From your company slogan to detailed marketing materials, you want to be very careful with the words that you choose to represent your business. What may sound perfectly fine to you may be construed as pretentious, offensive, or outright incorrect by another person. This is a particularly pressing issue when you cross cultures or the language barrier. When I took a recent trip to Taiwan, I was bombarded with all sorts of signs that may be fine in Taiwanese, but they sound terrible in English.

Beyond simple language issues, another area that deserves your attention is corporate or industry jargon. Even when marketing to others within the same industry as yours, it is important to be mindful of what jargon you are using. The marketing materials may make perfect sense to you, but the person from the accounting department of a potential customer may not understand. Technical language may stand in the way of completing a sale and it may make for a poor customer service experience. At the same time, you don’t want to patronize your clients by explaining every little detail.

Take the target audience into consideration when drafting up any sort of signage, newsletters, or even blog posts. Talking about PHP and mySQL may make sense to intermediate web users, but the novice blogger will have no idea what you’re talking about. Acronyms are a particularly touchy subject, so try to spell things out the first time before reverting to their shortened versions.

Have you ever been turned off by jargon? Has it stopped you from dealing with that company?