The BS Masquerade

This week, some of us in B2B feel the need to write in a foreign language - Marketing.

I am reviewing some copy for a client; it is not (for a change) written by AI, although it’s not really written by a person either. It’s written by a person who is trying to be something else.

The something else is a masquerade of business speak, industry jargon, and filler mealy words. Speak to them; they are clear, articulate, and jovial. Hand them a keyboard and a brief to write for the business, and their language transforms into something almost unintelligible.

I have seen this a lot in my career, especially with inexperienced writers; there seems to be a belief that they need to write in another language that is not native to them - marketing.

My chum Robert Rose wrote about this recently (and, shameless horn toot, chatted with me about it on my podcast), saying, “Marketing jargon is just camouflage for missing knowledge. Plain-spoken language better demonstrates your industry and business expertise”.

Unlike this weekly half-arsed shot from the hip, Robert backs his opinion with data, referring to research from Columbia University. Following the analysis of 64,000 dissertation titles, one of the research authors, Adam Galinsky, observed that “We use jargon when we’re feeling insecure.”

We think this bullshit makes us sound smart, and if you don’t know the acronyms sprinkled throughout, that’s on you, the reader; go Google it.

We’ve all felt that uncomfortable void of the blank page and the feeling that we need to write to a word count. The bloated business bullshit gives us confidence and fills the page.

Why tell us that your solution simply worked when you can let fly the word diarrhea and say that it was a paradigm-shifting, industry-leading transformation of the underlying operating model? It’s like expanding BS foam.

It reminds me of the famous quote, normally attributed to Mark Twain: “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”.

Which, it transpires, rather appropriately for a post about masquerading as something else, was actually from a chap called Blaise Pascal's “Lettres Provinciales”.

I’ve digressed; the point is that we now find it easier to be verbose than to speak plainly and write tightly.

No, not the clipped, short sentences of robots, which seem to be the fashion in LinkedIn posts today, but real, human ideas expressed in paragraphs that confidently and plainly get to the bloody point.