Devil's Dictionary Part 2

THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY OF MARKETING REDUX

James R. Rosenfield

Here are some more entries from Jim Rosenfield's DEVIL'S DICTIONARY OF MARKETING. Jim, who of course is on the side of the angels, hopes to have a complete DEVIL'S DICTIONARY published in late 2002.

ADVERTORIAL: a contradiction in terms. See INFOMERCIAL.

BENCHMARK: let's find out how lousy our competitors are, so we'll feel better about how lousy we are. Benchmarking is based on scoping out best practices. Best practices are ill-defined and subjective, unless you attach a bottom line dimension to them. I once conducted a database marketing best practices study for AT&T, and came to the obvious conclusion that best practices didn't exist. In fact, as soon as you identify and analyze a "best practice" company, the best practices flit into the air like will-o'-the-wisps. Just as no man is a hero to his valet, no company's best practices can sustain close scrutiny. All you start to see are the holes.

There are exceptions, of course: No one can deny that General Electric's Jack Welch has articulated and promoted numerous best practices (the 6 Sigma approach, for example) that have paid off in spades.

BREAKTHROUGH: OK for science, but when anyone uses it in business, run for cover.

CONSULTANTS: a useless term, because it can range from a guy who was just fired, to the rarefied and expensive realm of McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, et al. In truth, the guy who just got fired is not only cheaper, he's also much less dangerous. Plus, unlike the big firms, he is unlikely to have been retained by the CEO.

The name-brand consulting outfits send in batches of freshly minted MBA's, who gnaw at a company like army ants, and then depart, glutted, leaving a rotting corpse behind. Few things are sadder than visiting an organization that's just been done-in by these folks.

CREATIVES: advertising agencies, like other businesses, have finance departments, dataprocessing areas, et al. Unlike other businesses, though, they also have "creatives" and "suits."

"Suits" are the people who actually go out and visit clients. They are called "suits" because that's what they wear, but the term is demeaning, and carries an implication of "empty suit," meaning there's really no one at home. This is a canard, and is true only some of the time.

"Creatives" are the natural enemies of "suits." They write the words, draw the pictures, design the websites, direct the TV commercials. They wear bluejeans, and the males of the species usually have ponytails. They think they are artists, but of course they're not. Art has nothing to do with advertising. Money does.

CREATIVITY: one of those ineffable essences, the ghost, so to speak, in the marketing machine. What on earth could it mean? I had a boss once who used to run into my office, exhorting me to "Be creative!" I was young and scared, so I tried to look both sage and exuberant, an exercise that hurt my face muscles.

"Creativity," David Ogilvy once said, "is what sells." I would buy that. Creativity, properly, is an appropriate solution to a problem. When an ad agency tells you they're coming up with "creative solutions," fire them - or at least pummel them - for the crime of redundancy. If it's a solution, it has to be creative.

The children and the amateurs in the field mistake "creative" for "attention getting." This is a serious mistake. We learned in elementary school that setting yourself on fire will get you attention, but no one will want to be friends with you.

DATABASE: a really expensive mailing list.

DIRECT MARKETING: Lengendary adman Lester Wunderman takes credit for coining the term, but it was probably in the air at the time of the supposed invention. It began as both a refinement and a euphemism: Direct mail and mail order didn't encompass the scope of the discipline, not even in the 1950s or 1960s. And it was a euphemism for mail order and direct mail, non-glamorous endeavors possessing the whiff of hernia ads in the back pages of the Police Gazette.

Through a linguistic paradox, though, what began as a euphemism ended up contaminated by what it tried to euphemize, much as the word "intercourse," the king of euphemisms, has caused countless generations of schoolchildren to smirk and giggle. No matter how hard direct marketers have tried, "direct marketing" keeps reverting to direct mail and mail order.

This explains the plethora of substitute terms that come and go: "Maximarketing" and "Micromarketing" in the 1980s, for example. That acronyms should aspire to the same meaning is a symptom of definitional desperation. Then, in the 1990s, came the onslaught of "One-to-One," "Relationship Marketing," "Customer Relationship Marketing," "Interactive Marketing," etc.

