Branding and marketing executives have always loved nothing more than seizing the latest, abstraction that can somehow bend the ever-changing Zeitgeist to their favor and tell a tale, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
In recent years, CEOs, CMOs and brand managers swooned over leverage, alignment, blue-skying, thought leadership, convergence, unleash, pivot, impact, 30,000 feet, bandwidth, best practices, innovation, breakthrough, people-first and, of course, paradigm shift. Never to be outgunned in the jargon department, advertising agencies fell in and out of love with synergy, connected, transformation, disruption, scaling up, human-centered, omnichannel, media agnostic, relevance, purpose-driven and creative effectiveness to make their offering indispensable. And everyone has been caught slow dancing in dive bars with rockstar, brand evangelist, the customer journey and, of course, authenticity.
