I’ve been working in the IT sector for more years than I care to remember, and it’s never been short of jargon.

In fact, I have to confess that like most marketers, I love the buzz words! In this article in BBN Times we discovered about the top 5 tech buzz words for 2018 – Quantum Computing, Dark Data, Microservices, Digital Detox, and Actionable Analytics.

Just recently however, I’ve noticed it’s stepped up a gear. With the speed of innovation and digital transformation becoming a reality for pretty much every business, the industry has gone into overdrive.

Do we need to put a health warning on these buzz words? Probably.

The layers of change which organisations are now going through, and the demand that this has placed on vendors and systems integrators to respond with the very latest services and solutions, has brought about a whole new language. Virtualisation, SD-WAN, agile cloud, hyper converged infrastructure, function as a service, I could go on forever. What does it actually all mean?

Every business I speak to is after the same thing – they want to be able to show their end-customers that they can help them meet their needs and achieve their goals better than anyone else. So why don’t they just say that? It’s really tempting to pop in a plethora of buzz words but they don’t help the customer clearly understand the value they can get from all this cool tech and innovation.

The most effective marketing I have seen speaks directly to the customer in very plain English (not quite Yorkshire), telling them what value they will get from whatever service or solution is on offer. A customer doesn’t care about how powerful your containers are or the robustness of your APIs – they want to know how it will help them do what they want to do better, faster and / or for less money.

Stand out from the crowd by declining buzz word bingo. Keep it real. Keep it focused on the customer. Tell them what impact you can make on their business.

Join in the conversation. Let us know some of the best / worst buzz words you have heard recently, and we will share them on our Twitter feed @coterieMktg.

Helen Curtis
Founding Director