Is your jargon someone else's nonsense?

In an effort to stop local councils from using impenetrable jargon, the UK Local Government Association has issued a list of 200 banned terms.

As the LGA chairman Margaret Eaton said: “"If a council fails to explain what it does in plain English then local people will fail to understand its relevance to them or why they should bother to turn out and vote.” It's not a hard task to edit that statement to talk about companies using jargon with their customers.

Indeed, many of the phrases on the list are commonly found in marketing and sales literature too. When I started out in marketing, I wrote a section of a proposal that seemed to me to be in perfectly clear, plain English. I was rather proud of it. The sales manager told me that it was far too clear, and he would have to rewrite it so that the customer wouldn't be able to understand it. I was never sure whether he was joking or not.

Looking at the list, there are some terms that certainly mean nothing, but a lot are simply habit. The same words are used over and over again across numerous documents, to the point of tedium. I'm not advocating that we avoid these terms altogether – if we and the customers both understand exactly what they imply, then that's fine. What perhaps we all need to consider is whether there aren't alternative, simpler, more meaningful ways of saying what we mean.

Here are few examples from the list that do crop up in sales and marketing on a regular basis:

Core message/principles/values

Dialogue

Downstream

Early win

Enabler

Enhance

Facilitate

Functionality

Going forward

Good practice (and best practice)

Governance

Holistic

Horizon scanning

Paradigm

Partnerships

Prioritization

Process driven

Procurement

Single point of contact

Stakeholder

Top-down

Utilise

Value-added

Vision