It's all direct marketing, pure and simple: Knowing who your customers are, keeping track of their behavior, and addressing them in ways appropriate to their behavior. Without, of course, invading their privacy.

EMPOWERMENT: used only in cases where people have no power, most notably customer service environments. Customer service empowerment, a popular fiction in the 1990s, not only doesn't exist, but would probably result in immediate termination, should the poor customer service rep actually try to do anything to help customers.

Customer service, as of the early years of the new Millennium, has regressed entirely into a time-and-motion-study exercise in worker degradation. Following scripts and getting customers off the phone fast is the byword, far removed from the virtuous circle of customer loyalty, formerly espoused by such foolish optimists as yours truly: Being nice to customers contributes to both customer and employee retention, which contributes to profitability, since it costs much more to get new customers and new customer service reps than to keep existing ones. Still makes sense to me, but no one does it.

INFOMERCIAL: a contradiction in terms. See ADVERTORIAL.

INTERACTIVE TELEVISION (ITV): an imaginary media twist, where consumers interact with their televisions. Consumers do not want to interact with televisions. They want to sit dumbly and be entertained. It evidently has a degree of penetration in England, but U.K. T.V. has always been a less dumb medium than U.S. T.V.

KNOWLEDGE BASE: a fancy term for stuff I know, or rather stuff I want you to think I know.

MUTANT STATISTICS: there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, someone once said. (The quote has been attributed to several people). In a useful book, "Damned Lies and Statistics" (University of California Press, 2001), sociologist Joel Best discusses "mutant statistics," statistics that could not possibly be real, yet are widely believed. Best points out that mutant statistics are a result of both self-interest (e.g., a lung disease charity wants to dramatize lung disease) and sheer innumeracy (i.e., most folks don't understand numbers).

Marketing of course is filled with mutant statistics. Everyone from market researchers to media companies twists, distorts, exaggerates, and misunderstands statistics in ways ranging from the innocently ignorant to the nod-and-a-wink disingenuous.

My favorite marketing mutant statistic is a wonderful example of sheer innumeracy: Americans, we read and hear frequently, are subjected to 3000 advertising messages a day.

Sounds credible, given the constant assault on our sensibilities. But do the math: Assuming a 16 hour waking day, 3000 advertising messages equals 187.50 messages per hour, or 3.13 messages per minute. Even if you give the term "advertising messages" the broadest possible construction, and include logos on baseball caps and khaki trousers, 3000 per day is clearly impossible.

But, of course, no one does the math.

OUT OF THE LOOP: a nice way of saying that everyone's been ignoring me all year. It's also a nice way of saying that you, my co-workers, are lousy at communication, which of course you are, because no one is good at intra-organizational communication.

PROACTIVE: a neologism for "active," featuring a redundant prefix, not unlike the now rare "irregardless," utterance of which warrants a death sentence in certain English speaking regions. If you have to be told to be "proactive," you're not. If you tell other people you're "proactive," you're not. Ad agencies often pride themselves on being "proactive," which means finding new ways to fleece the client. Agency "proactivity" is especially important during lean economic times, when clients are less willing to be fleeced.

RE-ENGINEER: punch "re-engineering" into the Google search engine, and you'll get 242,000 entries. It's a popular term. I wonder what it means. I suppose it has to do with processes. I find RE-INVENT (next entry) somewhat more useful.

RE-INVENT: this term generated a mere 72,500 hits. I prefer it to RE-ENGINEER because it sounds more fundamental. I don't want the airline, hotel, or shopping experience (just to choose three at random) to be "re-engineered;" I want them to be "re-invented:" Start from scratch, throw out what you're doing, do something new.

If Customer Relationship Management exists, it's ignored by the airline industry. More properly, they pay attention to it until it comes time for the actual airline experience, where people are treated like sheep who are unnecessary nuisances.

