STAY HUMAN - Escaping from Buzzword Dependency Syndrome

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.

This is the second post in our campaign exploring the seven signs you might be about to become a B2B Zombie. We’ll cover the symptoms, the cure, and simple steps to success. And read to the end for a useful reading list (we know from our stats you all love a reading list).

1 - How to avoid Generic Thought Leadership Disease
2 - Escaping from Buzzword Dependency Syndrome (that’s this post!)
3 - Overcoming Algorithmic Addiction
4 - Curing your Corporate Voice Affliction
5 - Moving away from Template Dependence Disorder
6 - Breaking out of Risk Aversion Paralysis
7 - How to cure Engagement Entropy Rot

Thank you to everyone who has shared our campaign and posts on LinkedIn. If you’d like us to help you de-zombify your thought leadership content - whether that’s podcasts, video, editorial, or reports, hit reply and we’ll organise a call.

1 - What are the symptoms?

We all hate buzzwords, but we all use them. Do any of these symptoms look familiar to you?

• Excessive use of terms like "synergy," "leverage," "ecosystem," and "paradigm shift"

• Sentences that contain more than three acronyms

• Using "solutions" instead of actual product names

Here’s a real world example we found to illustrate the problem:

"Our cutting-edge solutions leverage AI-powered synergies to drive digital transformation across your enterprise ecosystem."

You might be able to decipher the buzzwords to work out what it means, but why do we use words like this so often in our B2B marketing?

The reality is, buzzwords are not about conveying ideas, but about social signalling. Buzzwords aren’t efficient shortcuts to explaining a complex issue - they are signifiers to other members of your tribe. They’re not communicating meaning, but belonging.

This creates two problems. Firstly, buzzwords exclude people who are not from your sector. When I first started working at the BBC in the early 2000s, I kept hearing people use the phrase ‘TX'. I assumed it was an abbreviation for something, but it took me far too long to work out that it just meant the time in the schedule when a programme was broadcast. As no-one explained it, I was too embarrassed to admit I didn’t know what the phrase meant. Buzzwords make it harder for people outside your sector to understand, question, and therefore improve, the projects you’re discussing.

Secondly, because buzzwords are shared across a sector, they don’t make you stand out. They are the passwords that let you into the club, but if everyone is using them, nothing you say is memorable or distinctive. Imagine a potential client discussing who to include in their next tender process - would buzzword filled marketing help them remember you? Or would you just sound like everyone else?

2 - Take The Test

At Storythings, we love learning a new language every time we start working with a client, and this often means learning their industry’s buzzwords. But once we’ve done this, we make a list of them so we can avoid using them in our work for the new client. Here’s a test from our campaign listing common buzzwords - how many do you regularly use?

3 - Here’s the cure

The good news is, curing Buzzword Dependency Syndrome is easy. Start by asking your colleagues for a list of the buzzwords they find most annoying, and make a rule to never use them again. Then, collect a dozen or so examples from your peers and competitors, and identify the words that EVERYONE uses. And stop using them as well.

Instead of buzzwords, try to create images with your language that your audience will remember. For example, when we were writing our 2023 Scroll Stoppers report on changing audience attention in 2023, we wanted to avoid a lot of cliched language about audiences and media.

One of our insights was about how hybrid workers were using the same media platforms for work and leisure. In a meeting I joked this was like ‘Mullet Media’, as mullet hairstyles are described as ‘business at the front, party at the back’. I actually hated the phrase, but it stuck, and the team kept using it, until it ended up being the title of one the seven sections in the report.

4 - Our simple steps to success

If you want to avoid Buzzword Dependency Syndrome, here’s a couple of things you can do that won’t cost a lot of time or money:

• Be a Buzzword Curator - when you come across words that you know are buzzwords in your sector, start a list of them, and share them with your team so you never use them in your B2B marketing again.

• Friends don’t let friends use buzzwords - ask a friend to read or listen to your stories, and to tell you the words they think are just buzzwords, or that they don’t understand. Sometimes we need someone with an outside perspective to see what is a good story, and what is a buzzword cliche.

• Be the dumbest person in the room - people are less likely to challenge buzzwords if they are new or have low status in a meeting. If you’re more experienced, take on the role of the ‘newbie’, and everytime someone uses a buzzword, ask them to explain what they mean by it. You’ll be helping them stop their reliance on buzzwords, and you’ll also help everyone understand what is going on.

4 - Go Deeper

Why Corporate Jargon is Bad for Business - great article from the NeuroLeadership Institute about how buzzwords not only make you harder to understand, they also make you appear less trustworthy.

Circling Back on Corporate Speak: The History and Impact of Business Jargon - this brilliant short history of buzzwords from Rivier University explains how post-war business theories, reacting to a new era of multinational conglomerates, developed early buzzwords like ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘low-hanging fruit’.

If We All Hate Business Jargon, Why Do We Keep Using It? - this Harvard Business Review article has a couple of great examples of how to stop Buzzword Dependency Syndrome, including a famous example from Greg Dyke at the BBC. I was working in senior management at the BBC at the time, and can vouch for how it did give people permission to challenge lazy buzzwords. But alas, after a while, the buzzwords came back with a vengeance…

We hope you’ve found this this valuable - if you have, we’d love to hear from you! Please reply to this email to get in touch, or share the article on Linkedin tagging Storythings.

Matt