Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The stupidity of jargon

Something that's been increasingly annoying me over recent years is the use of frantically trendy, meaningless jargon.

Look at this classic example, the opening phrase from a press release in today's Gulf News:

"Gowealthy.com, the region's global property and lifestyle brand offering comprehensive marketing solutions...

Totally meaningless and it tells potential clients nothing about the company or what it does.

In an effort to be trendy they've packed today's top-five buzz words into a meaningless jumble of nonsense - 'global', 'lifestyle', 'brand', 'marketing' and the daddy of them all, 'solutions'.

Nobody sells anything any more other than 'solutions'.

They're a reputable real estate company. Surely they're not ashamed of that fact? So why are they hiding it?

If a company loses sight of what it is and what it does it's headed for trouble.

4 comments:

Keef said...

A certain educational establishment likes to talk about 'core values'. Which always makes me think about expensive half-eaten apples.

* said...

HAHAHHAHAHAH! thats actually quite good. You really ought to read a book my Micheal Holmes called Fat Boy and the Dancing ladies (part 2 to Last Order @ Harrods).
They have all this gobbeldygook jabberwocky WORLD BANK mumbo jumbo, and there is a reporter who breaks it down and transalates it for it is.

Alexander said...

I wrote an article for Campaign Middle East some time ago that complained about 'solutionism', the crime of claiming that mundane, everyday things are solutions for everything - particularly things that aren't problems. I supported it by going to Wikipedia and entering a definition of solutionism, so you'd see it was a real word when you looked it up ,which got me eventually had up for 'Wiki vandalism' but it was worth it although, in the final analysis I failed to introduce the word to the English language, which is unfair because it belongs there...

Seabee said...

Alexander, I'm glad I'm not alone in ranting against the word 'solutions'. No-one offers anything any more other than solutions, and in Dubai it's usually 'lifestyle solutions'. So for example a furniture shop doesn't tell us that they sell furniture - which is what we're looking for - they advertise that they 'offer lifestyle solutions'.

It's bad marketing, it's stupid, it's misleading and it drives me mad!