Try It in English Next Time

Have you ever suffered from wrap rage? That’s the feeling you get when you try to open one of those clear plastic packages that so many products come in today. I’m sure the manufacturers mean well; I doubt they intentionally set out to make things difficult for their customers, but that’s where they end up.

This analogy occurred to me while I was reviewing sales literature for a client project I’m working on. Trying to decipher exactly what their products and services do for their customers was like trying to open up one of those packages—you know there’s some value in there somewhere, but it’s difficult to get to.

That’s because so much promotional material is loaded with multisyllabic abstract jargon. Or in plain English: big words that most people don’t understand and can’t picture in their minds. You read it once, and maybe get a vague sense of what they’re selling and what it means for you, but then you usually have to re-read it a couple of times and translate it into English in your own mind to make sense of it.

Buyers have so much access to information that they don’t necessarily have an incentive to make the effort to understand your difficult material. This is where the analogy with packaging falls apart a little. When you’re trying to open a physical package, you’ve already bought the product, so of course you’re going to persevere until you get it open. But if you’re trying to make sense of marketing literature, you haven’t bought it yet, so it’s easy to just skip over it and find something that’s easier to understand.

Buying decisions are hard enough, so you should strive to be part of the solution, not add to the problem. As simply as I can put it, just try to say it in plain English. Your customers will thank you.