ADLER Provides Fresh Insight into Effective Marketing Terminology

When describing your business to potential and existing customers, you want to make sure you are portraying yourself in the correct light. Trust and loyalty are difficult to secure and can be just as tricky to retain, and so your exact choice of terminology is highly important in communications in both the digital world and the physical.

Tired clichés and hollow phrases get thrown around all the time, and customer expectations are constantly evolving; these two factors combine to create a situation whereby the simple choice of a single word can mean the difference between success and failure in your marketing efforts.

In an effort to ascertain with more solidity the words and phrases which appeal to the modern customer base, ADLER Manufacturing Ltd. queried the opinions of five business and marketing experts from a range of industries including technology, luxury retail, travel and business marketplaces, presenting them with a list of promotional words and asking them to highlight which ones they would recommend, and which they think are likely to turn customers away. This allowed them to subsequently categorise each as either ‘Bad’, ‘Poor’, ‘Okay’, or ‘Good’, according to their effectiveness.

These five experts (pictured below & listed left-to-right) consisted of: Barry Ryan from Tactus Group, Huib Maat from Pairfum, Robb Young from XperienceDays, Sean Mallon from Bizdaq, and Tatyana Kozhevnikova from Artefact London.

Img: ADLER Manufacturing Ltd.

The analysis of these results proved to be rather telling, as it shows that oft-used words such as ‘Strategic’, ‘Well-rounded’, and ‘Visionary’ are considered more likely to do harm than good. Sean Mallon provided more detail on the rationale behind his dislike of ‘Well-rounded’ in particular, explaining that “businesses exist for a purpose and that purpose is to provide goods or services. By describing your business as ‘well-rounded’, you’re not telling anyone about the goods or services you’re providing, and nothing about how you provide them”.

‘Strategic’ meanwhile is considered to be unclear in its meaning and impossible to measure, while ‘Visionary’ is criticised for offering no real benefit to the consumer. Words/ phrases including ‘Adaptable’, ‘Game-changing’, ‘Hands-on’, and ‘Passionate’, among others, fared little better and are considered ‘Poor’ on ADLER’s hierarchy of terminology.

Img: ADLER Manufacturing Ltd.

At the other end of the scale sit the better-received terms of ‘Efficient’, ‘Innovative’, and ‘Unique’, which are considered to be most effective in building customer trust and loyalty regarding your brand with a classification of ‘Good’.

‘Efficient’ was singled out by Tatyana Kozhevnikova was a particularly effective term as “this means less cost within the business, better price, [and] faster delivery for the customer”. Barry Ryan and Huib Maat respectively asserted that ‘Innovative’ and ‘Unique’ are in fact the best words to use when describing your business; given that Barry Ryan works in the technology industry and Huib Maat deals in luxury fragrances, the appeal each phrase holds to the aforementioned individuals makes perfect sense.

For a little more detail regarding the outcome of ADLER’s queries, as well as a breakdown of each expert’s individual responses, follow this link to the company’s original feature. 

Sam Bonson

Sam is an aspiring novelist with a passion for fantasy and crime thrillers. Currently working as Editor of Social Songbird, he hopes to one day drop that 'aspiring' prefix. Follow him @Songbird_Sam

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