The devil's dictionary of marketing, redux again: more fiendish definitions from the author's work-in-progress, scheduled for publication in 2003. (Insider's View).
Tuesday, October 1 2002
ACTIONABLE: the dictionary definition involves litigation, giving just cause for legal action." The business definition is "something that you can take action on." This is simple illiteracy, and an egregious misuse of language. It's also very funny when you hear people at meetings unwittingly threaten each other with lawsuits.
CONSUMERISM: the cultural reality of America, and, increasingly, the rest of the First World. You are what you buy, you are what you want. "No ideas but in things," William Carlos Williams once wrote. No identity but in things, I write in 2002.
CONTENT: the stuff people see, read, or hear. It's hard to get a message across without content, isn't it, although when one contemplates McLuhan's great dictum ("The medium is the message") one's attitude towards content changes. Content cannot be detached from its vehicle. Contemplate that next time you daydream.
CORE COMPETENCIES: what you're good at. It sounds better to say "We have core competencies in information management" than to say "We're good at information management." "Core competencies" is weasel talk.
When businesses talk to consumers they make crazy promises, implicit or explicit: "Drive this car and become rich and famous...Try this concoction and lose 40 pounds without dieting."
When businesses talk to other businesses, the verbiage becomes softer, more equivocal, more weasel-like. Perhaps the purpose is communication after all, since weasels can't go wrong speaking weasel to weasels.
DELIVERABLE: the first time I heard this I was nonplussed. "When will you have your deliverables?" I was asked at a meeting. Was I to deliver groceries, perhaps, or packages on behalf of Federal Express? I was soon enlightened. It is the au courant word for what you're supposed to do. The word's unconscious physicality reflects an interesting current in early 21st businesspeak: The more abstract the business world becomes--cf. the Internet, the dominance of services, et al.--the more concrete the language becomes.
DISCONNECT: in the same wearily neological spirit of "impact" used as a verb, but in reverse. In this case, a verb is used as a noun, as in "Whoa! There's a disconnect here!" Disconnect is a polite way of saying that you are illogical and absurd. Unless the meeting is extremely formal, the "disconnect" phrase is always preceded by the exclamation "Whoa!" See IMPACT.
