In marketing, the product created typically includes commercials, print and broadcast ads, web content, brochures, direct mail, spam, flyers, press releases, and parts of magazines and newspapers. Beware of typos and poorly phrased sentences or your effort could end up as a joke in Jay Leno’s Headlines feature.

Lewis Carroll, who stammered and was probably not the pedophile or drug addict we have heard he was, understood both rhetoric and logic. Rhetoric is the art of speaking or writing effectively. Rhetoric is at the heart of marketing. The following bit from Alice in Wonderland illustrates exactly why effective word choice is critical:

March Hare to Alice: …Then you should say what you mean.

Alice: I do; at least - at least I mean what I say -- that's the same thing, you know.

Hatter: Not the same thing a bit! Why, you might just as well say that, 'I see what I eat' is the same as 'I eat what I see'!

March Hare: You might just as well say, that "I like what I get" is the same thing as "I get what I like"!

The Dormouse: You might just as well say, that "I breathe when I sleep" is the same thing as "I sleep when I breathe"!

If we could all communicate without words (“What’s that, Lassie? Timmy’s in the well?”), life would be easier.  But we can’t market our products or services without words – not even photographers can do that.

Abbot and Costello’s Who’s on First routine from the 40s is still famous for its word confusion. The premise of the routine is that Abbott is identifying the players on a baseball team to Costello, but their names and nicknames can be interpreted as non-responsive answers to Costello’s questions. The first baseman is named "Who," thus, the words "Who's on first?" is ambiguous between the question ("Which person is the first baseman?") and the answer ("Mr. Who is the name of the first baseman.")

Remember Broadcast News? “I'll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time.” 

How about The Thin Man?

Nora Charles: They say you were shot in the tabloids.

Nick Charles: They never got near my tabloids.

You do not want your work to be laughed at for the wrong reasons. It’s one thing if you intend for it to be humorous, but otherwise, they’re laughing at you, not with you. Tom Lehrer once said, “I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.”

You want to communicate clearly to your potential and current clients. Any therapist will tell you that communication is at the crux of how well or how poorly people relate to each other. In business, your success depends on how well you communicate. Sometimes the company with better marketing sells more than the company with a better product (IBM and Mac ring a bell?)

Clarity is essential to a company’s bottom line, but sometimes clarity is elusive. Think of a contract. Its aim is to define not just small details but infinitely tiny ones, leaving no stone unturned.  Yet there is nothing more incomprehensible to most of us than a contract written in legalese. The written word can be simple, complicated, deliberately misleading, confusing or even obfuscating. It can also be as clear as clean water.

How you use language, how you communicate to potential clients in particular – in other words, marketing – is critical. If they’ve misunderstood what you offer and are immediately disappointed at what they get, they won’t be your clients for long. In that case, your time, budget, and labor will be wasted. Your marketing will have been successful because it brought a customer in but it will have no value if the customer walks away after your first interaction. In that case, the classic line from Cool Hand Luke would apply: “What we got here is a failure to communicate.”