Buzz words annoy me. When words become labels which people use without thinking, they become worthless. People give the appearance of buzzwords actually shaping their thinking. How sad can we get?
Here is an array of the most often used marketing buzzwords and their definition according to Dwyer.
Consumer oriented marketing – marketing
Targeting – marketing
Multi-level marketing – marketing
Viral marketing – people talking about us or our products
Email marketing – sending emails to people we barely know in the hope that one in a hundred might read it and take action
Search marketing – marketing
B2B marketing – marketing to a business
B2C marketing – marketing to a person
Demand creation – marketing (or it could be going out and buying our own products)
Integrated marketing – marketing, sales and fulfilment knowing what each other is doing; an unusual occurrence.
Market segmentation – who or what convinces these people to buy this stuff from this place
Relationship marketing – marketing using long lunches and attending sporting events to build trust through familiarity
Enterprise marketing – see B2B marketing
Customer alignment – marketing?
Customer centric – marketing?
Consumer initiated marketing – free marketing
Consumer generated media – free media
User generated content – free content
Value – perceived benefit ÷ perceived cost
Value adding – increasing perceived benefit or reducing perceived cost
Value proposition – sales pitch that inflates the perceived benefit and deflates the perceived cost
Key performance indicators – tens if not hundreds of unrelated measures I use to demonstrate that I know what my business is doing. They are often not a real indication of performance and rarely are key.
KPI – see key performance indicators
Metrics – see key performance indicators
Marketing dashboard – The KPIs that people look at and do nothing about each month
Low-hanging fruit – things we should already have done
Paradigm – how we do what we do now
Paradigm shifts – changing how we do what we do now
Accountability management – blame shifting
Get on the same page – agree with me or get out
Branding – logo, colours, font?..
Brand identity – what customers feel and think when they see my logo, colours, font?
Brand – what customers feel and think when they see my logo, colours, font?
Look and feel – appearance; logo, colours, font?
Pushing the envelope – a party game enjoyed by postal workers?
Reputation management – controlling information flow to that which I want known
Bounce rates – the proportion of people who got onto our site by mistake
Trend analysis – trend
Thinking outside the box – thinking
Brain dump – scatty thinking about what we do usually reserved for handing over to the person who is replacing us
Thunderbolt thinking – thinking (in a rainstorm?)
Lifelong value – guess at how much money we would make out of a fictitious customer who stays with us for life, however long that is.
Lifetime value – same guess
Out-sourcing – stuff we have given up doing because we thought it was too hard
In-sourcing – stuff we outsourced that we lost control over and had to do ourselves again to save costs
Win-win – compromise
Take it offline – talk about it later
At the end of the day – what is actually important
Calls to action – telling people what to do now
Redeployed people – people who have lost their job
De-layering – see redeployed people
Downsizing – see redeployed people
Cross-functional team – something to be created so that blame shifting is difficult – see accountability management
Decentralization – something to do to make the regions accountable – see accountability management; usually completed in a cycle with centralisation.
Empowerment – see accountability management
Intrapreneur– one our people who always seems to be full of ideas that won’t fly in our organisation
Stakeholders– people who have an interest in what we do, or dracula slayers
Heads-up – follows the practice of using a noun where a simple verb would have sufficed e.g. “give you a heads up” instead of “tell you”
Living our mission statement – if only I knew what that meant, I am sure I would
Up-skill – learn
Push back – disagree
Critically important – important, perhaps critical
Best practice – something we are not doing that others are (and are doing better for it)
