Heads Up, Marketers: That Jargon Habit Could Be Costing Your Brand Millions of Dollars

What would you think if you received a memo that said your company is “leveraging operational synergies to paradigm-shift our workflow vis-à-vis productivity enhancements”?

Actually, never mind. Odds are you read memos like that every day. So here’s a better question: What does that sentence even mean, anyway?

If you don’t know, there’s no shame in admitting it. After all, that sentence is 100% pure jargon. And according to the results of a just-released study from Kickresume, plenty of professionals don’t know what it means, either.

And while that revelation might be amusing, it carries a very sobering insight: Corporate jargon is not only proliferating in industry—in marketing, most certainly—it’s also impairing communication and hampering productivity as a result.

“Jargon is like speaking in codes,” explained Martin Poduska, head of content at Kickresume, an online resume-building platform. All professionals, he added, “start developing their own language, but if you’re not part of that group, it’s going to make communication very difficult. It makes the lives of even those on the inside much more difficult.”

And, potentially, costly to the companies that employ them.

To gauge the effect that jargon is having on the corporate world, Kickresume drafted two versions of a workaday business memorandum. One group of 25 people received a plainspoken version of the memo. (Its essence was: “We are combining teams to work more efficiently and be more productive.”) A second group of 25 received a jargony version that included the “operational synergies” spiel at the top of this story.

The group that had read the vernacular scored 80% on a subsequent reading-comprehension test, while the jargon readers scored just 50%. An hour later, when asked to recall key points from the memo, the group that had read the conversational version could recall 34 of those points. The jargon group? Only 12.

From these and related questions, the researchers also determined that the slowed or impaired communication caused by jargon is likely behind real dollar losses for companies. 

How many dollars? Grammarly and Harris Poll data suggest that teams waste some 7.5 hours every week compensating for poor communication. Using an average white-collar wage of $36 per hour, Kickresume calculated that corporate America’s jargon habit could be costing it anywhere from $546,000 for a firm with 100 employees to as much as $40 million for one with 10,000.

Which begs the question: If jargon is that costly and that annoying (a related Kickresume survey of X postings suggested that as much as 85% of executives actually don’t like it), then why do so many professionals still use it?

ADWEEK posed that question to Tony Maher, general manager of the U.K-based Plain English Campaign. In Maher’s view, jargon practitioners are often focusing more on grandstanding than doing actual jobs.

“Some people write to impress rather than perform,” he said. “[Jargon] might make them feel better to begin with but it will rapidly have the opposite effect. People will simply stop reading their memos.”

“One of the biggest attractions [to using jargon] is that you can hide behind it,” Poduska added. “If you don’t have much to say in the first place, you can easily keep using jargon. [Or] if you have an unpleasant message, like when you have to fire someone, words like ‘streamlining’ sound not as bad.”

Unfortunately, thanks to AI, corporate babble is only likely to increase. ChatGPT was happy to turn our nine-word directive “it’s important for the marketing department to work hard” into 64-word tract laced with bromides like: “By aligning our efforts and fostering a collaborative environment, we can optimize our campaigns and enhance brand visibility.”

As jargon proliferates, the paradox is that simple, straightforward writing may capture more attention for its rarity alone.

“I’m always impressed when I read a difficult message that I understand the first time I read it,” Maher said. “Either that person really understands the subject matter or they have taken a long time to make sure I can. If I have to read it three times, it goes in the bin.”