brentashley

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.