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So you’ve fought through crowds in the foyer, paid through the nose for your pick ‘n’ mix and endured the sticky car­pet on the walk to your seat. What more could you want for your cinema exper­i­ence (other than to see your chosen film that is)?

Well, accord­ing to research from a trial most people want to play mass audi­ence games.

Take a look at the fol­low­ing for Volvo run in the UK:

I guess it beats the oblig­at­ory ad for the local Tandoori.

Source: Advert­ising Lab

With 2008 barely star­ted, the Centre for Policy Stud­ies released The 2008 Lex­icon: A guide to con­tem­por­ary News­peak (free as a PDF). In just over 20 pages it provides an A to Z of the jar­gon that infests much of polit­ics and polit­ical report­ing today.

Read­ing through it, it’s impossible to ignore the par­al­lels between News­peak and marketing-speak (and par­tic­u­larly tech-speak). It’s not sur­pris­ing when the two mutu­ally inform and rein­force each other. The intro­duc­tion sums up News­peak as:

…a lethal blend of management-speak (stra­tegic frame­work, bench­mark, best prac­tice), therapy-speak (hol­istic, empower­ment, clos­ure) and post-modernism (nar­rat­ive, cul­tural shift, “truth”). The res­ult, too often, is hol­low obfuscation.

Much the same can be said for the lan­guage of mod­ern mar­ket­ing. Products and ser­vices have been replaced by solu­tions. Improve­ment by optim­isa­tion. Use by leverage.

The ques­tion is: does any­one actu­ally believe this moves brands closer to their customers?

There’s a say­ing in NLP that points out that com­mu­nic­a­tion is not about what you put out but rather what the recip­i­ent takes in. If all they take in is words without mean­ing and com­mu­nic­a­tion without human­ity, what does that say about the qual­ity of the res­ult­ing relationship?

Bey­ond the rela­tion­ship ques­tion, as the lan­guage becomes more con­struc­ted, more abstract, read­ers have to work harder at decod­ing it. This has the dual effect of fall­ing foul of their ever more lim­ited atten­tion spans and of leav­ing cus­tom­ers with no real sense of what they are buy­ing or why they should buy it.

This means that in try­ing to make products sound more than they are, the res­ult is to make them less than they could be.