Technically Speaking

by | Nov 25, 2014

Here are Immutable Communication Rules 1 through 3:

  1. We are not the target audience.
  2. We are not the target audience.
  3. We are not the target audience.

Here are Immutable Communication Rules 4 through 6:

  1. If technical people could communicate with non-technical people, God wouldn’t have invented marketing.
  2. If technical people could communicate with non-technical people, God wouldn’t have invented marketing.
  3. If technical people could communicate with non-technical people, God wouldn’t have invented marketing.

Here’s the dilemma: Marketing people have to trust subject matter experts (SMEs; i.e., technical people) to ensure product details, technical specs, etc. are properly represented. But the trust seldom extends the other way. So, marketing copy gets chewed up and rewritten. It might make perfect technical sense; but it’s unintelligible because SMEs ignore Immutable Rules 1 – 3. That makes our copy, which should be audience-serving, a popularity contest, which is self-serving.

Technical people drain language of suggestive meaning, of nuance and style, of voice and personality, of conceptual abstraction, of the abillity to engage the imagination, of the power to persuade and convince. They denote, rather than connote. Reading their prose is like eating sawdust.

But let’s not be unfair to our technical tormentors. While their their language may be dense and their purposes self-serving, their hearts are in the right place. They just can’t be in charge of marketing or marketing decisions. Then, with a little guidance, a little patience, a few kind words, constant reminders of Immutable Rules 1 – 6, mines in the hallways, and armed sentries posted at the door of the Marketing Department, marketing people can go about their work in peace and conceptual harmony.

Their abstruse antagonists can while away their minutiae as it suits their own punctilious predilections. With any luck, they may even figure out that not everything actually needs to be said, technically speaking:

He said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination. (George Eliot, Middlemarch)

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I, MikeGogulski [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons