Trendy Words

Far too often, "exclusive" isn't exclusive. It's a word that *sounds" good, which leads some to thinking that sounding good is all that is required to sell something. That probably worked at a time when exclusive usually carried meaning. But if that that time existed, it's long past. It's slapped on every marketing email, flyer, and phone pop-up, and there is almost never anything exclusive, nothi...

 2025 has been a right year for absolute nonsense. We name things using marketing words that aren't factually accurate. Critical thinking across the industry is at all-time low. Things that aren't marketing are being called marketing. And what's left is being used to focus on things that marketing often has the least influence. Jon McGreevy and I round out 2025 with a highlight of AI, digital lite...

So much of our culture and formal education has encouraged and rewarded us to use "fancy" words when explaining things -- words that show off our education, make us feel sophisticated and important. But almost all of this notion fails when it comes to marketing, and it's a challenging process to unlearn that way of thinking about words. Olga Pope has raised picking fights over this kind of overly...

Best Practices in marketing are often a lie. At least, they are far less useful and relevant than best practices in other professions and disciplines.  Samar Owais, known for her stellar writing and penchant for picking fights with people online over how to compose an email, explains how, more often than not, marketing "best practices" are usually nothing more than herd behaviour, at best a starti...

Personal Brand. This might one of the silliest and most pointless phrases in modern marketing. It means almost nothing beyond "things about myself" and it's questionable if committing to the idea has helped anyone market or sell anything. In this episode, I talk with copywriter Jo Watson CMgr MCMI (the extra letters are important) about why personal brand is mostly irrelevant and how to better app...

 For this episode, we wade into the (somewhat nice) jargon and empty words of cybersecurity with "Human Firewall." Cybersecurity has a knack for creating turns of phrase that are hard for outsiders to understand. Human firewall has sprung the the idea that it is people, rather than tools or technology, is both the first and last line of defence against cyber attacks, and while this is accurate, it...

"We are passionate about what we do" has been a tired, overused cliche in marketing for nearly 20 years now. We continue to be regaled with how much businesses want to tell you how much they like the things they do. It needs to go, and a return to showing your customer why they should care that you like your work, rather than talking our ear off about it. This episode's guest, Anna Gunning, has be...

Marketers and clients have a fundamental misunderstanding about what "safe" means when it comes to creative ideas. Copywriter Jim Compton-Hall sits down with me and talks about his experience of "safe" in marketing, and how that comes across on an emotional level when clients hear it. We discuss why this actually leads to really weak and risky marketing, and what we can do to change the language o...

 "Content" is one of those words that's so buried in how we make things on the internet that it's hard to see how empty it has become as a word. It does no one any favours: not the creators, not the brands, and not the distributors. In this episode, listen to copywriter Ed Callow give a takedown of content and we can rethink this pervasive, vapid word we use in modern business marketing Ed's Linke...

If there's one thing that marketers and consultants love to preach, it's the death of something: brands, SEO, content marketing, social media, sales funnels, programmers... the list goes on, and not a single proclamation has been right (with the possible exception of the Blackberry smartphone). Jon Harrison, co-founder of Birmingham-based brand agency, One Black Bear, unleashes all the anger and a...

Strategy. A word that's so abused in business in marketing its easier to find examples of it being used to describe things that are distinctly not strategic than it is to find accurate information. What exactly is a strategy, and how it is different from a plan, a vision, or tactics? Our guest, Sophie Blackmore, drawing on her years of experience from her strategic marketing consultancy, Happy Mar...

For our second episode, we are taking on "community." An idea that often gets confused and used interchangeably with words like "audience," "market," and "subscribers." Gus Bhandal, marketer and LinkedIn guru talks about his story about building and being part of a community, and what lessons you can take to create community that benefits you as both a person a business Gus can be found on LinkedI...

For our first episode, we are taking on "innovate." A word so overused and abused that it's been used to describe a cheese sandwich. Our guest is copywriter Sarah Catherine Jones, who breaks down how and why innovate is such a poor word to describe what many businesses do, and how to figure out what to write or say instead. Sarah can be found on LinkedIn and via her website .