More words for buzzword bingo
According to this Marketing Week article, four more business words will be hitting our boardrooms soon. And they’ve caused such a stir, the likes of The Times and the Guardian have been covering them too.
In the line-up we’ve got: solomo (no, not a robot), plussification (which you have to read twice to check it’s not a naughty word), likeonomics (which is almost exactly what you think it is) and tradigital (a disgusting amalgamation of traditional and digital).
The problem with three out of the latest four to hit our boardroom-buzzword-bingo cards is that they’re unnecessary labels. They’re names for processes and ideas that we’ve always had, and never needed to name before.
Like ‘likeonomics’. In a nutshell, it means: the more people that like your brand, the more people will buy from you. But didn’t we always know that?
‘Tradigital’ marketing. That means using traditional marketing principles in digital spaces. Although it’s quite fun to say, it’s something that marketing companies should be doing already.
And ‘plussification’ has come from Google+. It’s about how many people have clicked ‘+1’ next to webpages – recommending them. The higher a website’s ‘plussification’, the more people will go on it. You know, a lot like how the more places that link to your website, the more people will get to it. That thing people have known and done for ages.
The fourth one is a bit trickier, but equally silly.
‘Solomo’ is a combination of ‘social’, ‘local’ and ‘mobile’. It’s about sending people deals based on where they are at the moment (since half the British population have smartphones, companies can tell where half the population are at any one time). But you have to be careful; readers can become ‘deal fatigued’. That’s right, deal fatigued.
The problem all four of these words have in common is that they need explaining. And everyone will have a slightly different understanding of them. So while everyone’s nodding at the presenter in the boardroom talking about raising the company’s likeonomics through solomo tradigital marketing, and getting a higher plussification average (without, of course, causing deal fatigue), no-one really has the foggiest what they’re on about.
Has anyone shouted ‘bingo’ yet?
