There are some marketing terminologies that make my blood pressure pop.
One of them is ‘codify’.
Codify.
A word that implies we’ve used cutting edge science, space-age technology and Einstein intellect to explore, understand and articulate the rules of the impossible and the unexplained.
But actually all we’re talking about is looking at how some pretty blatantly obvious stuff has worked.
Hell, if you spend 2 minutes online, you’ll find most of it explained by the very people who did it in the first place.
But there we go, throwing out ego-enhancing words with our smug smiles as if we are the masters of the universe … a bastard love child of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk … when really we’re a bunch of human photocopiers who go into meltdown when the Wi-Fi goes down.
I get we’re in marketing.
I get we need to show our value to business.
But apart from the fact that means pushing brands forwards rather than copying what others are doing, the only people we end up fooling with this sort of bullshit are the sort of people we shouldn’t want to be working with in the first place.
Seriously, codify is as much as a cry for validation and acceptance as when WeWork kept claiming they were a tech company.
I get from a marketing perspective that there can occasionally be some real value in this, but as one of my mentors recently said to me – who is an individual with an incredible track record in business – if you want to make a difference to a company, make a difference to them.