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Posted on September 3rd, 2008 by Mike Jennings

Marketing babble: will it ever stop?

The worst offender

PC Pro inboxes see their fair share of press releases that are full of rubbish about the ‘user experience’ and providing customers ’solutions’ to problems that really don’t exist.

It seems to have reached a new zenith this week: in a presentation from a major IT company – regarding a relatively sedate new offering  – I saw some of the worst examples of marketing-speak that have ever darkened my inbox.

It was relentless: first, I was being told that the said product will provide an ‘exceptional HD experience’. Call me naive, but all of the HD footage that I’ve already seen has been pretty exceptional when it’s been on hardware that can handle it – and that could come from any one of several businesses. The company then promised that they would be ‘executing on [their] strategy’ with the new products. Call me naive, again, but a company that doesn’t execute its strategy will soon be calling in the administrators and closing its doors for good.

It’s evidently a quiet product, too – although the company in question just can’t say so in those simple terms. Instead, there’s the mystical-sounding ’sensitive acoustics’ so that our poor, technology-afflicted eardrums will cope.

No, it doesn\'t stop.

The hyperbole continued: ‘momentum’ was mentioned more than once, and ‘competitive stack-ups’ sounds like a fantastic idea for a pancake eating competition, but less so for a new piece of computer hardware. And then there’s the ‘leading edge’ of the market, ‘mainstream positioning’ and ‘unprecedented performance’. There wasn’t the chance to have just passive cooling, either – instead, we’ll be offered a ‘passively cooled solution’ when the time comes for us to embrace ‘price-performance leadership’.

None of this was my favourite piece of marketing babble, though. The company will be, apparently, aiming to ‘leverage the technology to win in the mainstream space’.

I’m sorry, but that barely means anything and it leaves me sleepy and disinterested rather than enthused about the new products coming out way. There’s nothing wrong with saying that the company in question wants people to buy its new mainstream products. It certainly makes a lot more sense and will probably attract a lot more people. Instead, we get this sort of thing – probably dreamt up by a boardroom full of suits who think that they sound suitably executive and professional – with little regard for what the most important people here, the customers, want to hear about new, exciting hardware.

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Posted in: Random, Rant

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