Kill the Jargon, Free the People

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I pulled this wonderful tagline (service feature?) from a Comergent-via-Ziff Davis Media email the other day:

Optimizing Customer-Facing Operations Through Service-Oriented Applications.”

Who wrote this? I pray no one from a marketing department had a hand in it.

When you’re crafting your marketing message, you’ve got to appeal to the lowest common denominator. That means you simplify, in the easiest-to-understand terms, what it is you do to help people. You want to make it easy for them to say, “Hmm. I want that. We need that.”

Yes, “customer-facing” is a valid, behind-the-scenes term for hardware and software products. So, too, is “service-oriented application”. And yes, these terms mean something tangible to someone else other than me. But that’s not my point.

My point is: kill the jargon, keep it simple, particularly when persuading. You entice people — you first hook them — and only then should you hit them with whatever jargon you need to use to sell.