Turn on any Western movie and there’s a good chance you’ll see a familiar scene: the tied up bad guy is draped over a horse and rode outta town.

This brings up two questions.

1. Why did they give the bad guy a free horse? It’s like saying, ‘Listen here, mister, you take this new Porsche 911 we bought you and get the hell outta here!’
2. What does this have to do with business-to-business (B2B) copywriting?

They’re both fair questions.

I don’t have an answer for the first. But the second question is because I’ve noticed some rather annoying, lazy trends in business marketing. They are overused words I would love eliminated. There were a few acts of violence I wanted to use as an example, but this being 2021, I chose the innocuous Spaghetti Western cliché.

As such, here are my Terms I’d Like to Tie to a Horse, Smack the Horse on the Butt and Send Out of Town Forever.*

*It’s a working title.

Solution

Without a doubt the single-most overused word in business marketing. It’s a word that sounds flashy – “we don’t sell things, we sell solutions!” But everybody uses it.

I was at a trade show B.C. (Before COVID) and I did a 360 degree turn, looking at all the booths. It was Solutions this, Solutions that.

Often the word isn’t even necessary. It’s attached on the end like a nasty mole. Picture a restaurant saying they have “hamburger solutions,” “French fry solutions” and “gravy-covered chicken-fried steak solutions.”

I hope you brought your Pepto Bismol solutions.

Solutions is regularly added to a word or phrase to make it sound fancy. But all it does is dilute your message and make you sound like everybody else.

And sounding like everybody else isn’t good marketing.

Innovate/Innovative

I get it.

I really do get it. It sounds awesome. It sounds like what a Silicon Valley start-up CEO would say while staying at a luxurious cabin in Park City, Utah.

But innovative has become another overused word that’s lost all meaning.

Think of innovative as a beautiful, candy apple red Mercedes convertible. Awesome, right? Now imagine driving that Mercedes around San Francisco – stuck in traffic surrounded by other expensive candy apple Mercedes convertibles.

The influx has made it just another car.

Unique

Words used to actually mean something. As in, they had definitions and agreed upon meanings. Unique is another word that business marketing abused to the point where it lost all meaning.

It means one of a kind.

Now unique gets thrown out because, again, people think it sounds good.

“Oh, I love that dress! It’s so unique.”

“Yeah, I got it off a rack with 40 others of the same dress in different sizes, but you’re right, it’s so unique!”

Now string together the Holy Trifecta of bad copywriting – “innovative solutions for your unique business needs” – and I want to reach for a bucket.

Learning to Shut Up

There’s an episode of Seinfeld when Kramer has taken a vow of silence.

That ends when he’s with Kathy Griffin’s character, who is an overwhelming motormouth. After suffering a barrage of verbal bullets, Kramer finally had enough and breaks his silence.

“You gotta shut up!” he tells her to a chorus of laughter from the audience.

Great writing is done in the editing process.

Not to say I’m a great writer – that’s for you to tell me after you read this – but I write a bad first draft and then cut as much as I can. Do I really need that phrase? What value did that sentence add? Okay, how many times are you going to use the word effervescent??

It’s critical to stick to a point, cut as much as possible and not be a flood of words.

You need to learn when it’s time to shut up.

(See what I did there?)