Our marketing universe is filled with jargon. Most of which is contrived to reinforce differentiation. Unfortunately, all this really does is reinforce for clients that agencies use jargon as a marketing ploy.

Why? First because they really don't care about the name. Second, after a few dog and pony shows where every agency in the competitive bid is throwing around all this made up terminology, albeit with slightly different meanings, the client gets irritated.

Why? Because every client is made up of individuals all with varying degrees, associations, bias, and actual knowledge related to marketing and branding. All this does is create confusion.

And who are the worst culprits of this nasty little habit? Branding and advertising firms. Take for example the following:

The point of showcasing your expertise is to provide the client with what they need to be successful, not tossing around a bunch of lingo that they could care less about. That's why at Tugboat, we concentrate on speaking whatever language or terminology that makes the most sense to the client. Because "branding" the process is not  important to the client.