Compliment or Coincidence

As some of you may know, I’ve recently become involved with the marketing operations of Vansdirect.co.uk.  It’s surprisingly difficult deciding how to advertise “cheap vans” and “great van deals”.  Google analytics is slowly becoming a close friend but I still only understand 20% of it!

Text Speak is Wrong!!!

Only a few hours after finishing my unapologetic attack on abbreviations in the workplace, another pet peeve of mine reared its ugly head - text speak!  What made this worse was the apparent contradiction contained within my friend’s statement - “It’s not Xmas, it’s Christmas BTW!” (it should be noted that his words weren’t directed at my use of the abbreviation).

I’ve noticed such behaviour creep into life at Vansdirect.  When we sell a van, we no longer send “documents” but instead “docs”.  No longer do we require “proof of identity,” instead it’s “proofs”.  I’ve even heard the company referred to as “Vans” rather than our self-created one-word title of Vansdirect.

Marketing Linguistics?!

Most things in life are fairly straight forward and easily understood.  Why therefore do marketing people like to complicate everything with jargon and abbreviations for everything?  I was reminded of Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam today as Vansdirect’s Marketing Manager, who I won’t name (…Owain Cassidy…), went into a whole spiel of marketing linguistics which us mere mortals could only nod along to.

It’s true to say that all departments are guilty of this.  We all preach “Communication” as a virtue yet we make it more complicated by integrating short-hand into our daily routines.  I accept that this can save time.  Time is money after-all.  But I can’t carry the business dictionary and thesaurus with me all day!