In my first week at college, I picked up a great line from my micro-econ professor. This was in the 80s, a decade before Freakonomics, but at the beginning of the discipline’s awareness of it mathematicization. The professor said something like this:
You’ll learn theorems and laws in this class, and you’ll pick up some math. But, when you write your papers and take your exams, I want you to always always always tell me: “who is doing what to whom and why”. Economics that doesn’t do that is useless.
I was at a brainstorm a little while ago discussing strategies for a client. Some questions emerged about how we should think about the customer’s buying mode: are we looking to upsell within a store, competing with a brand that’s only available at another? are we trying to generate demand for the activity that requires our product or speak to people already committed to that activity? Pretty standard sets of questions.
What I noticed, though, was a rush to put labels on ideas and capture the dynamic within an existing, perhaps widely known concept (value chain, purchase cycle, influencer strategy). The words were all useful, but they seemed to dampen the energy of the conversation – they didn’t tell us who was doing what to whom (or, more importantly for marketers with whom) or offer theories of why.
I suggested that we should avoid putting conceptual labels on dynamics during a brainstorm. That we should stick to people dynamics — getting inside people’s heads would get us to better ideas. Being inside people’s heads would give us a better handle on whether the idea was good or not. One person, who had been dropping jargon on the conversation suggested he was doing so “to put a pin in the thinking.”
Aha! Putting pins in something, like a butterfly, kills the subject! Putting a pin in something makes it static, stops it from its natural movements, makes it less rich.
It doesn’t sound consult-y, but if our marketing models aren’t helping to explain who is doing what to whom (and with whom) and why, then they should be kept out of design discussions.
[...] Stick a pin in it and it dies. [...]
[...] Most importantly, my skepticism of jargon also stems from a belief that jargon tends to make things static and close off avenues of exploration. In an earlier post, I wrote: What I noticed, though, was a rush to put labels on ideas and capture the dynamic within an existing, perhaps widely known concept (value chain, purchase cycle, influencer strategy). The words were all useful, but they seemed to dampen the energy of the conversation – they didn’t tell us who was doing what to whom (or, more importantly for marketers with whom) or offer theories of why. [...]