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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 Prod­ucts and ser­vices have been replaced by solu­tions.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.

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