One of my favorite sayings (just ask anyone who works for me) is "Degeek the speak!"  As technology marketers, we too often fall in love with the speeds-n-feeds and feature/function of the product we are marketing, and forget that we are selling to a real human being who has a business problem to solve.


I often find myself wondering why we fall so quickly into geek-speak.  I means, it's not like we all grew up dreaming that one day we could talk about how we "have decoupled the number of processors from the number of memory modules, thereby unlocking an unprecedented amount of configuration flexibility."   (That's a direct quote from a piece of marketing material that recently came across my desk.  No joke.  I have eliminated the company name to protect the innocent.)  But somewhere, some marketing person thought that marketing phrase was going to move the needle.

The bottom-line is that we need to simplify.  Yes, technology is cool.  Yes, engineers can do amazing things.  But most people have the attention span of a gnat with attention-deficit-disorder.  As marketers, we need to communicate the value of what we are selling in short, easy-to-understand English, with a bit of a flair and a bit of sizzle.  It's not just enough to have the steak (in this case, the number of processors).  You need to have the sizzle.  What's so exciting about that decoupling and why does an average person care?

What this poor anonymous marketer was probably trying say is something like: "Do your end users beat on you because their inventory reports take too long to run?  Are your end users constantly asking you for more applications and not increasing your budget? Well, with the new servers from [REDACTED], you can deliver the applications they want faster than ever before, thanks to improvements in how we handle memory."

The flip side of this argument is that if you simplify too much, then you risk sounding generic, and let's be honest, every IT marketer in the world is out there saying "Cheaper, more secure, faster." 

I'm not saying that I have this problem figured out by any means.  Indeed, it's something that m team and I struggle with on a daily basis.  Marketing is as much art as it is science, and the job of any truly artistic marketer is to make the complex into the simple.... in other words, degeek the speak.