Marketing, PR and branding are only as good as their language will allow them to be. So it's no surprise to find marketing bloggers talking about language. I've been following conversations about language use among the Corante Network marketing bloggers:

CONSUMER: John Winsor of Under The Radar takes a look at the history of "consumer" and "consumption" and urges us all to think beyond these words when picturing customers:

"[Alvin] Toffler [author of The Third Age] spoke of consumers of the future being interested in participating in the creation of their own products. He was right. Today people are opting to gain local knowledge rather than simply succumb to the available market information."

Many marketers substitute the word "customer" for "consumer" to get away from the connotation of consumption, and yet some are even sensitive to "customer." In a terrific post from last September, Jennifer Rice of What's Your Brand Mantra responds to a reader who called her out for using "customer":

"The issue is not the words we use; it's the top-down, centralized management mentality that presumes that the business knows everything and the 'customer' knows nothing. And this is why many businesses are having a tough time adapting to the social technology & grassroots revolution."

Grant McCracken of This Blog Sits.... has also tackled the consumer/customer issue. In this post he suggests the term "multiplier":

"The term multipler may help marketers acknowledge more forthrightly that whether our work is a success is in fact out of our control. All we can do is to invite the multiplier to participate in the construction of the brand by putting it to work for their own purposes in their own world. When we called them "consumers" we could think of our creations as an end game and their responses as an end state. The term "multiplier" or something like it makes it clear that we depend on them to complete the work."

BLOGGER: Apart from the "blogger vs journalist" debate, now apparently we have.....blogger vs writer? This week Ad Age's Simon DuMenco wrote a column titled "A Blogger Is Just A Writer With A Cooler Name":

"It occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing -- writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology. Even though I tend to first use Microsoft Word on the way to being published, I am not, say, a Worder or Wordder. It’s just software, people! The underlying creative/media function remains exactly the same."

To which Shel Holtz at a shel of my former self posted this comment:

"Dumenco must never have heard of 'novelist,' 'biographer,' or 'journalist,' unless he considers all of these to be just writers with cooler names."

Shel also posted on this year's release of the "List of Words and Phrases Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness":

"It seems to have become a popular notion that more general terms should be used to replace specific labels with narrower meanings....[but]...say 'journal' and people will wonder what kind. Say 'blog' and people will know just what you’re talking about."

MEMOIR: I had my own hot-button word issue this week in reponse to the ongoing fallout from the revelation that James Frey's best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, turns out to be more fiction than non-fiction. The consensus of the publishing world, with Oprah's blessing, is that it doesn't matter, because many great memoirs have had their factuality called into question. Great writing is great writing, etc., etc.

This, however, is not about literature. This is about marketing. Hanging a genre label on a piece of literature is an act of marketing because it gives people information about what they are buying. It offers them a frame of reference, a set of expectations. And the fact is that Frey and Doubleday likely called the book a memoir because it would sell better that way. Otherwise they would have called it fiction and sold it as such.

For them now to say it doesn't matter is disingenuous and unethical. If you are selling something you have an obligation to provide potential buyers with as authentic a description of it as possible. If A Million Little Pieces was a 1993 Honda Civic and the seller said it had only 25,000 miles on it when in fact it had 225,000 miles on it, the buyer would have grounds for a lawsuit.

(Image: ©Nick Jones, The Language Investigator)

You'd have to look far and wide before finding anyone who'd argue that we should add more buzzwords to the marketing vocabulary, or that we shouldn't try to use plainer language that communicates some actual reality to at least one speech community, if not to the widest possible set of speech communities possible.

Two Hub contributors have posted in the last couple of months on this issue. BrandMantra's Jennifer Rice posted on being dissed by a reader for using the notorious buzzword -- "customer"? The disgruntled reader suggests "people" instead. Jennifer, and indeed many of the commenters, responded that "people" is far too general a word to do the work that "customer" does, linguistically. And Jennifer points out that, "The issue is not the words we use; it's the top-down, centralized management mentality that presumes that the business knows everything and the 'customer' knows nothing. And this is why many businesses are having a tough time adapting to the social technology & grassroots revolution. "

In an unrelated (except thematically) post, Grant McCracken suggested replacing the word "consumer," about which he said " 'Consumers' sound like ravening beasts who must destroy what they buy instead of renting it from the recycler." Grant suggests "multipliers" because "the term multipler may help marketers acknowledge more forthrightly that whether our work is a success is in fact out of our control. All we can do is to invite the multiplier to participate in the construction of the brand by putting it to work for their own purposes in their own world. When we called them 'consumers' we could think of our creations as an end game and their responses as an end state. The term 'multiplier' or something like it makes it clear that we depend on them to complete the work."

IMHO -- neither "consumer" nor "customer" is a buzzword. Both are old words that reflect specific realities to people across a number of different speech communities. The problem is that "consumer" packs approximately a ton of negative connotation in its baggage, while "customer" apparently is beginning to founder under the weight of negative connotations, as well. It's unfortunate when words that have served well begin to age ungracefully, but it's a perfectly natural part of language evolution.

Also part of how language evolves is the adoption of replacements for words that eventually get pulled out of daily usage under their own weight. You can't hurry new-word adoption along -- it's viral to the max. That being said, someone has to start. I think "people" will never do as a replacement for "consumer" or "customer," but "multiples" has possibilities. Any other suggestions?