Cutting Through Marketing Speak and Fluff

When I read the post "Yahoo! vagues up leadership reorganization PR with cutting edge gobbledygook" over at WebInkNow I had to chuckle. This type of "marketing speak" always makes me facepalm. Do the people writing this stuff really believe they are being effective communicators or are their hands so tied that they can only turn out something so vague as to not be help accountable or be able to be pinned down to anything specific all?

Having worked in marketing and public relations I can understand how phrases that "sound good" but essentially mean nothing in the end can be tempting. Often you are writing press releases with very un-solid information. I worked in video games and if there is one thing I learned is that people will hold you to every concrete detail (such as a release date or published feature) down to the "t".

If you don't deliver each and every exact detail you give they are bound to hound you until you die. That said, I think there is a fine line that can be drawn where you give enough relevant information as to get the idea you need to across while leaving you enough "wiggle room" to allow for changes and/or delays etc.

I became very expert at using phrases such as "seems" and "appears to" and "all signs point to". These phrases give the illusion of certainty while leaving you a much needed "out" if not everything goes according to plan.

An example might be if there was a bug in a game and the developers told me that the bug was fixed in the new patch. If I was writing the patch notes (notes that goes out with game patches explaining changes/bug fixes/etc.) I would say "The bug that was making helmets sit on character's heads sideways appears to be fixed." rather than "The bug that was making helmets sit on character's heads sideways is fixed." While it may seem like a small thing in the end it makes a big difference if, for example, the bog really wasn't fixed but still showed up.

I'm getting of a bit of a tangent. What I really wanted to do in this post was quote the Yahoo press release and then "boil it down" to see what (if anything) is is actually saying. Here is an excerpt from the recent Yahoo press release with the amazingly original title "Yahoo! Announces Leadership Reorganization".

Roy Bostock, Chairman of the Yahoo! Board, said, "The Board sees enormous growth opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and our primary objective is to leverage the Company's leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these opportunities. We have talented teams and tremendous resources behind them and intend to return the Company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation. We are committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo! on a trajectory for growth and innovation and deliver value to shareholders."

Whaaaat? It reads like a joke paragraph that some sort of "marketing speak" auto-generating machine would spit out. Now lets take this paragraph and cut out all the cliche, overused, and/or worthless "fluff" we can.

Roy Bostock, Chairman of the Yahoo! Board, said, "The Board sees enormous growth opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and our primary objective is to leverage the Company's leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these opportunities. We have talented teams and tremendous resources behind them and intend to return the Company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation. We are committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo! on a trajectory for growth and innovation and deliver value to shareholders."

OK. So lets see what we come up with without all the "empty calories".

Roy Bostock, Chairman of the Yahoo! Board, said, "our objective ...is to leverage...the Company's leadership and current business assets and platforms... to return the Company to...growth.... We are...exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will...deliver value to shareholders."

While this is a start some of the marketing speak is so embedded in the way these people talk that to take it out will make it difficult to understand what they are talking about.

Here is my final distillation of the edited paragraph above:

Roy Bostock, Chairman of the Yahoo! Board, said, "[we want to] ...[use]...the Company's [employees] and [assets]... to return the Company to...growth.... We are...[trying to figure out] [things] that will...deliver value to shareholders."

From this:

Roy Bostock, Chairman of the Yahoo! Board, said, "The Board sees enormous growth opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and our primary objective is to leverage the Company's leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these opportunities. We have talented teams and tremendous resources behind them and intend to return the Company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation. We are committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo! on a trajectory for growth and innovation and deliver value to shareholders."

 To this:

"We want to use the Company's employees and assets to return the Company to growth. We are trying to figure out things that will deliver value to shareholders.

That is quite a bit of "fluff". One thing I realized while evaluating this is that they use the phrase "deliver value to shareholders". Can anyone out there tell me exactly what is means to "deliver value"? Seems like a very loose term that can be interpreted many different ways.

Does "deliver value" mean increasing the value of the stock? Increasing the value of the company assets? Delivering dividends? Who knows. And that is the real danger of "marketing speak" it gives the illusion of concrete details without delivering on anything that you can actually hold them accountable for.

If you ever end up writing a press release like the one excerpted above stop for one second and think. "Am I delivering any actual information? If not why not? Are there people in the company stopping me from giving any "real" information and if so why? What may they have to hide?