Every now and then a word gets into my bad books.

At the moment, it’s ‘benefits’.

This is a shame, because it’s not such a bad word and originally meant a kind deed or something well done. Then one day people like me got hold of it. Copywriters grabbed it, bundled it together with ‘features’ and tossed both into copy for brochures, press releases and other marketing and PR materials.

The kind, friendly element was drowned by the dressing to ensure the ‘you must buy it because it’ll be so good for you’ message always got through. ”Forget features, sell the benefits,” people say.

The more I look at the original meaning, the more I like the word. Perhaps what I don’t like is the approach to marketing that reduces everything to a formula, which when applied automatically tends to fall flat. (Thinks back to weigh up own guilt.)

Another use of the word, to describe state social security payments, hasn’t helped either. With a stronger attachment to the failure of government systems rather than the relief given to genuine claimants, the poor word doesn’t stand a chance.

Now I regret it being in my bad books. I want to like benefits again and restore its benign impact, but this means working harder to find better ways of talking about features and _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .

z2zine next: If a picture can paint a thousands words . . .

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It’s that time of year when businesses want to sell . . . by direct mail, by phone, email and online. I’m hearing from businesses I haven’t heard from since the previous January and some I’ve never heard from before.

Some of them are eager to sell, some are very keen and some sound desperate.

So many sales and marketing messages . . . on twitter, in unsolicited emails and phone calls . . . tell me I need to redesign my web site. Why? No one asks how much business our web sites generate? Some even ask if we have a web site – fail for research, chaps.

Now I don’t mind people contacting us if they’re reasonable and prepared to have a reasonable chat, but the caller who wanted to tell me how he could help us develop our business just would not answer my repeated question: “What is the point of your call?” So I ended it politely.

From pressing the top 10 reasons why I need to do one thing to telling me why doing something else will make me so much money, these people don’t realise that beating up your potential customer is not a good start.

We all need to buy products and services and sometimes we need to change suppliers or improve what we’re already doing, but frightening us to death with horror stories doesn’t build a relationship . . . especially when we can see straight through the sales patter: a dead customer can’t pay an invoice.

Please can all sales people and marketers realise that, while usually I don’t mind someone identifying my genuine needs and offering methods to fulfil these, I get angry when forced to buy at gunpoint.

Am I the only one?

z2zine next: Are you on benefits?

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There is an option to stop writing.

There are also options to edit what’s already written, to cut, to shorten sentences.

More words don’t necessarily make it any easier to understand a message. As the 140-character limit of twitter demonstrates, communicating succinctly can be very effective: it concentrates the mind.

I can remember sitting in an exam and watching someone walk up to the front of the hall for more paper. I worried that I wasn’t writing enough. It didn’t matter: the few words I wrote answered the questions well enough for me to get an A.

I can remember a sales manager worrying about a tender and just writing more and more. In the end, they just repeated themselves to the point of confusion.

When standing up to deliver an elevator pitch, the most effective attention-grabber is often a pause.

Sometimes the words we leave out make those we do write and say even more powerful.

z2zine tomorrow: Relax!

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