Hey, have you had enough of every other guru telling you how to growth-hack and synergize your way into actionable, scalable and authentic marketing process?
If that sentence triggered your cringe reflex, then this new bracket from LinkedIn is for you. Getting into the spirit of the NCAA 'March Madness' basketball tournament, LinkedIn has launched its inaugural 'Marketing Madness: Buzzword Beaters' bracket, which pits the most overused industry buzzwords against each other in a fight for ultimate buzz term supremacy.
As you can see, they're all here - 'guru', 'omni-channel', 'disruption' - all of those terms you hear or read every day, which have started to lose all sense and meaning the more they've been repeated. There's also my personal favorite 'growth hacks'. Just, nope.
The key difference with the 'Marketing Madness' bracket is that winning is not an ideal goal here. In LinkedIn's full post on the match-ups, they go through each buzzword battle in order to come out with a winner.
Among the highlights:
- Disruption (1) over Cloud-based (8). We hear about how almost everything technology-related is “in the cloud” these days, but it’s at least more descriptive than “disruption” which has come to mean almost nothing.
- Value-add (5) over Scalable (4). Scalable is a meaningful adjective, but one that’s been applied too often. (Are those cans of soda in the breakroom fridge scalable for the entire team?) But value-add takes the cake when it comes to nice-sounding yet empty lingo.
- Authentic (4) over Bandwidth (5). The adjective “authentic” has been raised into a golden ideal, as if the idea of acting like ourselves is novel. Admittedly, we might only be peeved by bandwidth because colleagues keep telling us they don’t have enough of it for us.
You can read the full match-up by match-up rundown, along with the ultimate victor, here, but the real winner here is clarity, with the tournament itself serving as a reminder of the annoying overuse of such terms.
There is a place for many of these, a lot of these references do make sense and should be used in your descriptions. But they also get incorrectly used often, mostly for show, with wannabe's parroting the latest colorful desrcriptors ad-naseum till they become eye-roll triggering, hollow reference points which do little more than fill the gaps.
Keep in mind that people have heard each of these over and over, and are likely to tune out more and more every time you churn them out.
Or, just ignore it and go on your merry smarketing way. Up to you.