On this episode of The Suite Spot, a fireside chat about all topics IT and OT, hosts Howard Holton, Carlos Vargas and Paul Lewis dive into the “marketing magic decoder ring.”
That’s a fancy way to say that marketing lingo, particularly during a time when the way companies are buying and operating, should be broken down into more meaningful statements and ideas that organizations can act upon and measure, not be chock-full of platitudes and meaningless buzzwords.
“We’ve had lots of interesting conversations about creativity over the last several months,” Lewis said. “Sometimes, we fall into the trap of what we’ll refer to as ‘marketing speak.’ … I think it would be wise to double-click on some of those terms and talk about what we really mean.”
For example, consider “digital transformation,” “IT agility,” “efficiency” and “cost savings” – do those words really tell the complete story? Lewis and Holton contend that they do not.
“I even had an argument with a vendor one time, because they kept using ‘digital transformation,’” Holton said. “It really felt like ‘The Princess Bride’ – I don’t think that means what you think that means. … I don’t need it to mean to you what it means to me, but I do need to understand, every time you use a term, what it means to you.”
That particular vendor’s marketing manager struggled to encapsulate the meaning of “digital transformation” in two sentences or less, highlighting a common issue surrounding such language. If you can’t explain it, how can you sell it?
Holton and Lewis said the most common phrases are “reduce costs,” “reduce risk” and “increase revenue,” and they spent this episode of The Suite Spot pulling back the curtain on those terms and more in an effort to demystify marketing lingo with their trusty “decoder ring.”
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