See if you know what this means: ABC Company "is a leading provider of customer data management solutions for customer-focused front-office and analytical applications, enabling large organizations to rapidly deploy business-critical applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems."

Confused?

Without reading this sentence more than once—or several times perhaps—you probably can't explain what that company actually does. And that's a problem for the real technology firm that uses that sentence in its marketing materials. (The company's name has been changed, to protect the verbose and jargon-riddled.) The description is full of technical terms and unclear words, such as "front-office" and "business-critical."

This type of practically indecipherable language dominates many press releases, marketing brochures, and Web sites—not to mention some conversations—as many companies depend on technology to differentiate themselves, and sounding modern and up-to-date becomes more important. But while technical jargon and unclear terms like "customer driven" and "facilitate" are popular, they complicate a marketing message. "They're just meaningless," says Chris Coleman, president of Folio Z, a marketing firm in Atlanta that works primarily with technology companies.

Meanwhile, having a clear, concise message only gets more important. In the age of e-mail—when a recipient can zap your message in mere seconds—you have even less time to explain what your company does.

When Coleman runs communication workshops for executives, she has them pay close attention to every word they use to describe their company, asking questions like, "If you had X dollars, and this was your budget, would you pay $10,000 for this word?" Hint: The word premier isn't worth the money. What company doesn't call itself the "premier" or "leading" provider in its industry?

Coleman uses a game to get managers to realize how often they use "weasel words," her name for unclear or overused words. To play the game, "Weasel Word Bingo," everyone gets a game board showing a grid with words including proactive and enhanced. Throughout the session, whenever someone uses one of the words, others can cross them off on the board. The person who notices the most words wins, and the one who uses the most loses.

The goal is to get people to describe their companies in original ways that everyone can understand. "Sometimes when you take these adjectives away, you get down to what you really do," Coleman says.

She helped Brian Godinez, vice president of creative production services at Video Networks Inc. in Atlanta, identify some words he now tries to avoid, like the overused solutions. Another: scaleable. "It's a complicated word," he says. "Some people understand it, and some people don't."

Another tip: Get rid of clichés. When people say "thinking out of the box," they aren't doing it. But the phrase is one of many in our common business lexicon, like "win-win" and "added value," that people use often, without considering if they're appropriate or outdated.

That's why, when you're looking for inspiration for clear and creative marketing messages, don't look to your competitors. "Good communication isn't the stuff that's being foisted upon us by the business community," Coleman says. "It's the stuff in music, in movies, in popular culture."