An ongoing, incomplete list of words to ban from strategy writing
I consume a lot of fashion and strategy-related media.
To begin, this list is mainly for personal use. It’s a selection of the words I find myself using in my professional life that have become clichés. They’re shorthand for ideas that are too quickly evolving, nebulous, or complex for the kind of efficient and globally comprehensible communication that strategy writing requires.
I call them “ketchup” words, inspired by an old New York Times article about truffle oil: a condiment you can insert basically anywhere to raise something to “premium mediocre” status without offending anyone or fundamentally altering the message of the dish slash strategy report.
Over the past few years, I’ve become of the opinion that there is more than enough content in the world. As a culture, we have much to gain by being more specific and direct about what we are trying to say. Consider this something between a parodic reference tool and a personal manifesto for better, clearer output.
This is for Fran Lebowitz.
Authenticity, noun. As in, “Gen-Z seeks authentic brands that fit with their lifestyles.”
Authenticity, employed in a marketing context, refers to the perceived alignment between three key points:
1) What a firm is selling (sneakers, protein chips, luxury handbags)
2) The brand’s legitimacy in offering this item for sale (clout, expertise, savoir-faire)
3) Most importantly, the degree to which the brand successfully obfuscates the commercial aims of this legitimacy behind some supposed higher virtue (community, wellness, tradition).
Irony can, of course, be a virtue.
Co-creation, noun. As in, “Audiences engage with brands that offer opportunities for co-creation.” At first glance, co-creation is something between an engagement opportunity and an existential threat. It implies that audiences have the same power as firms in determining which products are offered to them, from Doritos flavors to TikTok content.
In practice, co-creation is the practice of brands listening to market demands and client feedback (e.g. reading the Instagram comments) and, very occasionally, soliciting these audiences directly. Or it’s a customization service offer with just enough brand guardrails to make users feel like they’re riffing directly with designers.
Co-creation is not the benevolent democracy of the market, it’s just how the market works.
Community, noun. As in, “Community-oriented content builds engagement.” Like many of the words on this list, I find “community” employed in this context to be hollow at best.
A community, in marketspeak, is a group of people who like the same thing. They might sometimes recognize each other on the street or comment on the same TikToks and feel a flash of belonging to something, but that something is always some nebulous concept, such as “Taylor Swift,” and never one another.
A community, as theorist Dwight McDonald in his essay Masscult and Midcult, requires not only a group sharing common interests, traditions, sentiments, and values, but a scale small enough that it “matters” what each individual member does. This isn’t impossible in consumer culture, but it requires meaningfully engaging with incredibly small cohorts.
In other words, let’s call most brand communities what they are - factions of mass culture - and save this word for the nebulous, hard to reach, and often offline subcultures where real movement and meaning happens.
Culture, noun. As in, “Brands position themselves as cultural actors.”
A brand doing something “cultural” is a brand doing anything that isn’t actively, as we speak, selling you something. They get away with this because they choose activities just outside the domain of the things they usually sell. Of course, they’re still allowed to make you want them to sell you something, because everyone at this art gallery/book club/pop-up/magazine launch/hot-dog stand/cocktail class/escape room/dental clinic is really hot.
Curated, adj. As in, “A curated collection of new fragrances.”
I spent a lot of time in Brooklyn in the early 2010s, so I remember very vividly when “curated” became a standard word in the marketer’s toolbelt. I also recall the backlash that came with it.
If “curated” has since beaten the pretentiousness allegations, it’s because it’s difficult to be divisive about a word that actually does, after all, describe what it’s like to build a coherent narrative about anything in a world where meaning is constructed entirely via acts of consumer choice.
My only opposition to “curated” is when businesses use it to describe collections they, themselves, have designed and produced. That’s not curation, it’s product strategy.
Experiential, adj. As in, “An experiential journey into a new collection.”
Experiential is placed alongside immersive a lot, which is a touch oxymoronic, because both words get used interchangeably. If I really had to pin it down, I’d say “experiential” is just slightly less tech-connoted than “immersive”, and more participatory.
What’s unfortunate is that both words seem to describe a universal desire - to feel present, engaged, alive; to sense that a given moment carries a weight that differentiates it from any other moment - but neither addresses the unaddressed need behind that desire.
In other words, it’s less helpful to describe things as ‘experiential’ than it is to explore why we suddenly need to employ the word at all; why “an engaging brand experience” needs to be differentiated from any other, presumably more common experience.
