“I’ve heard of buzzwords, but buzzparagraphs? Damn.” That was a comment on media blog Gawker.com regarding the home page of Arnell Group.
What is Arnell Group, you ask? According to Gawker, it’s a PR firm; according to the Arnell Group Website, it’s a “multi-disciplinary brand and product invention company that executes across every consumer and trade touchpoint… Arnell Group examines the space between brand assets and consumer desire to identify opportunity and to develop and implement business-building solutions from product to experience…”
All righty, then.
But that got us thinking about other marketing companies whose business is far from evident based on their home pages.
Companies such as Summit Marketing, which according to its home page “brand[s] the art of original thinking.” But wait, there’s more: “From expression to invention…we leverage success to help our clients gain competitive advantage.” Note: The ellipses are Summit Marketing’s.
While I’m glad that Summit doesn’t leverage failure, I’m not sure how it can brand the art of original thinking, nor how its branding of said art would help me market my goods.
The second paragraph of the Haley Marketing Group Website is pretty straightforward and jargon-free: “At Haley Marketing, we specialize in creating affordable relationship marketing, e-mail and direct mail campaigns, and providing creative services that make it easy for companies to stand out, stay top-of-mind, and sell more.” The first paragraph, however, was a finalist in the Cliché Cram-a-thon: “Looking for marketing that breaks through the clutter… captures attention of real decision-makers…keeps you top-of-mind…and proves the value you can deliver?”
One more example, from Markitek™, “home of synaptic selling™”: “Effective selling to today’s Well Informed Buyer™ serves as the connection point of unpredictable interactions between Sellers and Buyers. We call it Synaptic Selling.” Three ™ symbols for 29 words—clearly Markitek is gunning for a book deal a la Jeff “Coloring Outside the Line™” Tobe and Derek Lee Armstrong and Kam Wai Yu of “The Persona Principle™.”
Marketing firms, of course, aren’t the only companies whose Websites are liberally splashed with puffery. Providers of multichannel commerce software load their sites with such amazing concoctions of jargon and vagaries that the result is poetry of a sort (though not a good sort). The difference is that software companies aren’t promising to boost your business by helping you better communicate your unique offerings to customers. Then again, judging from the verbiage of their Websites, some of these marketing firms aren’t either.
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