Why Our Customers Aren’t Listening to Us

We marketers are not talking to our clients in a candid, direct, and understandable way. Instead, in far too many cases the marketing in our industry can become so, well, grandiloquent that our communications confuse rather than clarify and alienate rather than disarm prospective clients. We’ve all seen it: Websites and brochures promising “synergies” via “new paradigms” by “leveraging” “capabilities” to “drive essential advantage” with “next-generation solutions” for our “multipolar world.” You get the point …

The Deeper Issues of Marketing-Speak

The problems with messages like this are deeper than we think. Here are some of the problems we’re causing with our language:

• Customers aren’t just confused—they’re offended. Clients think theyre being had—that marketing is trying to bowl them over with vagueness and ambiguity. It isn’t just that we’ve been unclear. Clients think we’ve been manipulative, and they think it’s disrespectful. In fact, in one instance it led a client to refer to a competitor’s marketing department as the “designated corporate liars.”
• Big prices + lack of specificity = frustration. We are selling complex, expensive products and services. Customers want us to solve their specific business problems, but often they don’t see what our messages have to do with them and the resolution of their business problems. They look at our messages and ask, “How does that solve my data integration problems? I’ve got a very discrete issue that needs to be addressed, and yet you’re talking in this hyperbolic language. You’re selling a blender as a ‘produce integration apparatus,’ and that doesn’t build trust.”
• The sin of inclusion. We try to satisfy everyone in all our different markets, verticals, and geographies. But by doing so, we satisfy no one. Our marketing becomes diluted and so inclusive that it no longer means anything. These issues combine to create the Thesaurus Effect, where marketers reach for big words to hide the fact that they don’t have anything specific to say in the first place. We can’t be specific because if we are, it could be contradictory across some of our various markets. And so our message is further diluted out of fear that we not offend anyone or leave anyone out.
• All marketing-speak sounds the same. The very language that we think differentiates us from our competitors—our value propositions—makes us all sound the same to customers. At Cognizant, we went through a rebranding exercise that caused us to look at each of our primary competitors and compare all their value propositions (something that our clients do all the time). But if you remove the logos and fancy type fonts, they are all indistinguishable. It’s as if the marketing teams for all the firms in this industry were given the same 12 words (think of those word magnet games on refrigerators) and then were given the task of jumbling them together.
• Marketing-speak makes the purchasing decision more difficult. Clients can’t compare what they can’t understand. At Cognizant, we look at our sales pipeline on a very active basis, and it turns out that we are running into the same six competitors with great consistency because our industry has become very consolidated. Our clients are coming back to us and are saying, “It’s really tough at the initial phase to understand what really distinguishes you guys”—meaning “you guys” collectively as an industry. We are making the purchasing decision more difficult for them.

Want to learn how to make your marketing speak more clearly? ITSMA program clients will receive a Viewpoint by Malcolm Frank later this month explaining how.

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ITSMA specializes in helping companies market and sell services and solutions more effectively. We work with the world's leading technology, communications, and professional services providers to generate increased demand, strengthen customer relationships, and improve brand differentiation. ITSMA annual program clients include business leaders such as AT&T, Cisco, Deloitte, EMC, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and Tata Consultancy Services, among others. Our comprehensive research, consulting, and training on topics including ITSMA Account-Based Marketing℠, Brand Positioning, and Solutions Development provide the insight and experience companies need to improve business results. ITSMA is based near Boston, and has offices in London and Tokyo. Learn more at www.itsma.com.