Stuff and Nonsense
For many years now I’ve enjoyed listening to old broadcasts of “The Goon Show.” This 1950s BBC radio program starring Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Spike Milligan specialized in a unique brand of surrealistic humor, as if Lewis Carroll had written for the British music hall. The show influenced Monty Python’s Flying Circus and countless other comedy groups. Scriptwriter Milligan’s Goonish humor often devolved into pure nonsense words and phrases such as “spon” (generally used as a noun for some disease or other unwholesome object), “twinge,” and the all-purpose exclamations “Ying tong iddle I po!” and “Needle noddle noo!”
Nonsense words can work brilliantly when used for laughs by gifted radio comedians. In marketing copy, unfortunately, nonsense is usually just nonsense.
What do I mean by nonsense? I’m talking about those “filler” words we use when we can’t think of something more precise or meaningful to say — that comforting babble we fall back to hide the fact that we haven’t given our marketing sufficient thought.
Examples?
!. “Any,” accompanied by its big brothers “anyone” and “anything.” This word is so open-ended that it probably shouldn’t count as a word at all. I’ve heard business owners offer to solve “any kind of (insert service here) problem” for “anyone who needs any help.” What kind of specific image does “anything” evoke in my mind? I get no clear picture of what he does or who his target market is with “any.” And yet businesses still insist on using this non-word as a badge of honor: “Look how widely our services range!” Yeah, right — so widely that I have no clue what they are or aren’t.
2. “Every.” See “any.”
3. “Full-service.” This mind-numbing term makes its insidious appearance time and time again in business descriptions and elevator speeches. I have no idea what it means, and be honest, neither do you. That’s because it has no meaning. “We’re a full-service laundromat.” Really? Does that mean your competitors are — what, 65-percent service? Do their machines only work 4 days out of the week? Do they require you to bring your own water from home? Does “full-service” mean you’ll come to my house and do my ironing for me?
You see? “Full-service” conveys no specifics, gives me no clear mental image of your services or benefits, and implies merely that you’ll do what I paid you for without falling down on the job, which doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.
Why, then, are these terms so commonplace? We’re used to seeing them, for one thing, so our internal B.S.-meter tends to let them slide. So we end up inadvertently stuffing our marketing copy with filler, then wonder why it isn’t reeling customers in.
The most dangerous kind of incompetence, in my opinion, is the invisible kind — incompetence that goes unnoticed due to its sheer ubiquity. There’s a lot of filler out there, not just in marketing copy but in life. Focusing on the real content makes us more effective at both.
