brentashley

Hands up everybody who immediately clicks “skip flash intro” without waiting to see ANY of the flash.
ok, now. one, two, three, four…ten..twenty..a hundred… – oh, this isn’t going to work…
Right, then. Hands down.

Now, Hands up everybody who usually cares to watch the whole flash intro before getting to the content.
ahh – that’s better. one… two…you there – is your hand up or are you scratching your head?..ok, two…….three. ok, three – let’s write that down

Chris Nott at dithered says that the recent spate of comments about marketing-speak

…has made me think if those who are leary of marketing respect the marketing (or similar) department in the companies they work for.

Heh heh. Since i’m an independent consultant, I don’t have a marketing dept per se. My experience, though, is that I don’t have much time for businessspeak or marketingspeak. If a marketing department spouts it, I don’t have respect for them. If they are clear in their communications, I do. I spent over a decade as a snivelling servant for the Ontario government and had my fill of doublespeak and gobbledegook.

I do have a colleague who markets me to clients and I really respect what he does and the value he provides for his percentage. I wouldn’t be happy with him if he told customers they could leverage my synergistic qualities to make a win-win value-added seamless business solution for them, but if he lets them know that I’m personable, knowledgeable and can coax all sorts of extra functionality out of their systems with my scripting expertise then he’s gonna get me solid repeat business, and that he does. All by talking with humans as humans, not interfacing with corporate-speaking entities.

It’s all relationship building. As The Cluetrain Manifesto says it so well, markets are conversations, and the dialogue has to be bidirectional. If the marketers are talking AT customers rather than conveying information, then they’re not listening. Senseless marketing blather is designed to be vague enough not to make any points significant enough to hang a real discussion on. Effective marketing motivates the consumer to enter into a two-way dialogue with the vendor.

In the past couple of weeks, there’s been a bit of hoopla about KnowNow. This company has cool interesting technology and is populated by more than a couple of industry cognoscenti, but likely due to the dynamics of the post-bust dotcom situation found itself with an internal power imbalance leaning away from the technology and its potential and towards venture capitalists and marketers. The website read like a “how-not-to” guide for clarity in communication. I was glad to see that they listened to the various voices who decried the vacuous marketspeak and rewrote their introductory pages to actually convey understanding.

I’ve been researching some CRM stuff this morning, specifically call scripting software. Marketspeak abounds. It’s remarkable what lengths they go to to provide rambling verbose descriptions of their products without ever giving me a clue what its actual technical specifications might be, how I might be able to use it or integrate it, etc, etc. Just who is the target of these sites? I can only assume it’s aimed towards government and corporate buyers who don’t actually know the problem space the product fills, although my experience with them is that they’ll at least want a technical laundry list.

If I want to know more, I have to supply my contact information, exposing myself to a sales call, numerous followups and a lifetime of self-authorized spam. One place requires me to give them contact info just so they can send me their whitepaper.

Hey guys, just give me INFORMATION. Allow ME to discover your product and its specifications, and I will ASK when I want to know more. The minute you try to force me into your salespitch stream, you’ve lost me. I’m out the door to find a shop that will let me browse in peace without a salesman stalking me through the store.

Ain’t it always the case. I blog about something and then immediately run into someone yakking about the same stuff, usually saying it much better than me.