It’s because we’re all on those damn phones all the time. While we’re at it, ban engaging.
Gen ____, noun. As in, “Gen Alpha is brand-aware like never before.”
Generational cohorts are an incredibly useful tool for describing long-term shifts in, say, the real estate market. They help us understand how many people belong to a broad age range and their approximate demographic makeup. At their absolute best, they’re a helpful framework for describing the global context a given cohort would’ve experienced.
What generational cohorts cannot do is describe the emotional and social landscape of an entire age group based on insights extrapolated from macro-data. The scale is simply too large to account for the endlessly more experiences that shape consumer culture. Overuse of generational cohorts delivers meaningless platitudes. (Are “the youth today” interested in challenging norms, do they defy authority? Groundbreaking.)
Worse, you risk ending up with false clichés that obfuscate the actual social landscape you’re operating in. That’s how we ended up with a bunch of decks circa 2022 about “Gen-Z” featuring people of all genders in bright makeup and pink hair, blissfully ignorant that young men IRL were busy taking the sharpest right wing turn in decades.
Immersive, adj. As in, “Immersive retail experience.”
I despise the word immersive. It is the word our culture deserves. Immersive, in marketing parlance, means “Not on a screen.” An immersive something is an instance engaging all five senses of the person experiencing it. It gives that person a reason to be there that’s not exclusively commercial, at least at first glance. By that logic, taking my cat to the vet is extremely immersive.
I don’t know. I think it’s because I’ve never experienced anything “immersive” that didn’t leave 10% of my brain thinking, “this is supposed to be immersive.” The artifice is too visible, the underlying commerciality too exposed, the curtain pulled back a bit too far. It’s pure simulacra: replacing the thing (awe, wonder, joy) with an image of the thing (virtual reality headset).
Self-expression, noun. As in, “Wearing luxury brands is all about self-expression.”
The problems with this one are the ambiguity, and the lurking nihilism hiding behind it. What we mean is: developing a coherent sense of identity through consumption (e.g. The Extended Self, Belk 1988) and then communicating it through wear or display. In a world characterized by an embarrassment of consumer choice, our very self-hood is constructed through an active series of choices amongst an ultimately limited set of available goods (see: Curation). The illusion of choice.
Further, what, exactly, is being expressed, and to whom? What is self-expression if not a silent scream into the endless abyss of content?
If a tin of sardines and a bottle of natural wine is all I have to express about my short window of existence on this earthly plane, take my sentience and donate it to a more deserving dolphin.
Status, noun. As in, “Knowing the next hot restaurant is the new status symbol.”
My opposition to “status” isn’t so much ambiguity or misuse as it is overuse. A lot of Instagram and TikTok consumer culture commentary (you know the ones) feels very concerned with hierarchy - placing everything on some kind of matrix, positioning one consumer choice against another. Interestingly - maybe a bit recursively - this feels related to the rise in knowledge and cultural capital as an important lever of social positioning in an economy of choice and abundance.
Here’s the thing, though. Declaring everything a status symbol isn’t necessarily false, but it flattens human experience in late capitalist consumer culture into one ever-shifting hierarchy - we consume things to show we’re better or different than others, sure. But we also do so for self-actualization, comfort, familiarity, novelty, altruism, habit, convenience, etc. etc. etc.
These motivations don’t exclude status-driven consumption, but they aren’t always secondary, either.
Storytelling, noun. As in, “Relevant storytelling and strong visual codes are key for this market.”
Hear me out: I don’t think we use “storytelling” enough.
Accompany me on a quick pivot to design theory. When we create something - a pair of sneakers, a couch, a B2B software - we write a script for the next person about what to make of that thing. (Researchers call this the “pre-objectification”).
Through the materials we use, the forms we choose, and the marketing copy with which we accompany it, we offer suggestions for how the object should be worn, sat on, or used. We give people hints about the social or emotional role of the object by positioning it in an existing design language: sexy, young, outdoors-y, professional.
In short, all creators are storytellers. I think the more we invite people outside of Market-Comms’ teams to engage the concept of narrative, the more coherent strategies we’ll have all around.
What Only ___ Can Do, noun. As in, “We must identify what only (our brand) can do.”
Every luxury brand seems to use this framework, and if we’re all approaching the problem from the same angle, it feels unlikely that the output is going to be all that singular.
