If You Have To Call Yourself Innovative, You're Probably Not

It happens all the time. A word reaches a tipping point in the collective vocabulary, and suddenly everyone's saying it. It's the definition of "buzzword", a term that's doomed to dilution.

Remember when "awesome" meant "breathtaking," "extremely impressive," or "awe-inspiring"? I do. I also now hear it 100x a day as filler and acknowledgement.

"I'm gonna work on some email."

"Awesome."

No, actually. My breath is still in my lungs. My heart rate is hovering at... yep, normal.

We accept our dictionary loss without thinking much about it. Life moves on. As a superlative, awesome is done for. Society adapts. If you need to convey the original meaning, you just have to find an even better word, or replace the buzzword with its definition.

"SpaceX just launched a rocket into space, then landed the rocket on its feet."

"Great Caesar's ghost!"

(Or something like that.)

In business, this process often happens when laggard companies want to catch up to competitors through marketing. A thought leader or top company will coin a term, start espousing a certain value, or will be praised a certain way by customers or academics or press. Other companies start to parrot. Suddenly, everyone in the business world is using the word, and the compliment is diluted. (Ex: Corporate "synergy" used to mean cooperation that led to outcomes greater than the sum of their parts. In 1990, Stephen Covey touted synergy's virtue in business, and suddenly every company claimed it, until it essentially rhymed with "success" but really meant, "fuzzy metric to make up for lack of real results." Now people roll their eyes when you say it.)

Definitions are not cheapened merely because of a word's popularity. But a word's popularity makes it more likely to be co-opted by those who either don't truly understand the word or want to sound cool. In other words, great business terms are easily ruined by marketers.

This is happening right now with the word, "innovation."

On Tuesday, Dennis Berman of the Wall Street Journal asked, "Is a Peanut Butter Pop-Tart an Innovation?" He detailed how nearly half of the S&P 500 used the word "innovation" in their Q3 conference calls, how Red Robin describes its hamburger buns as "innovative", and Kellogg proudly touts the "innovation" of putting peanut butter in pastries.

The answer to his question is, of course, no. "Innovation" has been co-opted just like "synergy" and "dynamic" and a hundred other terms. These folks conflate "innovate", which means "to re-imagine" and "re-create," with simply the word, "change."

Every company wants to be innovative. Of course. We all want to be pack leaders, have everyone else ripping off our buzzwords (which, side note, happened to my company recently when a competitor changed their marketing copy to mimic ours exactly—imitation is flattery!). And in the sea of products we may want to buy and companies we may want to do business with, how do we cut through the BS and know who really is pushing the future's boundaries and not following behind?

Whatever your definition of the term, here's my barometer for how to spot the innovators: they're not the ones calling themselves innovative.

Steve Jobs didn't have to say it. He just had to hold up an iPhone.

If you go around telling people you're humble, the opposite is true. "Humble" is a descriptor that's bestowed not seized. The same is true with "innovation."

The best marketing, in other words, is a great product. Innovative companies first re-create and re-imagine and disrupt, and then let others pile on the adjectives. Not the other way around. (In the case of my company, the only way we'll win is by having a product that people talk about, not by tooting our own horn or worrying about copycats. It's something we have to remind ourselves often.)

Someone from a major media company in New York recently told me that they had just launched an "innovation task force," to help them seize the future. He said that the fact that they need a group with the name "innovation" means it's not going to work.

I tend to agree.

What do you think?

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Shane Snow is Chief Creative Officer of Contently. He writes about media and technology for Wired, Fast Company, Ad Age, and more, and tweets at @shanesnow.

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Is innovation the new buzzword? Join the discussion with:

• Bruce Kasanoff – 'Innovation' Has Become a Useless Word
• Gijs van Wulfen – Why Companies That Can't Innovate Keep Talking about Innovation.