Streamline Training & Documentation: Touting English

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Touting English

Regardless of how one feels about calls for English to be declared the national language of the United States, I would hope we can all agree that favoring plain English, as opposed to buzzwords and convoluted mystifying syntax, is a worthy choice.

Recently, Paul Bennett, creative director of IDEO (which stands at #15 on the Boston Consulting Group's list of the World's 25 Most Innovative Companies), published a column at Business Week Online that makes the case for marketers to shed pretentious invented words (à la "marketecture," "contenterprise," and "brandology") and return to communicating in words that come out of good old vocabulary that normal people use.

Bennett suggests, "everyone knows that getting a brand right and marketing it cleverly is really hard. So maybe we don't all need to make it sound more complicated simply to justify what we do." He goes on to say:

The hardest thing that marketers and brand managers have to do right now is simplify. Marketing and branding need to get back to first principles — people, feelings, stories, and things. Tangible things. Not weird words.

It's Bennett's prescription for recovery that really caught my ear:

So try this. Buy a train ticket home for the weekend. Not your current house, but home-home, to your parents. Now sit them down at the kitchen table and, in 50 words or less, tell them what you do for a living, what product you make or sell (or if you're a consultant, what process or deliverable you sell), and what's good about it. Don't use weird words or anything with lots of syllables. Don't quit until they understand you. I told my mother once that I worked in Conceptual Marketing and I swear she thought I had joined a cult.

Remember what you said. Now go back to work, and apply this principle to your job. Simple stories, truths well told, no made-up nomenclature and gilded lilies. It's more clever to be simple, don't forget that.

I would add that those training and coaching people in the business world need to make it clear that reworking any communication that is turgid, into something lucid and listener- or reader-friendly is a high priority.

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Labels: Branding, Communication, Competencies

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