Marketing in Plain English: Why Buzzwords Get Confusing

When strengths are overused, they quietly become blind spots. In marketing, those blind spots often show up in our language – as buzzwords or jargon.

Marketing professionals are fluent in a unique dialect – a mix of corporate jargon, consultant-speak, technical terms, and digital shorthand. In our determination to be precise and communicate as subject matter experts, we often forget how to sound human.

Strip away the jargon, and marketing is about people, behaviour, connection, and impact. Good marketing can be explained as a business conversation that solves a real-world problem. Marketing terminology is a mix of metrics, strategies, and performance indicators with varied modelling complexities. Professionals often consider them in clusters, because together they tell the story of how a brand is performing and signal what needs to change. They each have their context, time, and place. But they should always be translated into plain English, to have a clear conversation that is understood by anyone. And from that connection comes a natural opportunity to share and offer what you do.

Like most native speakers, it’s easy to rattle off what you want to say, only to realise you may have already lost your audience in the process. When we say brand purpose, we mean: What do we believe in? brand positioning, we’re really asking: What do we want to be known for? And when we talk about brand equity, we’re asking: Do people trust us enough to choose us, and pay for what we offer?

Then there is customer lifetime value (CLV), which measures the length and value of a relationship over time. On a human scale, it is the difference between a lifelong friendship and a one-off conversation. It is often easier and far more rewarding to nurture existing relationships than to constantly form new ones, even though both have their place.

This is where customer acquisition cost (CAC) comes into the picture. CAC tells us how much we are investing to gain a new customer. If your CAC is extremely high, it may be a sign that you are working too hard, or spending too much, just to earn attention. That’s a valuable insight in business especially when budgets are limited.

Even the more mysterious digital terms have very ordinary meanings. Retargeting for example, is when technology notices your interest in something and gently reminds you about it by following you around online. A bit like a teacher giving a curious student a book on the topic they had asked about earlier that day. Another popular term is growth hacking which is far from anything illegal or magical, and is simply the act of being smart, fast, and resourceful with the tools and data you have.

The same applies to digital marketing acronyms, which can quickly alienate anyone who doesn’t use them on a daily basis and has no context for their relevance. When we obsess over the cost per click (CPC) of an online ad, we are looking at how much we pay each time someone clicks on it. That figure is then measured against an industry benchmark to make sense of performance.

If you look at classic corporate and consultant language terms like leverage, ecosystem, touchpoints, and end-to-end to name a few, you’ll notice that they’re all everyday dictionary words at their core describing coordination in one form or another. In my book, I use a Formula One metaphor, among others, to bring marketing coordination and collaboration to life because metaphors are universal storytelling aids people always understand.

So, when someone says, “We need better end-to-end alignment across our brand ecosystem and touchpoints,” what they really mean is: Everything needs to work together, from beginning to end, for real people.

That’s it.

In real life, one brand may boast 50,000 followers yet see little engagement or repeat business. Their customer lifetime value is often low, and their customer acquisition cost is likely high. They’ve paid for attention, not connection. Another brand may have far fewer followers but strong engagement, repeat purchases, and genuine loyalty. Their numbers are smaller, but their relationships last longer.

Another false positive is when an advert follows you endlessly after a single click. Engagement or click-through rates may rise, but trust often falls. A metric may improve while the relationship deteriorates. That’s what happens when buzzwords and numbers replace human understanding.

Marketing is a business function that everyone can appreciate when explained in plain English – whether you’re speaking to internal teams or external customers. The goal is always the same: real connection.

// Charral Izhiman