6 Overused Branding Terms To Nix From Your Vocabulary

Welcome to our marketing blog! We’ve been busy growth-hacking with an authentic piece of snackable content.

Wait, what?

You’ve probably encountered dozens of sentences exactly like this, and had the same reaction. This type of marketing jargon sneaks its way into the vocabulary of marketers, who use these words so often that they’ve lost their meaning all together.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common branding buzzwords to decipher what they really mean:

Growth-hacking: The problem with this word is that people use it to describe anything they do. Wrote a blog post? Growth-hack. Tweeted an influencer? Growth Hack! Made a sandwich? Definitely a Growth-Hack.

Snackable Content: We all know what it means for content to be consumable, but what makes it snackable? Do you dip it in hummus and call it a day? Go ahead and create succinct, shareable content, but stop calling it a snack.

Omnichannel: If Omni translates to “everything,” then is your “omnichannel marketing strategy” truly reaching customers through every single channel possible? Unless you’ve pioneered a surefire way to advertise inside of customers’ dreams, we’ll take that as a no.

Brand Journalism: This is really just a more artistic way of talking about branded content. Marketers invented brand journalism once “storytelling” was truly driven into the ground, and we predict this term will have the same fate.

Game-Changer: Ah, the false promise of a game-changing product. Sorry to break it to you, but if you’re not actually impacting the human race, you’re not a game-changer. Truly game-changing products include things like the wheel, the printing press and the personal computer.

Authentic: Our high school English teacher taught us to never use the word “unique” so how is “authentic” any more meaningful? Rather than referring to your brand as authentic (an act which is inauthentic in itself) try doing something innovative and revolutionary. That same teacher taught us that actions speak louder than words.

Okay, we admit it – we’re guilty of using these words and sharing content that uses them. But the overuse of these words is a cycle we all contribute too, and it’ll be much easier to stop a bad habit if we’re in it together.