I’m slightly ashamed to be mentioning BT again in order to open this post, but there we are, I am. I still remember an old BT advert featuring Maureen Lipman, where she states: “You get an ology, you’re a scientist.”, in fact here it is.
As a marketer the nearest I’ve gotten to science in my career is when I’ve hired Futurologists (they’ve got an ology so they must be scientists) to do after dinner speaking. What a great job it is being a Futurologist (or Futurist if you want to renounce your ology) – you make predictions about the future and people are impressed with your vision. Nobody can say you are wrong, or disprove you as the future hasn’t happened yet. What a fantastic gig that is! I wonder how you go about becoming a Futurologist?
From this moment onward, I am going to use my blog as an experiment, in part (I’ll still talk marketing), to predict the future in order to practise towards becoming a futurologist. The tag cloud on the right will show the terms mentioned in my blogs – the more often I talk about subjects the larger they will appear on the right. If I’m talking about the future, then the largest words in the cloud will be the things I’m predicting will happen. So, not really very scientific, I don’t have an ology to my name yet – but it could be interesting.
So, to my first prediction…
#1 There will be more w@nk words used in business meetings in 2011 than in 2010.
Let’s be honest here. The less people know, the more they fluff their language up with lengthy words to conjure up an element of believability to their spiel. The internet is a breeding ground for w@nky terms which budding marketers can throw about in presentations to make them look clever. From, taxonomy (classifying things) to web 3.0 (doesn’t really mean anything), there is always a w@nky term to be had to show that you know what you’re talking about – and in general people know less and less what they are talking about as they throw away ‘old ways of doing things’, in favour of made up nonsense that somebody has blogged somewhere. So, this trend means that next year we’re going to have to put up with more ‘new thinking’ and its associated www@nky terms than we’ve had to put up with in 2010. It also means that more and more people are making a living talking utter nonsense with no basis – but that’s the world we live in.
Addendum | I have to disagree with a little of my own post here. Marketing is actually very scientific when it’s done properly – although more and more that’s not the case, which is my point!