Mad Ave and MBA Baloney a Problem for Consumers
June 29, 2010
Short honk: You know my view about the baloney that marketing and public relations types create. If you take a look at my summary of my lecture about real time search, you know that slapping the phrase “real time” on a search engine is about as meaningless as yip yapping about “social search”. I just want to capture the story “Technical Jargon ‘Confuses Shoppers’, says Which?” from the always-clear UK newspaper, The Telegraph. “Which” is a “consumer watchdog”. It is a consumer reports type of publication. For me, the loud bark in the write up was:
Information about megapixels, contrast rations, resolutions and refresh rates are baffling shoppers and not helping them to make informed purchasing decisions, warns Which?, the consumer watchdog. The group found that product labels on items such as televisions was not consistent across brands and often contained meaningless figures that could be misconstrued by shoppers.
I am more concerned with the why, not the fact that Mad Ave and MBA baloney makers confuse people. Heck, these folks confuse me, but I am addled and growing somewhat fatigued with the jargon of the world’s smartest people. Almost everyone I meet under the age of 40 is one of the world’s smartest people. Whatever happened to the good old segmentation of people by a yardstick other than ribbons awarded to everyone for T Ball participation? One high school class had so many A+ students, the graduation featured a play of these all-equal wonders.
Here’ my take:
- The people writing about products don’t know what the heck the products do, so engineers’ quips are recycled as Talmudic statements.
- The process for group approval almost guarantees a slow devolution to popular jargon. This helps me understand why one vendor’s statement becomes a feature on every competitors’ product check list. “Assisted navigation” and “real time search” are two examples.
- The financial pressure ensures that whoever is working on a project has too little time to work on one activity. Now attention deficit disorder plays a role as well. That’s why when I run meetings, we use facilities where phone reception sucks, Internet connections are lousy, and distractions are curtailed by the remoteness of the location. Even then, it takes effort to stick to an agenda and figure out a method appropriate for a specific problem.
Search and content processing vendors are suffering because of their marketing. The only groups that have more electrode burns on sensitive bits are content management vendors, outfits pitching fully automated anything systems, and azure chip consultants who think that working as a newspaper reporter gives them technical expertise and financial acumen. No wonder customers are confused.
Just my opinion. Honk!
Stephen E Arnold, June 29, 2010
Freebie
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
