What’d He Say??

Jonathan Bernstein crisis communications, crisis management, Crisis Prevention, Crisis Response Leave a Comment

Using corporate jargon is guaranteed to alienate stakeholders

“There’s tremendous turbulence in the ecosystem, of course, in mobility. And that’s sort of an obvious thing, but also there’s tremendous architectural contention at play. And so I’m going to really frame our mobile architectural distinction. We’ve taken two fundamentally different approaches in their causalness,” said Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIM), to Bloomberg Businessweek editors as he introduced the BlackBerry PlayBook – RIM’s answer to the iPad.

I would venture to guess that the first thing most of you said after reading this quote, taken from Merrie Spaeth’s list of BIMBO awards for the month, was “what?!” When seeking to communicate, whether it be for crisis management or, in this case, marketing, it’s crucial that your audience is able to understand what in the world you are talking about. Remember, your general stakeholders are very unlikely to understand the jargon used within your business, even if it seems commonplace to you, and if the message presented is unintelligible it’s simply human nature to ignore it and move on, which is the last thing anyone wants when trying to get their message across.

The BCM Blogging Team
https://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/

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