The Gobbledygook Manifesto -- Cutting Edge! Mission Critical! An analysis of gobbledygook in over 388,000 press releases sent in 2006

Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I'm gonna puke! Just like with a teenager's use of annoying catch phrases, I notice the same words cropping up again and again in Web sites and news releases—so much so that the gobbledygook grates against my nerves and many other people's, too. Well, duh. Like, companies just totally don't communicate very well, you know?

Many of the thousands of Web sites I've analyzed over the years and the hundred or so news releases I receive each week are laden with these meaningless gobbledygook adjectives. So I wanted to see exactly how many of these words are being used and created an analysis to do so.

AN ANALYSIS OF GOBBLEDYGOOK

First, I selected words and phrases that are overused in news releases by polling select PR people and journalists to get a list of gobbledygook phrases. Then I turned to Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company, for help with my analysis. The folks at the Factiva Reputation Lab used text mining tools to analyze news releases sent by companies in North America. Factiva analyzed each release in its database that had been sent to one of the North American news release wires it distributes for the period from January 1, 2006, to September 30, 2006. The news release wires included in the analysis were Business Wire, Canada NewsWire, CCNMatthews, Commweb.com, Market Wire, Moody’s, PR Newswire, and Primezone Media Network. Thanks to David Hamm, Glenn Fannick and Melanie Surplice at Factiva for their help.

The results were staggering. (Click on the chart to load a larger image). The news release wires collectively distributed just over 388,000 news releases in the nine-month period, and just over 74,000 of them mentioned at least one of the Gobbledygook phrases. The winner was "next generation," with 9,895 uses. There were over 5,000 uses of each of the following words and phrases: "flexible," "robust," "world class," "scalable," and "easy to use." Other notably overused phrases with between 2,000 and 5,000 uses included "cutting edge," "mission critical," "market leading," "industry standard," "turnkey," and "groundbreaking." Oh and don't forget "interoperable," "best of breed," and "user friendly," each with over 1,000 uses in news releases.

WRITE FOR YOUR BUYERS

Your buyers (and the media that cover your company) want to know what specific problems your product solves, and they want proof that it works—in plain language. Your marketing and PR is meant to be the beginning of a relationship with buyers and to drive action (such as generating sales leads), which requires a focus on buyer problems. Your buyers want to hear this in their own words. Every time you write—yes, even in news releases—you have an opportunity to communicate. At each stage of the sales process, well written materials will help your buyers understand how you, specifically, will help them.

Whenever you set out to write something, you should be writing specifically for one or more of the buyer personas that you want to reach. You should avoid jargon-laden phrases that are over-used in your industry. In the technology business, words like "groundbreaking," "industry-standard," and "cutting-edge" are what I call gobbledygook. The worst gobbledygook offenders seem to be business-to-business technology companies. For some reason, marketing people at technology companies have a particularly tough time explaining how products solve customer problems. Because these writers don’t understand how their products solve customer problems, or are too lazy to write for buyers, they cover by explaining myriad nuances of how the product works and pepper this blather with industry jargon that sounds vaguely impressive. What ends up in marketing materials and news releases is a bunch of talk about "industry-leading" solutions that purport to help companies "streamline business process," "achieve business objectives," or "conserve organizational resources." Huh?

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

When I see words like "flexible," "scalable," "groundbreaking," "industry standard," or "cutting-edge," my eyes glaze over. What, I ask myself, is this supposed to mean? Just saying your widget is "industry standard" means nothing unless some aspect of that standardization is important to your buyers. In the next sentence, I want to know what you mean by "industry standard," and I also want you to tell my why that standard matters and give me some proof that what you say is indeed true.

People often say to me, "Everyone in my industry writes this way. Why?"

Here's how the usual dysfunctional process works and why these phrases are so overused: Marketers don't understand buyers, the problems buyers face, or how their product helps solve these problems. That's where the gobbledygook happens. First the marketing person bugs the product managers and others in the organization to provide a set of the product's features. Then the marketing person reverse-engineers the language that they think the buyer wants to hear based not on buyer input but on what the product does. A favorite trick these ineffective marketers use is to take the language that the product manager provides, go into Microsoft Word's find-and-replace mode, substitute the word "solution" for "product," and then slather the whole thing with superlative-laden, jargon-sprinkled hype. By just decreeing, through an electronic word substitution, that "our product" is "your solution," these companies effectively deprive themselves of the opportunity to convince people that this is the case.

