“Please review the print mock up carefully. The PDF file has bleeds so we’re showing it to you in spreads to ensure the inside margins align and images are hi-res and do not appear pixellated.”
As a designer, I’m careful to NEVER use that sentence in an email to my clients. It is industry jargon. While it is beautiful and perfectly clear to me, it is maddening nonsense to the non-designer.
If you’re a marketer, then you may also be guilty of assaulting people with jargon. Here’s a test. Have you used any of these words or phrases recently in your marketing:
“flexible,” “robust,” “world class,” “scalable,” and “easy to use”?
Or “cutting edge,” “mission critical,” “market leading,” “industry standard,” “turnkey,” and “groundbreaking”?
How about “interoperable,” “best of breed,” and “user friendly”? And my personal favorite, “dynamic.”
Marketer David Meerman Scott calls these “gobbledygook phrases.” He decided to find out just how overused these words were. By analyzing 338,000 news release wires over a 9 month period, he found that 74,000 of them mentioned at least one of the gobbledygook phrases. The winner was “next generation,” with 9,895 uses. The runners-up are in the list above.
His disdain for these phrases is aimed directly at the writers. He claims that because these writers don’t understand how their products solve customer problems, they cover by explaining how the product works using meaningless industry jargon.
Instead, they should write with their buyers in mind, not the product. It goes back to explaining how your product or service will benefit your customer. Don’t just blather on about how great your product is. The buyer needs to understand how you can help them. Define the problem, touch on their pain points, and offer the solution. Incidentally, these are also winning traits of a good sales letter.
You can read more of David’s article at DavidMeermanScott.com.