A few days ago, I attended a marketing talk. Purportedly, it was about content marketing. In practice, it was all gobbledygook. Three of the four presenters, and the moderator, were intent on proving their knowledge, not of content marketing, but rather of industry terms and abbreviations. Every presenter threw in a liberal dose of terms such as: sales enablement (that was new to me), lead gen, demand gen, business intelligence solutions, and many others I can’t recall or didn’t understand at all.
The moderator, whose title was simply given as CRO (I had to look it up—it stands for chief revenue officer), actually asked someone this question: What is your revenue model? If he had used plain English, he would have asked: How do you make money?
Certain industries are rife with jargon. If you know any lawyers or government contractors you will agree. Here in D.C., we love our acronyms. Everyone loves to throw out an HHS here, a DOJ there (that’s the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Justice). And the reason D.C. people do this, and why most people use jargon, is to show that they are insiders, that they have knowledge that only people in that place or industry know.
However, as Amy Schoenberger writes in Forbes (Six Words Marketers Need To Remove From Their Vocabulary), close to 90% of people may not truly understand what you are saying, and just pretend to. Those same people may then use jargon as a cover for the fact that the just don’t know what they are talking about. Peppering your conversations with terms people use but that don’t really mean much is exactly what makes you look like a tool.
Does this mean you should never use jargon? No, in fact there are time when you actually do need to use jargon, especially when talking to your peers. Marketing Profs provides some guidelines on how to use jargon properly in How to Use Jargon for Good, Not Evil in Your Content and Marketing.
Bottom line: use jargon judiciously, not rampantly.
