The work environment has changed immeasurably during my career. In my first market research job as a graduate we created slides of results, and printed them out onto acetates, which then had to dry, before being slotted into holding frames. Any changes and you had to do that slide again. Printers took 5 minutes to produce a single slide.

Tools to ‘enhance productivity’ are rife. We can integrate reporting across multiple platforms. We can create ‘decks’ with far more flexibility and creativity than before. We obsess about animation and builds, about ‘the message’. Death by Powerpoint and Analysis Paralysis are phrases born in the last generation.

But these tools often inhibit and distract us from more rewarding, direct, and meaningful interactions. Why not talk to each other, face-to-face, rather than hiding behind a presentation or an email. Powerpoint comes with built-in protocols and assumptions how charts should be laid out: titles and bullets, graphs and commentary. The Marketing profession has created its own language and terminology, at least partly because…

• marketers are innately aware and guilty that our ‘profession’ is largely Applied Common Sense, so we create ‘technical’ language to lend it more credibility (noone likes to admit this)
• as in other spheres, the jargon is a defensive mechanism to hinder or prevent ‘outsiders’ from realising that marketing is largely Applied Common Sense (see above)…

In marketing parlance, it’s a strategy to create barriers to entry in order to add value to our own core proposition and thereby add value. See what I did there?

Take (for example) two very common marketing strategies, and an alternative description…

Drive Penetration = get more people to buy some

Build AWP / FOP / Loyalty / Share of Requirement etc = Get some people to buy more

But by speaking in tongues, by overlapping objectives, strategies and plans, surrounding ourselves with TLAs, we get bogged down in our own process. Clusters and segements don’t buy brands and products, people do. And all these tools, applications and acronyms simply isolate marketers from the people they claim to want to understand.

As Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign famously realised, the election was about the economy. Well, marketing is about people. If we can get past the jargon, we can start talking as people, in human terms, about what people want and why they want it. Then we can start thinking about how we can give it to them, and make them feel better.