JRosenfield Article

THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY OF MARKETING, REDUX AGAIN

More fiendish definitions from the author's work-in-progress, scheduled for publication in 2003.

James R. Rosenfield

May 2002

ACTIONABLE: the dictionary definition involves litigation, "giving just cause for legal action." The business definition is "something that you can take action on." This is simple illiteracy, and an egregious misuse of language. It's also very funny when you hear people at meetings unwittingly threaten each other with lawsuits.

CONSUMERISM: the cultural reality of America, and, increasingly, the rest of the First World. You are what you buy, you are what you want. "No ideas but in things," William Carlos Williams once wrote. No identity but in things, I write in 2002.

CONTENT: the stuff people see, read, or hear. It's hard to get a message across without content, isn't it, although when one contemplates McLuhan's great dictum ("The medium is the message") one's attitude towards content changes. Content cannot be detached from its vehicle. Contemplate that next time you daydream.

CORE COMPETENCIES: what you're good at. It sounds better to say "We have core competencies in information management" than to say "We're good at information management." "Core competencies" is at least a slightly weasel-like formulation.

When businesses talk to consumers they make crazy promises, implicit or explicit: "Drive this car and become rich and famous…Try this concoction and lose 40 pounds without dieting."

When businesses talk to other businesses, the verbiage becomes softer, more equivocal, more weasel-like. Perhaps the purpose is communication after all, since weasels can't go wrong speaking weasel to weasels.

DELIVERABLE: the first time I heard this I was nonplussed. "When will you have your deliverables?" I was asked at a meeting. Was I to deliver groceries, perhaps, or packages on behalf of Federal Express? I was soon enlightened. It is the au courant word for what you're supposed to do. The word's unconscious physicality reflects an interesting current in early 21st businesspeak: The more abstract the business world becomes-cf.. the Internet, the dominance of services, et al.-the more concrete the language becomes.

DISCONNECT: in the same wearily neological spirit of "impact" used as a verb, but in reverse. In this case, a verb is used as a noun, as in "Whoa! There's a disconnect here!" Disconnect is a polite way of saying that you are illogical and absurd. Unless the meeting is extremely formal, the "disconnect" phrase is always preceded by the exclamation "Whoa!" See IMPACT.

DRILL DOWN: the Industrial Revolution revolutionized the moving and making of things. Steam enabled machines to produce unprecedented breakthroughs in manufacturing. And in mining.

It's interesting that the Information Revolution, particularly database activities, uses old-fashioned imagery based on such a grim and dangerous endeavor as mining. "Data mining" is one of these. "Drill down" is another. It not only sounds grim, it sounds dental, come to think of it. "Drill down" was originally used in data mining applications, where the metaphor remained consistent. It's now used in lots of other environments, e.g., "Let's drill down to what Bill really meant at the last meeting." When someone says "Please drill down until you come up with something actionable" you are allowed to leave for the day. See ACTIONABLE.

GRANULAR: this means small. I'm not sure where it came from, athough it's metaphorically consistent with "data mining" and that whole tiresome set of 19th Century industrial imagery.

GRESHAM'S LAW: bad money drives out good, in its original, economic incarnation. It's a law wonderfully applicable to just about everything in business. Bad people drive out good people. Bad ideas drive out good ideas. Bad advertising drives out good advertising. Bad organization drives out good organization. Etc., ad infinitum.

GROWING THE BUSINESS: I've been hearing this grating phrase for over 20 years. It's based on an organic metaphor, sensible enough, I guess, when you consider that a corporation, legally, is a fictitious person. It makes me think of gardening, and it then makes me think of fertilizer. Fair enough.

HUMAN CAPITAL: a Marxist would probably nod her head at this, and remark sagely that post-industrial capitalism not only enslaves people to capital, it actually turns them into capital. Fortunately none of us are Marxists, so none of us would agree with this.

HUMAN RESOURCES: a dire phrase, proclaiming that people are assets not unlike machines or real estate. On the positive side, "resources" suggest value. On the negative side, "resources" indicate dehumanization.

It's moot whether the concept of "human resources" preceded the job of "Vice President, Human Resources," or vice versa. Certainly any Human Resources person I've met is primarily dedicated to preserving and enriching the job security of Human Resource #1, themselves.

Decades ago, in his great book "Up the Organization," Robert Townsend (one time CEO of Avis) suggested doing away with personnel departments as quickly as possible. Still seems like a good suggestion to me.

IMPACT: the use of "impact" as a transitive verb makes my flesh crawl. Am I the only one? E.g., "How will this impact our profits?"

True, it's shorter than saying "What impact will this have on our profits?" And in written English, it enables businesspeople to evade their insecurity about the meanings of "affect" and "effect." Certainly using nouns as verbs has a long and honorable literary tradition. Shakespeare did as he wished when it came to parts of speech.

But I'm rationalizing. Using "impact" as a transitive verb conveys a sort of bland, ignorant business school sensibility, MBA's gone wrong (if that's not redundant), and that in itself is enough to get your teeth gnashing.

INFRASTRUCTURE: no one knows what this means. It's misused as a synonym for structure, on the basic business principle that long words are better than short words. Used properly, it refers to the skeleton of entities, the underlying structure of things.

NEW ECONOMY: don't even say it.

OFFLINE: as in, "Let's discuss this offline." This is a technological term now used to mean "I'll have a private chat with you after the meeting," when someone needs to fend off humiliation or exposure. Normally, the offline invitation is delivered by someone in a power position. It can also be used to occupy a power position: No one to my knowledge has ever said "No, let's talk about this online, right here, right now."

PARKINSON'S LAW: time expands to fill the space allotted to it. Especially applicable to meetings, where people will do anything to make sure the session takes its fully planned two hours. Otherwise, you have to go back to your office and possibly do some work.

