Mulligatawny Monday | Five Words To Never Use In An Ad-?

Good morning, afternoon or evening, which ever applies to you.

I was on a mission over the weekend to come up with new stuff on -

• Building Traffic To Your Blog
• How To Write Posts That People Will Want To Read
• Optimizing Your Posts For Search Engines
• Increasing Website Traffic With Articles
• Magic Words For Your Advertising

and so on.  Regarding the last entry, I Googled all the words and phrases I thought might lead me to the “magic words” for your advertising campaigns and all I found was tired old cliches.

So, I reversed my thinking and searched for words, terms not to use, and came across an article that simply surprised me. Not as much as by what the author had to say, but that I had read a piece like this some 15-20 years ago.  And since some of you might not have been interested in reading business, or rather sales articles that long ago, why don’t you take a lash at this.

I’ll give you a little taste, and then you can decide for yourselves, as to whether Steve McKee is all wet or if his points are valid.  This piece was published Business Week,  so if you subscribe, you might have already read it.

Here’s his lead in line -

“Forget meaningless cliches and empty promises. What really matters is what customers take away about a business“

Here are the five words, with a brief description of why he thinks they shouldn’t be used:

1. Quality – The most overused word in advertising which is the primary reason you should stay away from it.
2. Value – Like quality, value has been ruined by overuse. Value, like quality is in the eye of the beholder.
3. Service – You’ve never heard and ad promising lousy service, which is why claiming good service falls on deaf ears.
4. Caring – Do you really believe your company cares more about customers than your competition does?
5. Integrity – A company either has integrity or it doesn’t. It’s either honest or it isn’t.

The conclusion:

“What you think about your company doesn’t matter.  All that matters is what your customers and prospects think.  The next time you’re tempted to use one of these five words in an ad, stop and ask if there is a better way to get the message across.  Using common words that have become empty cliches is a shortcut to nowhere.  Just because you sell it doesn’t mean people will buy it.”

Well -  I can kinda see where this cat’s coming from, but let’s have you decide whether or not it applies in your case.

By the way – two things:

First – Let me know what you think about the article by leaving a comment. Thanks

Last – I’ll be getting the items 1-4 mentioned above to you.  I’ll probably get to them sooner if you leave comments, as                      getting feedback from all of you really jacks me up.

Morgan