I coined a term “marko-babble” to cover all the gibberish marketers use to try and justify their opinions and decisions.  You’ll know marko-babble when you hear it. It’s a lot of “no there there” reasoning and makes you scratch your head in wonderment.

There’s also a great deal of brand-o-babble out there in the brand planning sphere.  One example I came across recently was the use of the Jungian archetypes.  A brand agency smartly used the idea to sell a strategy project to a university.  Sounds higher ed, no?  Name drop Carl Jung.  Well, the problem was, the brand shop did 500 interviews of students, faculty and staff (good homework, for sure) but it resulted in three clusters of archetypal users or consumer: Supportive Advocate, Experiential Adventurer, and Determined Enthusiast.  Sound like the entire planet to me.  Then they built the strategy off these three groups.

It’s important to understand customer care-abouts. But what the brand shop neglected to do, at least as far as I can, was to include brand good-ats into the equation.  Without a balance of good-ats and care-abouts you are simply pandering to your existing target. And overlooking endemic values that make your brand great.  It’s not a smart growth strategy.

Add to that the fact that the three archetypes, combined, are not particularly discrete and you really water down the value prop.

And that’s no babble. Peace.