An ongoing, incomplete list of words to ban from strategy writing
I consume a lot of fashion and strategy-related media.
To begin, this list is mainly for personal use. It’s a selection of the words I find myself using in my professional life that have become clichés. They’re shorthand for ideas that are too quickly evolving, nebulous, or complex for the kind of efficient and globally comprehensible communication that strategy writing requires.
I call them “ketchup” words, inspired by an old New York Times article about truffle oil: a condiment you can insert basically anywhere to raise something to “premium mediocre” status without offending anyone or fundamentally altering the message of the dish slash strategy report.
Over the past few years, I’ve become of the opinion that there is more than enough content in the world. As a culture, we have much to gain by being more specific and direct about what we are trying to say. Consider this something between a parodic reference tool and a personal manifesto for better, clearer output.
This is for Fran Lebowitz.
Authenticity, noun. As in, “Gen-Z seeks authentic brands that fit with their lifestyles.”
Authenticity, employed in a marketing context, refers to the perceived alignment between three key points:
1) What a firm is selling (sneakers, protein chips, luxury handbags)
2) The brand’s legitimacy in offering this item for sale (clout, expertise, savoir-faire)
3) Most importantly, the degree to which the brand successfully obfuscates the commercial aims of this legitimacy behind some supposed higher virtue (community, wellness, tradition).
Irony can, of course, be a virtue.
Co-creation, noun. As in, “Audiences engage with brands that offer opportunities for co-creation.” At first glance, co-creation is something between an engagement opportunity and an existential threat. It implies that audiences have the same power as firms in determining which products are offered to them, from Doritos flavors to TikTok content.
In practice, co-creation is the practice of brands listening to market demands and client feedback (e.g. reading the Instagram comments) and, very occasionally, soliciting these audiences directly. Or it’s a customization service offer with just enough brand guardrails to make users feel like they’re riffing directly with designers.
Co-creation is not the benevolent democracy of the market, it’s just how the market works.
Community, noun. As in, “Community-oriented content builds engagement.” Like many of the words on this list, I find “community” employed in this context to be hollow at best.
A community, in marketspeak, is a group of people who like the same thing. They might sometimes recognize each other on the street or comment on the same TikToks and feel a flash of belonging to something, but that something is always some nebulous concept, such as “Taylor Swift,” and never one another.
A community, as theorist Dwight McDonald in his essay Masscult and Midcult, requires not only a group sharing common interests, traditions, sentiments, and values, but a scale small enough that it “matters” what each individual member does. This isn’t impossible in consumer culture, but it requires meaningfully engaging with incredibly small cohorts.
In other words, let’s call most brand communities what they are - factions of mass culture - and save this word for the nebulous, hard to reach, and often offline subcultures where real movement and meaning happens.
Culture, noun. As in, “Brands position themselves as cultural actors.”
A brand doing something “cultural” is a brand doing anything that isn’t actively, as we speak, selling you something. They get away with this because they choose activities just outside the domain of the things they usually sell. Of course, they’re still allowed to make you want them to sell you something, because everyone at this art gallery/book club/pop-up/magazine launch/hot-dog stand/cocktail class/escape room/dental clinic is really hot.
Curated, adj. As in, “A curated collection of new fragrances.”
I spent a lot of time in Brooklyn in the early 2010s, so I remember very vividly when “curated” became a standard word in the marketer’s toolbelt. I also recall the backlash that came with it.
If “curated” has since beaten the pretentiousness allegations, it’s because it’s difficult to be divisive about a word that actually does, after all, describe what it’s like to build a coherent narrative about anything in a world where meaning is constructed entirely via acts of consumer choice.
My only opposition to “curated” is when businesses use it to describe collections they, themselves, have designed and produced. That’s not curation, it’s product strategy.
Experiential, adj. As in, “An experiential journey into a new collection.”
Experiential is placed alongside immersive a lot, which is a touch oxymoronic, because both words get used interchangeably. If I really had to pin it down, I’d say “experiential” is just slightly less tech-connoted than “immersive”, and more participatory.
What’s unfortunate is that both words seem to describe a universal desire - to feel present, engaged, alive; to sense that a given moment carries a weight that differentiates it from any other moment - but neither addresses the unaddressed need behind that desire.
In other words, it’s less helpful to describe things as ‘experiential’ than it is to explore why we suddenly need to employ the word at all; why “an engaging brand experience” needs to be differentiated from any other, presumably more common experience.
