Even though I’ve seen the compromising photographs from his errant youth (seriously), and even though he’s used his blog on this site to have a swipe at marketing people (like me), I have nothing but respect for Mr. Zone.  So I thought I shouldn’t let his observation “I hate the word convergence. My hope is that eventually marketing people will do so as well. It says too much in too many different situations and becomes meaningless to everybody except the speaker” pass without comment from me.

As always with Doug, there’s more than one thing going on here.  There’s the notion that marketing people talk a lot of crap (it’s a point obliquely made, but it’s there) and there’s the notion that marketing people matter even though they talk a lot of crap (it’s a point obliquely made, but it’s there.)  And then there’s the point – obliquely made by the simple fact of writing the lines quoted above – that people care enough to get angry, or at least write, about it all, which is an odd response to have about someone you think talks crap.  So…

I’m not sure that marketing people use what I agree are vacuous phrases like “convergence” entirely off their own bats.  We, after all, are briefed; we are simply the human GUI through which the technical bowels of the company are exposed (I think I just called you a bowel, Doug.  Apologies.)  That’s not to say that we marketers can’t and/or don’t think for ourselves, but what we do is shape technology for public consumption, especially those in marketing communications.  We refine, but we don’t define it.  So it seems to me unlikely that “convergence” is the exclusive creation of marketing; more likely it’s a phrase we’ve picked up and run with off the chief technology officer’s bat.  That’d be you, Doug.  In truth, I’ve personally always hated the word “convergence”, right back to my days as a journalist a decade ago when, in the main, it wasn’t marketers who introduced it into the language because it wasn’t marketing directors I was interviewing back then.  If you think marketers love using a buzzword, you’d be right.  But not half as much as technologists love inventing them.  In fact, inside every technologist there’s a frustrated copywriter trying to get out.  So it turns out that marketing directors don’t talk crap after all.  They just regurgitate it.  Am I right?  Good.

Well, not good, actually.  Not good because marketers DO matter, and re-gurgitated crap is an unbecoming output for someone of such influence.  But if what goes into the funnel is supposed to emerge new and improved, then logic dictates that far from being a simple GUI, marketing’s role is also as a filter.  Put another way, if technologists can’t articulate their own output clearly and persuasively, they should respect the ability of a good marketer to do it for them.  Which some do, but many don’t.  I don’t agree that marketers are exclusively responsible for the widespread use of meaningless words like convergence.  But I do agree that they can be held responsible for banning them.  Being successful in that endeavor, though, will be an uphill struggle; that’s for sure.  Why would a technologist want to take advice on articulating his genius from a humble marketer, after all?

Should we care about all this?  Actually, yes.  Hidden in the humour here is a real point.  I suspect that the quality of the dialogue and the degree of respect that exists between the marketers and the technologists in a technology company is a key to success.  If both pull in the same direction and hold the others expertise in high esteem at the same time as holding each other’s hand to the candle, a common language should result that far transcends clichés.  If you scan a company’s website and see it swimming in a sea of hoary catchphrases (like “convergence”) you can probably conclude that you’re not dealing with the sharpest tools in the box, whether the company in question is successful at present or not.  If, on the other hand, what you read is distinctive, unfamiliar, and thoughtful even if, occasionally, it’s harder to absorb because of that, then the marriage between technology and marketing – while it may not be polished yet – is almost certainly heading in the right direction.  Breaking new ground was never easy and familiarity with change takes time, but it’s usually the best road to a worthwhile destination.   Meanwhile, the banal majority (of technologists and marketers alike) can sun themselves in their walled gardens, thoughts converging in real time, entirely network agnostic.  Right?