Marketing Clichés #1: “Improving the user experience”.
This is the first in what will likely become a series.
Web writers and/or their managers love to use language that puts a positive spin on company-centered “improvements”.
One such spin is the growing number of sites which announce some new feature and then describe it as “improving the user experience”.
Usually this is complete nonsense. The change or upgrade is almost always made to serve the needs of the company and improve its revenues.
But writers and/or managers love to be “hip” to Web 2.0 lingo, so they spin the announcement to include phrases like “enhanced user experience” and “better interact with our visitors.”
For your amusement you can see 79,000+ examples by searching on Google for “improved user experience”.
There is a timeline in the birth, growth and decline of these phrases.
- Someone uses the phrase legitimately and truthfully.
- The phrase appeals to other marketers and they start to use it as well, more or less truthfully.
- A usage “tipping point” is achieved, and tens of thousands of marketers jump in and use the same phrase, with increasing degrees of dishonestly.
- The phrase starts to lose all meaning, it fades into “blah-blah land”, and the original user of the phrase has to edit his or her site and say the same thing in a new way.
The godfather of all these phrases is probably “integrated solutions”, with 1,780,000 results on Google so far.
Which are your favourite marketing clichés, and what are their Google counts?
Please share.
