Words and word choice are critical elements in advertising campaigns (web sites, press releases, etc.). They can tell your story or turn off your readers/viewers.
With all of the tools at our disposal (online dictionary, thesaurus, word synonyms, etc.) it should be very easy for marketers to avoid the list below. And yet we see these words again and again.
The list was emailed to me recently and taken from a story on About.com -- you can read more about each word there. I simply list them for you here:
1) Amazing
2) Free
3) New (or Improved)
4) Different
5) Incredible
6) Just
7) Guaranteed
It's amazing how many times we offer free or new items as incentives, calling ourselves different from our competitors while not demonstrating just how incredible our products really are. Doing so will cause our customers to become even more cynical of our words -- and, when they do that, they stop listening to the story we want to share with them.
Others will say the reason we see these words so often is because they are effective. Perhaps. As long as you are authentically amazing, incredible, different, or really free.
At some point though customers will desire something that is fresh rather than different, bold rather than incredible. Your challenge, your opportunity, is to determine when that tipping point is due to occur (difficult to do) -- or, you could move it closer to that point yourself by leading the way.
www.figment-consulting.com
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