These days, (with the benefit of having enrolled onto a rigorous full-time MBA programme whose coursework is laden with its fair share of pseudo - academic jargon and ‘industry proprietary language’ across disciplines such as Finance, HR, Marketing, Operations Management & Logistics, IT etc), I have somewhat unwittingly become wary of such words like ‘strategic’ and ‘creativity’, and consequently, have found myself becoming instantly suspicious of frequent proponents of the word, both in verbal exchanges and documented presentations…..as a matter of fact, it is not uncommon to come across people – professionals, MBA students, ‘management’ consultants and others in such ilk brazenly throw such buzzwords, terms and phrases around in discourses, presentations e.t.c, to the extent that some folks apparently cannot help mentioning the word strategic at least once in every other sentence, culminating in the effect of making otherwise ordinarily meaningful and purposeful words lose their very essence, thus becoming little more than weather-beaten clichés…..I can almost swear I’ve heard the ludicrous phrase ‘Strategic tactics for long-term growth’ in use by someone somewhere.
Particularly in my area of interest (and specialization), I have observed this is one plague to which many a marketing/brand consultant succumbs to. Now, in the field of marketing, one fundamental realization is that brands are complex, abstract and difficult to pin down. However, in endeavoring to define them, it appears we oftentimes forget this. With techniques such as brand pyramids and a thousand and one other varied, complex ‘proprietary tools’ of different orientation, we attempt to constrain and control them. Rather than trying to understand brands in their natural habitat, we box them in enclosures-turning them into guinea pigs of sorts. We do recognize, of course that pyramids, onions, mappings, brand wheels, master brand keys and other myriad techniques indeed can prove to be useful tools/disciplines that help in the distillation process – but a key and objective question remains that ‘do they really help define the unchanging core values of a brand?’ We spend ages debating and rationalizing the nuances of synonyms, performing semantic gymnastics to prove that Brand X is different from Brand Y, and ceaselessly agonizing over whether something is an Emotional Benefit or a Brand Value or in fact the selling proposition – a distinction we struggle to understand in the first place. At the end of the day, where does all of this get us in real terms? More often than not, a pile of disjointed words that look like little less than explosions in a bombed-out thesaurus factory. Unfortunately, when we eventually succeed in building our pyramids and agreeing that our brand is contemporary, stylish, relevant, inclusive and other usual suspects, we fall into the trap of thinking our job is finished. In reality, though, we are no closer to articulating ‘core essence’ than when we began – even if that particular box has been filled in. What should be rich, complex and, by definition, pain-staking to articulate only ends up more confusing and sadly subjected to assisted suicide by a thousand adjectives and buzzwords., by no means helped in the least by the phenomenon called Microsoft Power-Point (Like one of my clients, a senior marketing manager with one of the banks, while I was working on the agency side was wont to say “As if we strong brands had not been successfully built and nurtured long before the advent of Microsoft Powerpoint)
The foregoing brought to mind our recent encounter as MBA candidates (and job-hunters!) while attending a ‘rigorous’ assessment centre conducted as part of recruitment processes by one of the major GSM telcos in Nigeria just last December. At the assessment, we were expected to make individual presentations around a business case, and were prevented from utilizing Microsoft Power-point, so as to make for a level playing field where thoughts and ideas could be evaluated and appraised in their raw form, on the basis of what I’d term ‘intellectual merit’, making for the separation of what is intellectual substance on one hand, and what are merely ‘superficial’ aesthetics on the other, which is one thing the phenomenon called Powerpoint adequately avails us all of….in a sense, it’s like what they say about the visual representation of a girl you meet on Facebook, a platform on which ‘profile pictures’ have been severally airbrushed and notoriously embellished thanks to Adobe Photoshop.
Do not get me wrong however!
I’m not saying there’s no provision at all for a competent MBA or consultant as the case may be to display his well-earned ‘swagger’. If at all anything, it’s what sets you apart from the crowd and even increases your clients’ “willingness to pay” in certain instances…..or on a lighter note, I ask rhetorically “how in fact do you want them to know you attended Harvard..or INSEAD…or Lagos Business School if you don’t, in fact, engage in some occasionally well-timed term-dropping?”
Our own Dr. Tayo Otubanjo never ceases to emphasize the fact that in the boardroom, it’s as much a battle of WORDS as it is one of wits, and as an MBA desirous of making ‘impact’ in the corporate battleground out there, you just must bring yourself to terms with the prevailing industry jargon…Talk, as they say, is cheap quite alright, but if you’re skeptical about the essence of ‘talk’ (with or without requisite action to back it up!), check out our revered statesmen, politicians and captains of industry, they certainly do have their uncanny ways with words. So, you see, there’s indeed a place in the scheme of things for buzzwords, howbeit backed with impeccable content.
My guess is that as a consultant, an MBA or a professional generally, the onus lies on you to figure out your audience or client…you’re better off knowing what makes them tick……..some may get blown away from your nice power-point slides and technical jargons, while others place premium on getting to the ‘meat’…the real insights from your work…..whichever side of the divide you find yourself, ensure your work or presentation adds some deal of tangible value… not just a barrage of what my strategy teacher here at LBS humorously terms as ‘HOT AIR’, only embellished with the aesthetics of colorful power-point layouts, cumbersome tables and charts and interspersed with high-sounding pseudo-academic jargon such as, to mention a few, such as ‘brand hegemonisation’, ‘brand oxygenation’, ‘socio-cultural attitudinal nuances’, ‘paradigms’, ‘de-massification’, ‘reconceptualization’, ‘splinterization of markets’, ‘symbiotic linkages’, ‘dimensionalization’…….I’ll stop here as I reckon you’re probably rolling on the floor laughing at this juncture.
The take-out is that there’s absolutely beauty in simplicity….howbeit logical simplicity.
Interestingly, I read that Lord Rutherford used to tell his staff at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge that if they couldn’t explain their physics to a barmaid, then it was bad physics!
Frankly, it’s a trap I’ve fallen into myself at various times and I agree that it takes conscious effort to guard against falling victim. Pondering on all of it however, I reckon It definitely was not intended to be this complicated!
Tomi Ogunlesi is a second year candidate on the FTMBA programme at Lagos Business School with interests in marketing and brand management. He can be reached at tomijogun.ogunlesi@alumni.lbs.edu.ng