Another major drawback of the generic gobbledygook approach is that it doesn't make your company stand out from the crowd. Here's a test: Take the language that the marketers at your company dreamed up and substitute the name of a competitor and the competitor’s product for your own. Does it still make sense to you? Marketing language that can be substituted for another company's isn't effective in explaining to a buyer why your company is the right choice.

I'll admit that the gobbledygook phrases I chose are mainly use by technology companies operating in the business-to-business space. If you are writing for a company that sells different kinds of products (shoes, perhaps), then you would probably not be tempted to use many of the above phrases. The same thing is true for nonprofits, churches, rock bands, and other organizations—you're also unlikely to use these sorts of phrases. But the lessons are the same. Avoid the insular jargon of your company and your industry. Instead, write for your buyers.

"Hold on," you might say. "The technology industry may be dysfunctional, but I don't write that way!" The fact is that there is equivalent nonsense going on in all industries. Here's an example from the world of local government. "The sustainability group has convened a task force to study the cause of energy inefficiency and to develop a plan to encourage local businesses to apply renewable-energy and energy-efficient technologies which will go a long way toward encouraging community buy-in to potential behavioral changes." Hmm... What the heck is that? Or consider this example from the first paragraph of a well-known company's corporate overview page. "…[Company X] has remained faithful in its commitment to producing unparalleled entertainment experiences based on its rich legacy of quality creative content and exceptional storytelling. Today, [Company X] is divided into four major business segments… Each segment consists of integrated, well-connected businesses that operate in concert to maximize exposure and growth worldwide." Can you guess the company? Answer here.

EFFECTIVE WRITING FOR MARKETING AND PR

Your marketing and PR is meant to be the beginning of a relationship with buyers (and journalists). This begins when you work at understanding your target audience and figure out how they should be sliced into distinct buying segments or buyer personas. Once this exercise is complete, identify the situations each target audience may find themselves in. What are their problems? Business issues? Needs? Only then are you ready to communicate your expertise to the market. Here's the rule: when you write, start with your buyers, not with your product.

Your online and offline marketing content is meant to drive action (such as generating sales leads), which requires a focus on buyer problems. Your buyers want this in their own words, and then they want proof. Every time you write, you have an opportunity to communicate and to convince. At each stage of the sales process, well written materials combined with effective marketing programs will lead your buyers to understand how your company can help them. Good marketing is rare indeed, but a focus on doing it right will most certainly pay off with increased sales, higher retention rates, and more ink from journalists.

I'll be writing a lot more about this in my upcoming book The New Rules of Marketing and PR which will be published by Wiley in mid 2007.

Do you have favorite gobbledygook phrases? Comment on this post or on your blog with a trackback and let me know. Larry Schwartz at Newstex has offered "anything 2,0" as in Web 2.0 and PR 2.0 as his nomination. What about you?

Comments

[Britton Manasco]

Terrific piece. I would add that marketers (in business technology, anyway) can learn more from their professional services people than their product people. The professional services folks are responsible for implementations and need to have a good grasp of how the technology is used. They have -- to use some of Solution Selling author Michael Bosworth's Gobblegook -- "situational fluency."

I would also suggest that companies invest in profiling their customers in extensive case studies to better understand how they think and speak. Your customer case studies/success stories not only make great lead gen tools, PR fodder and sales aids, they can also -- as David suggests here -- be the foundation for the other marketing literature/content that you create.

[Todd Defren]

Brilliant. Great work!

[Jonathan Kranz]

How about "proactive" and "best practices," two of the most egregious BS offenders.

Why do marketers rely on this nonsense? A lot of what you say is true -- many marketers neither understand the customer nor the product. But I think there's another, deeper and darker reason: sometimes, they simply don't trust their product and don't want to expose it, naked and vulnerable, to a cruel and critical world. So instead, they dress it in a gown of rhetoric as a kind of linguistic protection. Maybe, just maybe, if they throw enough BS out there, no one will notice that the product isn't very good or that it isn't really different from what the competition offers.

