Enterprise Tech Jargon Fight
For most of my career, I’ve played a part of introducing new technologies and new technology brands to large companies, and of course the lingo for such an organization is “enterprise”. Whether it was the rise of cloud computing, the mainstreaming of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence or automation—my teams and I had been in the trenches of rolling out new vocabularies to understand the Next Great Thing™ that will transform business as we know it.
This involved embedding my strategists, writers, designers and account leads with our clients’ marketing and engineering leads to find ways to translate the often mind-numbingly complex products into a plain-spoken, easily digestible and compelling narrative that’s relevant to the types of challenges business leaders are facing. Human beings that have no more interest in being bored than you or I, however too often the ways products and services are marketed in this space do just that.
Why? Agencies as well as their clients on the corporate marketing teams get scared. It’s fight, flight or surrender.
Fight
Be brave. Engage in the hand-to-hand combat of study. Unleash your inner MMA champion and grapple your way through some expert podcasts. Master the Judo of using your weakness as a strength by being brave enough to admit what you don’t know, ask the seemingly dumb questions. It seems like a foreign language because it very well may be exactly that to you. No one would expect for you to create compelling ads in Portuguese if you don’t know how to read or speak it. It’s the same thing if you’re needing to create a brand or marketing campaign for a Web3, API, RPA, FinTech or serverless consulting companies. In order to thrive in designing and writing persuasive experiences for buyers in that, or any other vertical, they need to be moved emotionally, which requires 1) enough mastery of the topic for your content to be received as relevant, 2) be addressing a real challenge they are having in their jobs, and 3) engage with with their wants and needs as a human being.
Flight
Run away! Run away from the scary “threat” of new words and technology principles. Fleeing the intellectual challenge and falling back to the thinnest of marketing clichés, jargon, corny headlines, hyper-familiar stock images, and safe design tropes that result in brand camouflage. Seemingly, you’ve done no harm, but that’s a lie. The content is barely relevant. The target audience doesn’t take the company seriously. And worst of all, the brand is forgettable.
Surrender
You lie down and completely abandon advocating for a real person. This is where the worst of business to business (B2B) technology ends up, as the inertia of mediocrity that happens lulls marketers into a trance where they stop communicating to human beings and they communicate to businesses. Despite the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are people, that doesn’t apply in our universe. You’ll see more and more talk of people shifting the B2B label to Business to Human, as a means of attempting to avoid work that simply regurgitates tech specs (speeds and feeds). BMW doesn’t introduce a product with horsepower, torque and acceleration metrics. That embodies the surrender mindset. It doesn’t even try to connect with the excitement that drives a prospective buyer. When they led with BMW as “The Ultimate Driving Machine”, their adrenalyn glands get ready to surge.
Discerning Between the Three
We may want to fight all of the time, but sadly—due to time, budget or the willingness of a client—we get forced into picking our battles. The easiest way to discern which of these three categories a brand effort has fallen into is a buzzword to non-buzzword ratio. The higher the proportion of buzzwords in headlines or copy versus the way people actually talk to each other, the higher the likelihood you’re looking at work from a team that has given up or ran away.
Granted, most—but not all—of the industry buzzwords have legitimate meaning, which brings us back to knowing audiences and technologies well enough to use the vocabulary around them responsibly. With that in mind, don’t forget that overuse can be just as bad as misuse, whether it’s labeling services that are not cloud as cloud or “AI-washing” a technology that isn’t artificial intelligence. When such abuse occurs, a term that has a powerful meaning today, becomes drained of its impact and relevance tomorrow—making our jobs even more difficult.
Here’s a handy compilation of the most commonly used words. If you’re fully trapped into surrender mode, you can grab a handful of these words and sound like you know what you’re talking about when chatting with others who have surrendered. (They are more common than you might think). Good luck and fight, fight, fight:
| – As a Service | – Next-generation |
| – Agility | – Ops |
| – Automation | – Outcomes |
| – AI | – Partner |
| – Critical | – Platform |
| – Cyber | – Reinvent |
| – Data | – Resilient |
| – Digital | – Revolution |
| – Edge | – Robust |
| – Engineering | – Scale |
| – Enterprise | – Secure |
| – Future | – Smart |
| – Future-proof | – Solutions |
| – Holistic | – Strategy |
| – Hybrid | – Success |
| – Intelligent | – Synergy |
| – Innovation | – Technology |
| – Insight | – Transformation |
| – Integrated | – Virtual |
| – Leading | – Zero-trust |
| – Modern |