Office Vocabulary III: Marketing Jargons


If  you flap lips to Kotler,  turn blue rattling 4Ps, 5Cs, 7S, 9Ms , 12Ws and other alphanumeric marketing frameworks,  this list of marketing jargon will smell of freshly starched white cotton shirt on classic blue washed denims, getting you ready to hit the road running

Dilbert

  • Age Compression: young kids marketed adult or older children items. Walk through apparel line up in the kids section and you would know what I mean. Oh and toys too.
  • Aural branding: associating a sound with a brand. Ting ting tiding- rings a bell?
  • Autoagents: software which attempts to second-guess your consumption patterns. Digital Marketers this is lifeline.
  • Bait and switch: Entice the discount shoppers with advertisements of low priced items. They land and woof items are sold out, always! You have been clicking on those ads and entering showrooms with those sales haven’t you.
  • Beat the bushes: If you find saying marketing to bottom of the pyramid, unconventional or rural areas hackneyed here is your alternative.
  • Betamaxed: When better marketing for an inferior product wins.

Marketing Jargons

  • Blow-in: Advertising materials inserted between the pages of a newspaper and magazine that you painfully remove and delightfully sell a.k.a flyers.
  • Boilerplate: Standard legal wording used company or industry-wide. Since no one really reads it, this is a great place to be sneaky. T&C apply.
  • Brand Conscious babies: Reducing gap between popping out and recognizing brands! = Hole in pocket.
  • Brand terrorist: An employee who is undermining the organization. Quite the opposite of a brand custodian
  • Brandalism: sticking company logos on everything and anything. STOP!
  • Brandatories: Brand+ Mandatory = all the branding elements that must be included in a given ad or campaign.
  • Captive Kidspace: places business can sell to kids, knowing that they can’t escape. Schools.
  • Conspicuous non-consumption: a type of snobbery based on what an individual chooses not to buy.
  • Corporate logowear: apparels that scream the company’s logo.
  • Corporate vanity publishing: when businesses pay vast sums to produce beautiful coffee table books about themselves, their histories and their visions. The only people who will ever read these are the proofreaders at the publishing house.
  • CPS Cheap Plastic Shit: Promotional items (often made of plastic) distributed through advertising, corporate gifts, trade shows, or other give-away programs. Made in _____.
  • Drink our own champagne: A term meaning that a business will use the same product that they sell to their customers. The marketers at Cola companies are sworn loyalists!
  • FUD factor: Cheat sheet for selling: Create Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in the customers mind and then bring upon your solution. Insurance is an obvious culprit.
  • Kebab manoeuvre: packing up low quality products, heavily marketing them and selling at an elevated price
  • Less than zero: a customer who costs more to serve than they return in value. Junk them.
  • Marketecture: Technical advertising, usually including diagrams.
  • Open skies: Universally available.
  • Pig in a python: A sudden surge or sharp statistical increase in demographics, spending, age etc.
  • Prostitot: A pre-teen girl who dresses provocatively. Ah! for childhood.
  • Pucker factor: The degree of reaction to something that is startling or unexpected.
  • Reverse logistics: The return of a faulty product to the manufacturer.
  • Sausage and the sizzle: Used by sales when comparing substance (sausage) versus marketing spin (sizzle).
  • Tart up: To artificially increase the attractiveness of something.
  • Windshield survey: Avoiding the effort required to actually get out of the car during a site visit.
  • Word-of-mouse: Referral advertising, gossip or information shared over e-mail, blogs or social network.
  • Yogurt cities: Places that have an ‘active culture’, meaning a large number of museums, theatres, art galleries, etc.

Marketing Jargons

Office Vocabulary I: For the meeting magnate

Office Vocabulary II: Types of Workers

Office Vocabulary II: Types of Workers


Office Vocab for the Meeting Magnate struck a cord with you and inspired me to do a series. Am committed to find that waylaying humor in our work-life. So get ready to brush-up your vocabulary, dust-off a hard day’s work, huddle for a team sport and baptize the managers, peers and colleagues, I describe below.

