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Marketing Buzzword Bingo

Buzz words annoy me. When words become labels which people use without thinking, they become worthless. People give the appearance of buzzwords actually shaping their thinking. How sad can we get?

Here is an array of the most often used marketing buzzwords and their definition according to Dwyer.

Consumer oriented marketing – marketing

Targeting – marketing

Multi-level marketing – marketing

Viral marketing – people talking about us or our products

Email marketing – sending emails to people we barely know in the hope that one in a hundred might read it and take action

Search marketing – marketing

B2B marketing – marketing to a business

B2C marketing - marketing to a person

Demand creation – marketing (or it could be going out and buying our own products)

Integrated marketing – marketing, sales and fulfilment knowing what each other is doing; an unusual occurrence.

Market segmentation – who or what convinces these people to buy this stuff from this place

Relationship marketing – marketing using long lunches and attending sporting events to build trust through familiarity

Enterprise marketing – see B2B marketing

Customer alignment – marketing?

Customer centric – marketing?

Consumer initiated marketing – free marketing

Consumer generated media – free media

User generated content – free content

Value – perceived benefit ÷ perceived cost

Value adding – increasing perceived benefit or reducing perceived cost

Value proposition – sales pitch that inflates the perceived benefit and deflates the perceived cost

Key performance indicators – tens if not hundreds of unrelated measures I use to demonstrate that I know what my business is doing. They are often not a real indication of performance and rarely are key.

KPI- see key performance indicators

Metrics – see key performance indicators

Marketing dashboard – The KPIs that people look at and do nothing about each month

Low-hanging fruit – things we should already have done

Paradigm – how we do what we do now

Paradigm shifts – changing how we do what we do now

Accountability management – blame shifting

Get on the same page – agree with me or get out

Branding – logo, colours, font…..

Brand identity – what customers feel and think when they see my logo, colours, font…

Brand – what customers feel and think when they see my logo, colours, font…

Look and feel - appearance; logo, colours, font…

Pushing the envelope – a party game enjoyed by postal workers?

Reputation management – controlling information flow to that which I want known

Bounce rates – the proportion of people who got onto our site by mistake

Trend analysis – trend

Thinking outside the box – thinking

Brain dump – scatty thinking about what we do usually reserved for handing over to the person who is replacing us

Thunderbolt thinking – thinking (in a rainstorm?)

Lifelong value – guess at how much money we would make out of a fictitious customer who stays with us for life, however long that is.

Lifetime value – same guess

Out-sourcing – stuff we have given up doing because we thought it was too hard

In-sourcing – stuff we outsourced that we lost control over and had to do ourselves again to save costs

Win-win - compromise

Take it offline – talk about it later

At the end of the day – what is actually important

Calls to action – telling people what to do now

Redeployed people – people who have lost their job

De-layering - see redeployed people

Downsizing - see redeployed people

Cross-functional team – something to be created so that blame shifting is difficult – see accountability management

Decentralization – something to do to make the regions accountable – see accountability management; usually completed in a cycle with centralization.

Empowerment – see accountability management

Intrapreneur- one our people who always seems to be full of ideas that won’t fly in our organization

Stakeholders- people who have an interest in what we do, or dracula slayers

Heads-up – follows the practice of using a noun where a simple verb would have sufficed e.g. “give you a heads up” instead of “tell you”

Living our mission statement – if only I knew what that meant, I am sure I would

Up-skill – learn

Push back - disagree

Critically important – important, perhaps critical

Join the Forum: What (Semi-Ridiculous) Buzz Words Have You Heard?

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