Is Folgers the Domino's of Coffee?

And an end-to-end procurement something something

Hello Gobbledeers,

I was recently pleasantly surprised to find out that there are academics who are studying gobbledy. To be clear, they don’t know they’re studying gobbledy. They claim to be studying “jargon.” My kids are currently studying for the SATs, so I’ve been thinking about analogies lately. Here’s an analogy:

Gobbledy : Jargon
as
Jeans : Dungarees

Anyhoozit, a couple of folks from Columbia University and USC published an article last year in Harvard Business Review (“Do You Have a Jargon Problem”) looking at why organizations continue to use gobbledy when everyone agrees it’s terrible.

The short answer? Because lower level employees think it makes them appear smarter to higher level employees. The researchers report:

In one study, we asked MBA students to imagine they were entrepreneurs in a pitch competition trying to get venture capital funding. They had to choose between two pitches describing their company. Both pitches conveyed the same information, but one used lots of business jargon (“leveraging,” “competitive advantage,” “disintermediating,” etc). We then told participants that they were competing against successful MBA alumni (this put them in a lower-status condition), other MBAs (same-status condition), or undergraduates (higher-status condition). Overall, participants were significantly more likely to use the high-jargon pitch when they were in the lower-status condition.

First of all, if someone pitched me a new product that would be disintermediating middlemen while leveraging headless capabilities to give retailers a competitive advantage through higher conversion rates, I would have only question: “Who do I make the check out to?”

(And then you should ask, “Why are you dangling that preposition at the end of that sentence?”)

(To which I would respond, “I was being colloquial.”)

(To which you would respond, “I’m not even going to mention that it should be ‘whom’ at the beginning of that sentence”)

(To which I would respond, “I’m not sure you’re who I want to be giving my money to.”)

(To which you would respond, “Um…I think you mean ‘to whom I want to be giving my money.’”)

(Annnnnnd, scene).

One other interesting finding from their studies:

We examined whether students from lower-status universities would use more academic jargon. We collected over 64,000 dissertations and assessed the amount of jargon used in their titles…we found that authors from lower-status schools used more jargon in their titles on average than authors from higher-status schools, even after controlling for things like dissertation topic and length.

In other words, using words that you think make your company sound smart actually make your company sound dumb.

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But first, coffee…

Did you know that Folgers Coffee was going through a re-brand?

Neither did I.

Apparently people think Folgers tastes like crap and is only consumed by grandmothers, though (at least according to this NPR report) that doesn’t appear to be deterring some young people who admit that it tastes like crap and is consumed by their grandmothers, but they like cheap coffee, so you can go stick your fancy coffee up your freeze-dried ass (apologies for the aggression).

The fine brand managers at Folgers, surprisingly, took this information and decided to re-position the coffee to 20-somethings as a less expensive alternative to fancy-pants coffee while suggesting that people should own the fact that they like Folgers. To do that, they created this ad, using Joan Jett’s song Bad Reputation to suggest that they, per Ms. Jett, don’t give a damn about their bad reputation:

I wanted to mention that here because I generally think that software companies think their prospects are idiots who can’t tell when they’re being sold a pile of nonsense.

When they found themselves with a product with a, ahem, bad reputation, they did some research, discovered that some people knew the reputation but didn’t care, and then built a campaign about not caring that they’re perceived poorly. They were honest about the product (“we’ve heard people think it’s bad”) while tapping into a pretty interesting insight (“some people not only don’t care about the reputation, the bad reputation is part of the appeal”). Pretty smart.

The median Folgers drinker, according to Dall-E

It brings to mind my favorite of the “we know we’re terrible” marketing strategies, a move Domino’s pulled off pretty successfully more than 10 years ago:

It turns out that customers (and prospects) - gasp! - actually respond positively when companies don’t try to lie directly to their face. Weird.

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Let’s end with some classic gobbledy

Thanks to reader JC for sending along whatever the hell this is:

GEP SMART TM is a unified source-to-pay (S2P) procurement software platform that brings end-to-end procurement functionality for direct and indirect spend management into a single, cloud-native platform. It features a comprehensive range of procurement tools built into one unified procurement system, eliminating the need for separate, stand-alone software, modules, or tools for managing specific functions. GEP SMART helps streamline the end-to-end procurement process, accelerating digital transformation, elevating your procurement team’s performance to a whole new level, and enhancing its strategic reach and impact on the business.

By unifying the complete range of procurement software functionality into a single platform, GEP SMART becomes the single global procurement solution for all users — delivering incisive procurement analysis and decisive insights to the CPO, full category-wide control to sourcing managers, and immediately-available catalogs and “consumerized” ordering to buyers.

And I’m going to assume Gartner made this as some sort of April Fool’s joke:

Dall-E: Draw me something that will make me sad

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As always, thanks for coming along for the ride.

One quick note - there’ll be no column next week. I’ll see you before Thanksgiving.

Tell your friends and enemies about Gobbledy.