmm. That’s silly. But we are much smarter in the UK; and even smarter in B2B. We would never come out with nonsense like that. So I moved on to flick through IT week: “…includes advanced management features, such as Spanning Tree Protocol, which allows you to create multiple redundant paths across a network without creating loops in the LAN traffic. Any link failure and this product reroutes traffic within two or three seconds across another path so that operational performance is not interrupted,” spouted one ad enthusiastically. Aaaagh! Is that really what they wanted to say? What does it mean? Why is my brain melting?
Oh, I hear you say, but this is a technical product being sold to a technically literate audience. Just because dim agency types like you don’t get it doesn’t really matter. You’re supposed to speak to your audience in language that they understand.’
Exactly. Whoever the audience is, they are not freaks with no grasp on reality, no human emotion, with nothing defining them other than their job titles. And the more technical they are, the more likely they are to find out the nitty-gritty themselves on countless websites, review forums, conversations with their peers, etc. Why can’t we just learn to say what we can do for the audience and say it in a way that they connect with? A way that makes them excited, intrigued, curious, and optimistic. Whatever will make them feel clever or even inadequate if necessary, but speak to them like human beings not job functions; because that’s what they are.
So I looked to one of my other trade magazines for a bit of inspiration. I found SAP talking about ideas that can put you ahead of the curve’. What? Nobody says that. Unless they are very sad. In fact, even if you are very sad you don’t say that anymore. Saying ahead of the curve’ would only label you as a 1990s corporate saddo who isn’t up to date with the more modern meaningless corporate bollocks spoken by a saddo of the new millennium. Either way, I certainly wouldn’t want to be stuck talking to that person at the next party I turn up at.
So, in tribute to these purveyors of meaningless drivel I would like to invite readers to send in their worst examples of B2B marketing bollocks. Anything that winds you up because it simply doesn’t make sense, makes the simple complex or the complex incomprehensible. Call it a plain English campaign for the B2B Marketing community. They’ll be named and shamed and hanged-up high.