You know what? It never works. But it doesn't stop people from trying.

[Michael A. Stelzner]

You inspired a post on my site David!

[Melanie Surplice]

Hi David,

You already know I find this stuff fascinating!

It inspired a post on my blog today too - but what I find really interesting is the UK stats - only 1 in 11 (just under 10%) of the 264,000 press releases issued over UK wires in the last 9 months contained a Gobbledydook term.

I'm wondering if it's a cultural difference between the US and UK, or if PR professionals in the US perceive the US media in quite a different way than UK PR professionals perceive their local media...surely, if PR-types are writing releases for a journalistic audience, they would be choosing the most appropriate language...? Or at least in theory, anyway.

I'll be watching with interest to see how the Gobbledygook manifesto spreads through the blogosphere.

[Owen Lystrup]

Great post, David.

[Joan Stewart, The Publicity Hound]

Great list of offensive words and phrases, many of which show up repeatedly in companies' incredibly boring and pompous boilerplate.

I'd rather swallow shards of glass than have to read a press release about someone "starting a dialogue" with someone.

[Pete Jelliffe]

Just did a little number crunching, and I just wanted to confrim your findings. 74,000 articles with at least one buzzword/388,000 total articles is only 19%. Of that 19%, only 13% (9895/74,000) contained the most heavily used word "next generation", or 2.5% of the 388,000 article sample.

I agree these words are over used, but is a 2% occurence rate overuse?

[Barry Graubart]

David,

LoL - great post.
I love the chart, but the hype-master in me thinks you need to post it as a "top 10" list to increase your position on Digg.

[Jessica Zimet]

Read this post on marketingprofs.com, and would love to hear more about slicing the target audience into buyer segments and targeting each one. Hope you'll address it in future articles, or in your upcoming book.

[Dave Schmidt]

Right on. But I need to add a few of the biggest culprits. I conducted a survey of several hundred editors on our list a few weeks ago. Over 90% thought the adjective "leading" was overused (as in "a leading producer of") in press releases. In my opinion, it's a total throw-away. It means nothing, because everybody uses it.

To my surprise, "solutions" got only a 68% overused rating (although several editors sent comments underscoring their disgust with it). The word is not meaningless, it's just been ruined by overuse by releases and advertising from producers of standardized products (as opposed to custom-engineered products or services). Heck, a paper clip is a solution, isn't it?

I've got more survey data, and would be glad to share it via email, and through this venue. Fun subject, but also very important to those of us that are being pressured to succumb to corporate-speak every month as we toil to communicate for our clients.

[David Meerman Scott]

Dave, I would love to see your data! I agree that "leading" says nothing. I would really like to see the rest of your data. Can you post it here so others can see?? Thanks

[Jay Coffelt]

World-class post. It is truly a win-win. You've pushed the envelope.

[John Richardson]

David, Great Post.

These same words seem to end up in all of the mission statements too! No wonder nobody knows what their "mission" is...

John

[David Meerman Scott]

John, You're right! And the words also end up on the "about us" page of the company Web site. Thanks for reading. David

[Ron Jones]

I laughed myself almost to tears when I read your post. For the last six years, I've been in IT Consulting; first in the fortune 1000 market, now targeting SMB.

I have a theory about the motivations behind this "buzzword compliant" marketing campaign architecture.

Although hardware companies (a certain 'big name in routers' comes to mind) are not without shame in this, it's the software companies who seem to be the most offensive in their usage.

I believe that this stems from two or more primary causes:

1. The marketing departments at these companies either want to do justice to the pace of innovation that the developers are setting, OR they feel inadequate and less intelligent by comparison and are trying to compensate.

or (more likely)

2. Software is an intangible product, so in addition to the packaging and display, marketing wants to dress it up with highfalutin' $64.00 words in an attempt to give it some gravitas. It also helps to better justify the pricetag. Similar to the more serious nature of financial services marketing.