I have almost 5 million miles on American Airlines, and they do as well as they can under the current paradigm. I say throw out the paradigm. I hate carrying luggage on board, for example, but I hate even more checking it. The long nervous wait at the carrousel (why is my bag always the last?) is just too nerve-wracking. As a reward for my patronage, I don't want or need any free trips. How about taking my luggage at the Admirals' Club, guaranteeing my bags special treatment (e.g., someone who can read and cares will place it in the proper bin), and then meeting me at curbside with my suitcases?

Or the abominable food? Why not feed me a gourmet meal on the ground, and let simple, healthy snacks take care of the airplane time?

Or the inattentive flight attendants? Why not make it a rule that there will be no gossiping about boy friends or girl friends in the first class cabins of small planes, where you can hear every silly word. This gives me anxiety attacks about what on earth these pinheads would do if there were an actual emergency.

SCALABILITY: a particularly ugly neologism meaning the ability of a company to get bigger. Since it was used by now discredited dot-coms, the term has fallen into early obsolescence, but its sheer unattractiveness might well give it a second life.

SURPRISE AND DELIGHT: this is the idea that an unexpected treat will delight customers, making them grateful and loyal.

You can see right away how Pavlovian this is, which reveals a strain of intellectual fallacy as wide as the Grand Canyon. Pavlov is old-hat, and widely discredited. Business (and its handmaiden marketing) remains enamored of old-fashioned, positivist modalities that would be laughed off the stage in any other discipline.

Does surprise and delight work? Yes, but…

What's the "but"? You have to keep doing it. Lexus washes my car when I bring it in for service, which the first time surprised and delighted me, and the second time delighted me without the surprise. Next time, if they don't do it, I will be surprised and undelighted.

American Airlines meets me with a vehicle at the gate when I have a close international connection. The first time, surprise and delight. The second time, expectation and delight. But if it doesn't happen…

Thomas Edison said "Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of." Assuredly this is the case with surprise and delight, a great idea with very, very steep downside.

TEAM BUILDING: there has been a persistent fashion in America, as well as a few other Americanized places, for employees to be taken out to the countryside, where they jump out of trees into each other's arms. This is called "team building." It doesn't work.

Team building is one of those feel-good methods with the lifespan of a mayfly. It's good for a while, but it loses its impetus quickly.

I was once working with Telecom Australia (now Telstra). The employees, very nice people, were essentially civil servants, lacking the qualities of self-reliance and assertiveness needed for today's global economy.

One day I visited them to find that an aggressive, nay, swashbuckling group of hard-chargers had replaced the mild wimps of yesterday. What on earth had happened? Well, they had just come back from a few days in the bush, jumping out of trees, making their own food, and bonding. Bonding to the point that John and David, who hated each other, were now beer drinking mates, the highest level of relationship in Australia.

Alas, I returned a month later to find again wimps where there had been swashbucklers. John and David were no longer speaking.

Team building, predicated on sports imagery, is a false analogy. In sports, the players are more important than the coaches or managers. Who gets paid more - a star player or a star coach? But in business, it's the managers who make the most, and the players (so to speak) who are expendable and underpaid.

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX: this is one of those terms that clouds the mind and breaks the heart. It's akin to saying "Be creative!" It's supposed to mean think laterally, rather than linearly, but it's an admonition only given by those incapable of lateral thinking. When someone says in a meeting "Let's think outside the box," it's time to take a break and not come back.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP: a concept based on the misconception that thinking and leadership exist in business.

TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT (TQM): the Deming method, the great buzzword of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when companies talked about quality circles and zero defects. The fad was based on Japanese envy, a pathology that quickly disappeared when the Japanese economy went sour.

Echoing Voltaire's famous wisecrack about the Holy Roman Empire, Total Quality Management was never total, nor did it affect quality much, nor did have to do with management. It did make lots of consultants rich, though.

WIN WIN: the poet Howard Nemerov once wrote "You can't break eggs without making an omelette - that's what they tell the eggs." "Win Win" is what they tell the eggs. The party in the negotiation who promises "Win Win" always holds the upper hand, and if there's an upper hand, there cannot be a "Win Win." "Win Win" runs counter to games theory, experience, and common sense, yet you hear it all the time. When you hear it, head for the hills. And if you hear yourself saying it, head for a vacation.