Office Vocabulary: Types of Workers

  1. Agenda Benda: Someone who throws off the agenda, leading it into a different and unexpected territory
  2. Alpha geek: The head of IT.
  3. Alpha pup: The yuppy young trendsetters.
  4. Anointed: The Blue eyed boy, well or girl. The management’s pet who can do no wrong.
  5. Armchair general: A critique with no working knowledge.
  6. Bean-counter: A rather impolite way of addressing your accountant.
  7. Bell ringer: A door to door salesman. Remember Eureka Forbes!
  8. Big enchilada: An influential person in an organization.
  9. Body Nazis: Hard-core exercise and weightlifting fanatics who look down on anyone who doesn’t work out obsessively.
  10. Buellerlemic: A colleague who calls in sick a tad bit too often.
  11. Business-macho: Akshay Kumar at work. That one extra undone button, tufts of hair and gold chain.
  12. Business-provocative: Work attire that is sexy to the point of being inappropriate.
  13. Chainsaw Consultant: an outside expert brought in to hand over pink slips.
  14. Chartist: have deep love of graphs.
  15. Clocksucker: A completely unproductive employee; a waste of company money.
  16. Corprocrats: high earning, high achieving individuals who are far more at home with international business elite than they are with ordinary citizens of their own country.
  17. Cougar: That old power wielding woman with that handsome young fella!
  18. Cowboy: A worker that is difficult to supervise.
  19. Dead wood: An employee that no longer contributes anything meaningful to an organization.
  20. Dinosaur: An employee whose extensive experience is only surpassed by his resistance to change.
  21. Duck shuffler: Someone who disrupts your affairs after you’ve finally gotten all your ‘ducks in a row.’
  22. EPON Endless Pit Of Need: A colleague who continually seeks support for their ongoing personal and professional problems.
  23. Fall guy: A scapegoat.
  24. Firestarter: Someone known for inventing/exaggerating problems, then calling countless meetings to find a solution and be the hero.
  25. Flight risk: An employee who is thought to be considering quitting.
  26. Fly-tipper: A manager who avoids confrontation by quietly dumping work on the desks of his subordinates when they’re not around.
  27. Gofer: subordinate worker who is often given menial tasks.
  28. Goldbricker: That employee who works harder at looking valuable than actually contributing.
  29. Jargonaut: A true master of ridiculous jargon.
  30. Lightning rod: An individual that is a common target.
  31. Meanderthal: A person who has difficulty expressing themselves succinctly. They often give long, unfocused presentations.
  32. Monday morning quarterback: A person who offers criticism only after something negative has occurred.
  33. Mouse potato: couch potatoes of the internet generation
  34. Mucus trooper: Your colleague with a cold, at work, coughing all over you,
  35. Multi-slacker: A person who can perform many unproductive things at the same time. These include phone conversations, instant messaging, and web surfing, often on company time.
  36. Negatron: A person who sees the downside in every situation.
  37. New guy gene: The polite and friendly attitude that most new employees show.
  38. Peacock: A person who displays every award, certification, plaque on their cubicle walls.
  39. Pigeon: Someone that is easily deceived.
  40. Pilot fish: A junior-level manager that closely tails a senior executive.
  41. Powerpoint Bunny: Adept at the art of making presentations.
  42. Queen of the pigs: The best of a bad breed; the number one loser.
  43. Rhino: That superannuated colleague with that pretty young thing!
  44. Scrub: An entry-level employee. Usually replaceable.
  45. Seagull manager: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps over everything, and then leaves.
  46. Show coach: A manager who leads by example.
  47. Show pony: Someone who superficially presents well but lacks real depth.
  48. Spokesweasel: A public relations agent.
  49. Stress puppy: A person who is continuously anxious and lives for any sympathy gained from complaining about it.
  50. Tap dancer: A person who seems busy and productive, but makes little headway.
  51. Teflon Shoulders: co-workers who offloads work to others. Non-stick.
  52. Text starved: to have a largely silent phone.
  53. Vanilla Vapor trail: The wafts of perfume or cologne of a colleague.
  54. Velvet lip: A gifted smooth talker.
  55. Work of Shame: A dusk to dawn after-work party, followed by showing up at work in the same clothes. You can only hope nobody is noticing you.

Zomato: Bite on this.


Am adventurous with food, especially when the adventure sits in another’s plate. Am committed to spending hours browsing over where to eat. On many occasions missing the open hours and compromising on my meal. Defeating the purpose all together, I know. Those are exceptions. Zomato is pinned to my start screen, it serves me well. Payback time.

Here are 10 ideas;  some a gravy train, others will bring home more bacon, some are a piece of cake and perhaps very few that you may chew and spit out.

Food for Thought

  1. Travel recommendations: A partnership with the travel segment should serve your customers well. Think MakeMyTrip, Expedia, Ibibo, Yatra and more. As a tourist am keen to discover new places to eat, am looking for recommendations. It would be fantastic to get that information right up. Book a package and with it get recommended places. Perhaps even throw some deals into the package itself. Help me discover.
  2. Location based promotions: Don’t we all love discounts? How we discover them needs to be easier. Currently one zeroes down on the restaurant and then one knows of the promotions running. Why not have promotions and discounts listed separately? Everyone cares for a better ROI. Your users included.
  3. Events: Yes, think category. Shouldn’t everything food be there at Zomato. Now I don’t mean be everything to everyone, but listing food events & walks is not too off. Book My Show and or other event platforms could be great partners. Cross app traffic integration. Win-Win.
  4. Mobile wallet: Home delivery or dining-in, mobile is my wallet. Click to pay. Seamless and convenient for users. Rich user history for Zomato. Need I say more?
  5. Split the bill: Now assuming you are going the mobile wallet route why not solve for a common problem that of splitting a bill. Pay for what you order. Place the order on the app and get your bill. No bad debts.
  6. In App Orders: Give me a check box menu, let me place my order, generate an estimated bill, save my address and credit card details, track my order. Serve it hot. No dialing in for orders, reduces manpower dependency and turnaround time for the restaurants, Simply efficient.
  7. Home cooked food: You recommend restaurants but then there is a market for home cooked food, not quite organized agreed but could do with the right user base. There are plenty start-ups but do they have scale? Food for thought?
  8. Rude food: There are power users and reviewers but I miss a Vir Sanhgvi like content on Zomato. More academic interest, yes. But that’s how one explores, learns and engages. Please excuse the paid bloggers. They don’t yield the kind of credibility anymore.
  9. Personalized recommendations: Inundated with social; more feeds, more check-ins, more point of views on reviews, to what end? You know what I bookmark, what I browse, categories I read, where I go and probably if you included some my suggestions what I eat and how much I spend. I deserve some personalized recommendations don’t you think?
  10. Loyalty: Now you are not into a loyalty program but in this day and age of decreasing attention span some form of reward is good. Don’t read this as screaming a discount, How about Gourmet Club invite for power users? Occasions I am likely to dine out, Birthdays & Anniversary are a no brainer? Make my date special, make group check-in count. Take a leaf out of American Express.

Holler your business, marketing and product managers and tell me what you think.