Do You Have Marketing Mouth?

When I was a little boy and said naughty words, my Great-Grandmother would always quip: “You have in your mouth what I would not hold in my hands.” In the professional world, decades later, her words keep echoing in my mind as I hear people talking about our profession because, frankly, Marketing sounds awful.

We “funnel” customers to a “conversion” as though they are herd animals being forced into a cult. We talk about making our products “addictive,” our websites “sticky,” and our messages, “viral,” yet I doubt many of us would want a substance with those descriptors on our fingers, let alone in our mouths.

The pros take it even further. From George Lois' comment that, “effective advertising is like poison gas;” to Jonah Berger's book, Contagious; or Gary Vaynerchuk's Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook; the metaphor of Marketing language is one from which the audience should flee before being asphyxiated, infected, or punched in the face.

Don't misunderstand—I am not advocating for further sterilization of our language or the introduction of more meaningless, corporate buzzwords, nor am I attacking the experts I listed above. Those names came to mind as they are among my favorites and their books are on the shelf next to my desk.

However, maybe we should be asking ourselves what this language is doing to both perceptions of our craft and its effectiveness. Visual design describes color in psychologically positive terms: confident, powerful, trustworthy, etc. I can't imagine a group of graphic designers wanting a logo to look more “pus-like.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah...isn't this just more PC namby-pambyism? We all know what we mean, right? Yes, we may, but the meanings we hold in common might not be what we consciously intend. For instance, look at the classic priming tests by John Bargh. In these, he and others, created various word scrambles out of which subjects needed to make grammatical sentences. In one, he included words like “Florida, old, forgetful, wrinkle, etc.” This resulted in subjects leaving the test room more slowly, bent-over, and acting older than when they came in. Other examples show how words can subconsciously make us more or less patient, perform better or worse on tests, and even feel more or less lonely in the world.

In this last instance, Stephanie and John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago tested the effect of words on lonely people by creating a modification of the classic Stroop Test. Participants were asked to look at various words on a computer screen and to indicate, as quickly as possible, what color they were displayed in. Since participants are asked to focus not on the word itself but on its color, the participant's reaction to word’s actual meaning becomes subconscious and automatic. 

Psycholinguistics, Neurocinematics, Neurolinguistic Programming, and various other schools of thought tend to concur that words can subconsciously cause our minds to “click together” and guide our reactions, regardless of our conscious intent.

Do a quick Internet search using the phrase “why people hate marketing,” and you'll get about 23 million results. Run a search on “why marketers hate marketing” and you'll get one. This appears in a subheading of a blog by Kritiadlakha. The author reasons that both people and marketers hate marketing because it feels “shady” and “unnatural.”

I'll take it one step further: marketing isn't trusted or liked because its own creators describe it in terms of disease, threat, and domination.

But does it matter as long as we hide these terms away from the public and keep them sequestered in our studios and meeting rooms? Imagine a new restaurant opens near your office. Imagine that the menu looks excellent, the décor is inviting, and the scents coming from the kitchen make your mouth water.

Then imagine that you peek into the kitchen and see the chef pick his nose, then stick his finger in a sauce to taste it not once, but three times! How's your appetite now?

When pitching my concepts, I've started choosing my words with more care. I imagine my Great-Grandmother and ask myself: do I want this in my hand? Does this word sound like something I want in my mouth? I should mention that Great-Grandmother lived most of her life on a farm so she had clear ideas about what she wanted on the bottom of her shoe, let alone anywhere else.

What if my websites were “enticing,” and my customer relationships were “passionate” or even “titillating?” I could end up making Great-Grandmother blush.