Pete has written a great article on the abuse and misuse of English in beery PR-ish marketing circles:
I was reminded of this lesson earlier this month, when I went to the press launch of some new beers. We were told about the strong “head winds” in the market, and how this necessitated moving into”‘innovation white space” that would help people “navigate and explore” the “beer category”, making full use of “fixturisation”. We were then introduced to a “serious trilogy play” that would hopefully “disrupt” both the core market and its “adjacencies”.
I once made full use of fixturisation. I’d be careful of ever doing that again.
Pete reviews the causes: comfort with jargon, simple laziness as well as what he calls credibility but what I take to mean the need to project the appearance of credibility. I worked once with someone hired as a supposed expert who laced every sentence with acronyms. Once I started asking what each one meant as we moved along through meetings, it because pretty clear that there may have been something of a fraud being perpetuated.
But there is something else at play, too, that is more about language than the beer. Look at every word or phrase in his paragraph and you can see the migration of a concept from another field. Adjacencies, I have learned, is a concept in workplace layout that architects might use. The right people need desks near their logical peers. Head wind and navigateclearly come from sailing. White space? Is that the tabula rasa? Could be but it also could just be a muddled phony-ness, too.
Such migrations are a total waste of effort. There are too many great beer words, simple but specific. Words like malt and wort, firkin and kilderkin. They just don’t harken to a earlier day or speak to the fan boy technician. They roll off the tongue, confident in the inherent loveliness of their own sound. Find me a branding writer who can capture these sounds and I might even forget that it’s marketing. I once was presented with a group of uni-lingual unannounced Swedes in my own living room, in-laws of in-laws on a tour. One word was all it took to achieve understanding: øl. All the languid welcoming pleasures of beer were there in that one soft, leisurely syllable and the smiles that accompanied its being spoken.
[Original comments…]
Pete Brown – July 31, 2011 9:36 AM
http://petebrown.blogspot.co.uk
Great response Alan!
“Project the appearance of credibility” – that’s what I was trying to say.
Bang on about beer language. I love ‘sparging’ and talking about ‘brew length’ standing by a ‘brew house’, and when anyone says ‘grist case’ my toes do a secret curl of delight.
Pete Brown – July 31, 2011 9:37 AM
http://petebrown.blogspot.co.uk
Great response Alan!
“Project the appearance of credibility” – that’s what I was trying to say.
Bang on about beer language. I love ‘sparging’ and talking about ‘brew length’ standing by a ‘brew house’, and when anyone says ‘grist case’ my toes do a secret curl of delight.
Pete Brown – July 31, 2011 9:37 AM
http://petebrown.blogspot.co.uk
Great response Alan!
“Project the appearance of credibility” – that’s what I was trying to say.
Bang on about beer language. I love ‘sparging’ and talking about ‘brew length’ standing by a ‘brew house’, and when anyone says ‘grist case’ my toes do a secret curl of delight.
Craig – July 31, 2011 9:58 AM
http://drinkdrank1.blogspot.com/
Alan, your missing the point on this language. What you’ve got to understand is is the relationship between a specific beer brand’s frimas, as juxtaposed, to it’s framas. It’s pretty basic stuff. Beer marketing has a mission—a critical mission—a mission critical mission, you might say. How else are we expected to get past the gatekeepers?
Martyn Cornell – July 31, 2011 10:02 AM
http://zythophile.wordpress.com
“Talk brewery to me, baby …”
“Mash tun!”
“Ooooh …”
“90-minute boil!”
“Uuurrrgh …”
“Underback!”
“Aaaahhhh …”
“Dry-hopping!”
“Oh, baby, baby – you’re the best …”
Gary Gillman – July 31, 2011 10:20 AM
I’ve noticed since I started working back in the hoary 1970’s that jargon interlaces general commercial business speech, not just specialized areas such as marketing, public accounting and now the semi-conductor and other areas of the online revolution. Some matters were put on the back burner, but on others you had to cook with gas. Get on the blower and patch in that client fast, else he may look somewhere else. We had to come to grips with a problem, later, to drill down on it. We had to prioritize, later, put things in the right buckets. It’s nothing really new, and enough reading in various 1800’s sources (generalist and industry-specific) tells me they had their version of all this then. The problem is when jargon becomes a substitute for original thinking. Sometimes you need to go back to unadorned language to rediscover what is important. I’ve long felt that in the brewing business, you should explain simply and clearly to people what beer is made of, why it tastes as it does, and what to look for in the various styles.
Gary
Alan – July 31, 2011 11:05 AM
Pete’s apparently got the over caffeinated mouse hand shakes!
Simon Johnson – July 31, 2011 6:12 PM
http://www.reluctantscooper.co.uk
If someone whispers “ATP bioluminescence” in my ear, I twitch.
But the word ‘sparge’ takes me to a special place.
With a few gratuitous photos of stainless, I’m there.
I’m trying to segue out of dumb marketing into smart marketing. Which equates to writing press releases that I don’t gag over.
If I can write the beer equivalent of “they’re boxy, but they’re good”, my life will be complete.
dansmallbeer – August 1, 2011 2:42 AM
http://smallbeerblog.blogspot.com
Yes and no. Beer words are best for beer. But it seems from Pete’s post that the subject of this manglespeak is in fact the market. Markets, like lots of concepts, are abstract and therefore lend themselves to metaphorical representation. It is fine for metaphors to be used for abstract concepts, and this can be done very elegantly. After all, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind would not have worked if he’d stuck to adjectives proper to describing grey matter “spongy”, “hemispheric” etc.
The correct mark here is that these words and metaphors are shit. Marketing speak is an exercise in lending credence to the base activity of pushing stuff on people through the bastardization of romantic, scientific and emotive language. We’d have a lot more respect for this if they stuck to the perfectly good language of markets. Allow me to translate the jargon above: “It’s difficult to sell beer to people, what with all the competition these days. What we need is some new ideas for getting people to try some beer, like putting lots of it on shelves where people can see it.”
Craig – August 1, 2011 10:44 AM
http://drinkdrank1.blogspot.com/
Martyn said “underback” hee hee….
Jeff Alworth – August 1, 2011 1:23 PM
http://beervana.blogspot.com/
I am on Dan’s page. The language you hear falling from the lips of marketers is its own dialect, and it has nothing to do with the product at hand. I’ve spoken with people who use it, and my sense is there are a few things at play. One is poor vocabulary. Business and PR folk are inveterate word inventors, and a lot of it comes from not realizing they’re inventing unnecessary words.
A second issue is that jargon is often a dodge–it looks like the user has deep insight into a topic, when in fact s/he is throwing up a jargony ink cloud to hide ignorance. I realized this in grad school when the worst scholars were the quickest to junk up their junky arguments with jargon.
Finally, marketers have the idea that invented words create excitement. They find the prospect of turning a noun into a verb thrilling–as thrilling as they hope you’ll find the product they’re attempting to hawk. I assume it works. Pedants like Pete and you and me are decidedly NOT the target for their little muddle haikus. The engine of capital trundles along, completely unaware of how profoundly it disrupts our adjacencies. Or something.