Nobody Talks Like That
I spend a lot of my days taking pretty good content and removing words from them.
Not because the concepts are too complicated. Usually, it’s just the opposite. Somewhere between the person who is an expert that understands the thing and the person who needs to understand the thing, a layer of corporate language gets added. Suddenly, we’re not helping customers. We’re now delivering customer-centric solutions. But we are not making something easier. Now, we are streamlining workflows to drive efficiency. And God forbid we just use something. We have to leverage it.
We see this all the time in branding, and it’s not just B2B companies doing this – jargon knows no bounds – it happens with B2C companies as well. And we understand how it happens. These are smart people working on complicated concepts and messages. They know their subject inside and out. They have terminology they use with each other every day. Then marketing gets involved. Then leadership. Then legal. Then somebody decides the sentence needs to sound a little more “professional” or they need to provide all the details (that they know about). By the time it reaches the website, nobody talks like that.
Professional Doesn’t Have to Mean Corporate
That’s one of the stranger things about business writing. People will say something perfectly clearly in a meeting and then refuse to write it down that way. We’ll ask someone what their product does and they’ll give us a great answer. They tell us clearly, with specific insights, and make it very interesting. Then we’ll look at the website and find something like: “An innovative, integrated platform engineered to empower organizations through a best-in-class platform solution.”
What happened?
The person we talked to five minutes ago was a storyteller.
That’s why a big part of our job is listening. Not just for facts, but for language. We listen for the little words and phrases people keep coming back to—the nomenclature they naturally use to describe what they do, how it works and why it matters. Not jargon for jargon’s sake, but the language that feels specific and true to them. The little phrase an engineer uses when they finally stop explaining the technology and just tell you why it matters and how it works. The way a salesperson describes the product at a trade show. Or how a customer, who has an affinity for the product, talks about it when we conduct our research. When we hear something good, we grab onto it.
Those sentences are usually better than anything sitting in the “Messaging” column of a brand guidelines document because they sound like how people actually talk.
Jargon Isn’t Always the Enemy
To be clear, we’re not anti-jargon. Every industry has shorthand, and a lot of it is useful as it is accepted. If two engineers can communicate an idea accurately in three words instead of thirty, great. The problem starts when internal language becomes external language without anyone noticing. Words that feel specific inside a company can become almost meaningless outside of it. Innovative. Transformative. World-class. End-to-end. Best-in-class. Solutions.
None of these words are technically wrong. That’s almost the problem. They can apply to anyone.
If we can take a paragraph from your website, paste it onto your competitor’s website and nobody notices, we have some work to do.
Clear Isn’t Dumb
There’s also this strange fear that using simpler language somehow makes a company sound less intelligent. Like the more complicated the subject, the more complicated the sentence has to be.
We’d argue the opposite.
It takes a much better understanding of something to explain it simply. Anyone can hide behind terminology. The harder job is figuring out what actually matters, stripping away what doesn’t and saying the thing in a way another person understands immediately.
We have a saying around here: If we have a hard time understanding it—no one will.
It sounds obvious, but it comes up more than you’d think. If we can’t read a sentence and explain what it actually means, we can’t expect a customer to do the work for us. Sometimes that means asking another question. Sometimes it means going back to the engineer, the salesperson or the person closest to the product and saying, “Okay, but what does that mean?”
That becomes even more important in technical and regulated industries. If your product is complicated, your communication doesn’t need to prove it. Your audience already has enough to think about. Good writing should remove some of that work.
Would a Person Actually Say This?
There’s a basic question I keep coming back to when I’m writing: Would a person actually say this?
Not necessarily word for word. A website isn’t a transcript. But could I imagine someone from the company saying it across a table?
If the answer is no, I start cutting. I break it down into simple statements.
You probably wouldn’t tell someone you “deliver holistic solutions.” You’d tell them what you help people do. You probably wouldn’t say your company is “committed to fostering meaningful outcomes.” You’d tell them what you care about. You probably wouldn’t introduce yourself as “a leading provider of innovative technologies.” You’d just tell them what you make.
And strangely enough, you’d probably sound more credible doing it.
Stop Covering Up Your Voice
There’s a lot of conversation in branding about finding a voice. Sometimes we think the first step is simpler. Stop covering up the one you already have.
At the end of the day, a lot of this really boils down to two things: what we, as a company or brand, want to say and how the people we want to reach actually want to hear it. The work is finding that intersection. That’s where the message starts to feel clear, relevant and real. Everything else is mostly noise.
Listen to the people who know the business. Pay attention to how customers describe it. Write down the good stuff people say before they have time to make it sound official. Then resist the urge to corporate it up. People don’t need your brand to sound like a company. They need it to sound like someone worth listening to.
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