Most depressingly, the Law exerts an iron grip over conference calls, the worst mode of communication to which the poor telephone has ever been subjected. Conference calls, typically involving three groups of people in three places, drag on forever. Even worse, they induce a kind of toxic ennui that makes minutes feel like hours. Conference calls are great venues for eyebrow raising and eye rolling, since no one on the other end can see you. Videoconferencing, one of those great solutions that never quite seem to work, would at least eliminate the body language antics.

RESULTS-DRIVEN: a typical business commonplace, a yawner, a sycophantic phrase. It pops up in every other ad or brochure for business-to-business products. If you're not results-driven, what on earth are you?

REVISIT: this means I might have made a mistake first time around, so I better take a look at things again, as in "Let's revisit the Henderson contract." It's a word that helps one evade blame.

SEAMLESS: seamless is one of those terms never uttered by anyone telling the truth. It's the business version of "The check is in the mail." Often used in tandem with "integration," it's always a double lie because 1) Nothing is seamless and 2) Nothing is integrated.

"Seamless" is never uttered except defensively. Merging companies often promise a "seamless integration," which might be true for the CEO, who seamlessly receives a $20 million bonus, but is assuredly not true for the poor customers, who no longer know how much money they have in their checking accounts, or, for that matter, where their checking accounts are.

SPACE: oh my, this one really makes me cringe, as in "The B2B space." Need I say anything more?

STATUS SYMBOL: the anthropological sine qua non of 20th Century America, but a
more complex animal in the 21st. Diversity, complexity, globalization, media overload, and the sheer size of everything has generated a multitude of status symbols, depending on a multiplicity of factors.

Back in the 20th, though, particularly those post-war middle decades that now bask in a nostalgically roseate glow, there was one central all-encompassing all-American status symbol: The Cadillac!

Especially the Cadillac in its finned era of the 1950s and 1960s. It was the aspirational goal of all mainstream Americans, a sign of arrival. It was the first car to break through the $5,000 barrier. ($5,000!!!!!)

Cars remain great status symbols, of course, although the choice is greater and the status more segmented. One person's Sports Utility Vehicle, for example, is another person's wanton disregard for the environment and other drivers. Regardless, cars are the best status symbols on earth because:

--They're by definition portable, so where you go, they go.

--They for all practical purposes wear their price tags, since everyone knows what cars
cost.

--You can improve your status on the cheap. The fellow sailing down the freeway in a sleek Mercedes may be lease-poor, and living out of his car.

Back to Cadillac: You gotta hand it to those car guys at General Motors. They had it all, a status symbol so symbolic that it became the emblem for other status symbols. Not so long ago, you'd hear people refer to "The Cadillac of restaurants" or "The Cadillac of scotch." No more.

STICKINESS: a term that fortunately has dropped out of common use, probably as a result of the dot-com depression. It refers to the ability of a company to retain customers. Quite appallingly, it suggests that customers are flies, and companies-if they're effective -are flypaper.

Several years ago I spoke at a dreadful conference in Brussels that was themed around "sticky marketing." (Why do I do such things? Well, I don't any longer.) The conference organizers gave out sticky candies. I'm not making this up.

STICKY EYEBALLS: this loathsome phrase is correlative with STICKINESS, and refers specifically to a Website's ability to keep a visitor involved and engaged. It seems to have disappeared, praise be.

STRATEGIC FIT: when someone says "There's a strategic fit," there isn't. Trust me on this.

TARGET: your market, your audience, the customers or consumers you are trying to reach. Often used in the phrase "Penetrate our target marketplace." Metaphors of rape and war cluster around marketing lingo like flies around a dead skunk. There is even a book called "Marketing Warfare." This is shameful.

TELEVISION: the single most important cultural phenomenon of the second half of the 20th Century, and into the 21st. Americans and many other people spend more time watching television than doing anything else, save working and sleeping. Television is the great totalitarian mechaniser of the consumer society, the medium that turns people into buying machines. Programming and commercials conspire to create the value system that underpins consumerism.

Television does not have to be actively watched. Just having it on, and getting random impressions, is more than enough for it to do its job. No one needs to watch or listen to an ad in order for advertising to be effective. The essential job of advertising is to get people to buy, not to get them to buy a particular product.

Television both creates and benefits from the mass attention deficit disorder that's epidemic in early 21st Century America, and, increasingly, other First World countries.

TURBO-CHARGED: a ridiculous expression connoting energy, enthusiasm, and drive. Ad agencies will sometimes use it in meetings, as in "Jackson is turbo-charged to get that job done!" A turbo-charger, according The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, is a "device that uses the exhaust gas of an internal-combustion engine to drive a turbine…" "Exhaust gas" sounds about right.

USAGE: a word substituted for "use," because it takes longer to say, and helps fill the time allotted for meetings. See UTILIZE.

UTILIZE: a word substituted for "use," because it takes longer to say, and helps fill the time allotted for meetings. See USAGE.

VALUE-ADDED: taking a product and figuring out how to charge more money for it. Normally a lie.

VALUE PROPOSITION: this is another one of those chalk-scratching-the-blackboard phrases, guaranteed to give you a headache. I sigh audibly when I hear it, which means lots of sighing, since it's used all the time. "Value proposition" is a kinder, gentler way of saying "Why in the world would anyone buy our product?"

Endless hours of research and discussion go into defining "value proposition." In truth, there are only two kinds of value propositions:

1) Self-image. What will this product do for me to make me feel better about myself? (Cf. Marshall McLuhan's comment that advertising makes you sick, then sells you the cure).

2) Convenience, ease, stress-relief. What will this product do to make my daily life less maddening?