#Corporate lingo free#

As writer Rebecca Gowers (great-granddaughter of the famed linguist Ernest Gowers) told the BBC, jargon started out as a positive word, as it denoted “lovely, chirping birdsong.” But once the word started being applied to human communication, things changed.īy the 17th century, jargon had taken on two distinct definitions: Like the words twitter and chatter, the word jargon dates back to the Middle Ages and originally referred to a sound that birds made. In other words, I’m going to explain where business jargon comes from and why people use it.įirst, let’s take a moment to understand what jargon actually is. My key objective with this short dissertation is to create some transparency around the origins of the obfuscatory lexicon associated with specific industries and enterprises, and to then elucidate the myriad of hypotheses as to why such lexicon is leveraged in these contexts.

*All ‘tea’ comes from the Camellia Sinensis plant which contains caffeine.Or, “Why do business-people talk like that?” But in the SEO game, they can quickly become your enemy. Just make sure your branding police understand that guidelines are just that-guidelines. Put those terms in your metatags and descriptions.Īs for your brand guidelines, keep them updated with your preferred terminology. Add reviews that customers have submitted that use the highly-searched terms. Write another blog that compares your competitors’ herbal tea against your superior herbal infusion creations. Write a blog about the different phraseology and why it matters (and be sure to use one of the popular keywords in the URL). They don’t have to be everywhere-they just need to be peppered around enough to be found by the Google machine. In this case, it would be “caffeine-free tea” or “herbal tea”.Įven though those phrases are like fingernails on a chalkboard to you, you’ll need to find a way to get them onto your website. Not because Google is a jerk, but because they’re serving up content that includes the words your prospects are searching for.

The problem with this thinking is that you’ve got no chance in coming up anywhere near the top of Google’s search results. And you insist on using that exact terminology in all your marketing materials because you know there’s no such thing as naturally-occurring caffeine-free tea* and you’re bound to educate everyone as such. Let’s say you make dried herbal infusion products. The thing they don’t always remember is that SEO only works if you’re creating content that includes words your prospects are actually searching for-not the ones you’ve designated as your corporate lingo because someone thought they sounded sexier than the mainstream ones.

#Corporate lingo free#

Marketers know this: if you want to get found online, SEO is your cheapest option (because it’s free of media fees). Like all branding components, consistent nomenclature helps create consistency in the marketplace and among employees, so everyone is speaking the same language. Specifically, when it comes to corporate lingo and SEO.Ĭorporate lingo used to describe a company’s products and services is typically part of a company’s brand guidelines, which also includes rules around logos, graphics, photography, and voice. That’s why we have to occasionally remind our corporate marketing department friends of the importance of this balance. As an agency who uses someone else’s money to play that game, we wouldn’t even begin to create marketing art without science. When our team creates marketing art (something unique and meaningful for an audience) from which that audience gets joy (or value, in the case of marketing), I know I’ve done my job.īut without science-in the form of audience research and data analysis-the art of creating something meaningful is a crapshoot.

I like marketing because it’s a delightful combination of art and science.