It’s because we’re all on those damn phones all the time. While we’re at it, ban engaging.
Gen ____, noun. As in, “Gen Alpha is brand-aware like never before.”
Generational cohorts are an incredibly useful tool for describing long-term shifts in, say, the real estate market. They help us understand how many people belong to a broad age range and their approximate demographic makeup. At their absolute best, they’re a helpful framework for describing the global context a given cohort would’ve experienced.
What generational cohorts cannot do is describe the emotional and social landscape of an entire age group based on insights extrapolated from macro-data. The scale is simply too large to account for the endlessly more experiences that shape consumer culture. Overuse of generational cohorts delivers meaningless platitudes. (Are “the youth today” interested in challenging norms, do they defy authority? Groundbreaking.)
Worse, you risk ending up with false clichés that obfuscate the actual social landscape you’re operating in. That’s how we ended up with a bunch of decks circa 2022 about “Gen-Z” featuring people of all genders in bright makeup and pink hair, blissfully ignorant that young men IRL were busy taking the sharpest right wing turn in decades.
Immersive, adj. As in, “Immersive retail experience.”
I despise the word immersive. It is the word our culture deserves. Immersive, in marketing parlance, means “Not on a screen.” An immersive something is an instance engaging all five senses of the person experiencing it. It gives that person a reason to be there that’s not exclusively commercial, at least at first glance. By that logic, taking my cat to the vet is extremely immersive.
I don’t know. I think it’s because I’ve never experienced anything “immersive” that didn’t leave 10% of my brain thinking, “this is supposed to be immersive.” The artifice is too visible, the underlying commerciality too exposed, the curtain pulled back a bit too far. It’s pure simulacra: replacing the thing (awe, wonder, joy) with an image of the thing (virtual reality headset).£
Self-expression, noun. As in, “Wearing luxury brands is all about self-expression.”
The problems with this one are the ambiguity, and the lurking nihilism hiding behind it. What we mean is: developing a coherent sense of identity through consumption (e.g. The Extended Self, Belk 1988) and then communicating it through wear or display. In a world characterized by an embarrassment of consumer choice, our very self-hood is constructed through an active series of choices amongst an ultimately limited set of available goods (see: Curation). The illusion of choice.
Further, what, exactly, is being expressed, and to whom? What is self-expression if not a silent scream into the endless abyss of content?
If a tin of sardines and a bottle of natural wine is all I have to express about my short window of existence on this earthly plane, take my sentience and donate it to a more deserving dolphin.
Status, noun. As in, “Knowing the next hot restaurant is the new status symbol.”
My opposition to “status” isn’t so much ambiguity or misuse as it is overuse. A lot of Instagram and TikTok consumer culture commentary (you know the ones) feels very concerned with hierarchy - placing everything on some kind of matrix, positioning one consumer choice against another. Interestingly - maybe a bit recursively - this feels related to the rise in knowledge and cultural capital as an important lever of social positioning in an economy of choice and abundance.
Here’s the thing, though. Declaring everything a status symbol isn’t necessarily false, but it flattens human experience in late capitalist consumer culture into one ever-shifting hierarchy - we consume things to show we’re better or different than others, sure. But we also do so for self-actualization, comfort, familiarity, novelty, altruism, habit, convenience, etc. etc. etc.
These motivations don’t exclude status-driven consumption, but they aren’t always secondary, either.
Storytelling, noun. As in, “Relevant storytelling and strong visual codes are key for this market.”
Hear me out: I don’t think we use “storytelling” enough.
Accompany me on a quick pivot to design theory. When we create something - a pair of sneakers, a couch, a B2B software - we write a script for the next person about what to make of that thing. (Researchers call this the “pre-objectification”).
Through the materials we use, the forms we choose, and the marketing copy with which we accompany it, we offer suggestions for how the object should be worn, sat on, or used. We give people hints about the social or emotional role of the object by positioning it in an existing design language: sexy, young, outdoors-y, professional.
In short, all creators are storytellers. I think the more we invite people outside of Market-Comms’ teams to engage the concept of narrative, the more coherent strategies we’ll have all around.
What Only ___ Can Do, noun. “We must identify what only (our brand) can do.”
Every luxury brand seems to use this framework, and if we’re all approaching the problem from the same angle, it feels unlikely that the output is going to be all that singular.