Although I can never be certain, I believe that I once lost out in a job interview when the potential employer asked me if there was anything I found challenging about their product or their company. To which I replied "I can't understand your collateral, it doesn't tell me what your product actually DOES" (fresh out of the military, I thought they wanted me to be honest).

And perhaps I'm a bit on the slow side, but it took a year and half for me (a networking guy, not a software engineer) to finally understand the whole "dot net" thing from Bill & Co.

Ron

[David Meerman Scott]

Ron, What a great comment -- many thanks. I love the story about (possibly) not making the cut in a job interview because you weren't gobbldygook compliant. Priceless stuff! But imagine if you had koined said company... Cheers, David

[Jay]

Synergy is a big-time gobbledygook offender to me. Ditto for "leveraging" and "relationship management."

[cottageman]

Excellent post! The stuff that is contained in many over-the-top press releases is truly priceless.
This is of course where search engines and their keyword insight can help - no user would ever search for the gobbledygook stuff; so why do marketers still stick with this language?

[Sandy Calhoun]

Nice work. Read this next time you find yourself lost in a hailstorm of flying muck: Simple & Direct by Jacques Barzun. It's an old standby for the sane.

Cheers, Sandy

[Mary Topper]

Love the post - esp. that there is data behind it. I'm in tech PR and am a big proponent of leaving the ambiguous words and the office jargon out of our writing/ conversations.

BUT - I find it ironic that you mention "industry standard" making your eyes glaze over, while the slogan of your own company reads " Industry Standard in Technology Product Management and Marketing Education".

[George Dovel]

In 25 years of writing marketing materials for high-tech B2B, I'm sure I've committed every gobbledygook sin ever imagined and possibly created a few new sins along the way. Here are three additional nuances that might help explain this phenomenon:

1. Marketing writers often write for the wrong audiences. They tend to have limited contact with the "real" audience but constant contact with the managers or clients who sign their paychecks. Semi-subconsciously, too many marketing messages wind up aggrandizing the creators of the product rather than communicating the product's benefits and applications to intended buyers. These product creators want to feel like they are innovative, industry-leading, best-of-class people, so they want to see the fruits of their labor described in such terms as well. (Not being critical here; it's human nature, really.)

2. As all marketing writers know, it's easy to promote a unique product that cost-effectively solves a real customer problem in a way that's new and different enough to be intriguing but not so new and different as to be scary or weird. We also all know that such products are extremely rare; that's just not the way the industry works. However, to make every fractionally incremental advance seem important, we too often crank up the ol' rhetorical air pump to puff up the message.

3. In high tech (at least in the fairly exotic/obscure corners in which I've worked...semiconductors, computational fluid dynamics, optics, electronic and mechnical signal analysis, etc.), marketing writers are more or less shoved into the middle of a conversation between the scientists/engineers who create the products and the scientists/engineers who buy and use the products. Even with an engineering degree and a quarter-century in the industry, I have to be on guard constantly to make sure I don't dumb down the conversation simply so that I can temporarily participate in it. When we writers don't fully understand what the customer wants to know (a not-uncommon occurrence, I believe, given the lack of customer contact, the technical complexity of the subject matter and constant schedule & budget pressures), slipping into blather-speak is an ever-present temptation.

Given all the human and technical elements involved, meeting the gobbledygook challenge is not easy, but it can be done if everyone in the messaging food chain commits to it.

[David Meerman Scott]

Wow George. Your perceptions are spot on. I agree 100%. Many thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.

David

[Bill Alexy]

I think the word widget is overused

[Anton D'abo]

This is interesting but you've forgotten that these phrases often exist in the "About X company" at the footer or in the Editorial Notes section. Were the footers excluded from your data? If not, this would make a HUGE difference in your findings.

I would say terms like Flexible isn't exactly Gobbledygook especially in Engineering or Chemical publications!

However, having worked in Tech/Financial PR for 5 years I'd say you've hit on a good point.

From another perspective each industry keeps it's exclusivity by creating barriers to readers. Editorial staff do little to disuade PR professionals either. Thus the onus is on the dysfunction of B2B journalism is not only with the PR professionals!