NotRocketSurgery

"Revolutionary" overkill

ryan / Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:33:00 GMT

Tags advertising, buzzwords, enterprise, marketing, revolutionary | 4 comments

In some of our marketing materials, I used to refer to Lovetastic.com as “revolutionary” service. I’d call it the “revolutionary gay social network” and such. Of course, I believe that the term applies. We are trying to change the discourse in this area of online personals—to do something totally different that shifts the paradigm away from hook-ups and towards love and substantive communication. Our community is marked by a gently subversive (and explicit) philosophy that transcends the product itself and is instead about a broader culture and movement, so the revolutionary concept felt right.

But with all the focus these days on Purple Cows and Long Tails, everybody wants to be revolutionary. I started reading and hearing ads all over the place describing things from phone service to game consoles as “revolutionary.” It’s become a marketing cliche to mean that one’s product is incrementally different from its competitors, which of course is neither all that surprising nor interesting—and certainly not revolutionary. I grew to be immediately skeptical whenever I heard it in an ad myself. So I stopped using it.

The usurpation of a perfectly good English word to turn it into hyperbolic marketing-speak is a shame. I’ve got nothing against passion and a bit of well-intentioned hyperbole in marketing where it’s due, but when several huge corporations start having words like “revolutionary” applied to their products in national TV campaigns by ad agencies they’ve hired, the term sort of, well, loses its authenticity and indie subversiveness.

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As a post script, it’s worth noting that there is an enterprise-speak correlate for “revolutionary.” Large corporations like to use the term “disruptive technologies” to mean “products that don’t suck and might therefore might put us out of business.”