Double speak your way to fame (also, some exciting news)
Modern wisdom, unfortunately, is all about saying the right things
Before further ado, some personal/business news - yesterday we launched Kan(Ye) West’s most recent campaign (a music video and collaboration between YZY Gap and Balenciaga) on digital billboards in 9 countries and 11 cities.
More specifically - the US, UK, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Italy, Spain, Dubai and Romania! Couple of pictures below.
I’m so proud of the TPS Engage team and how fast they put this together (spoiler, less than 48 hours and over the weekend).
I don’t brag often and I only share 1% of what we do on here, so you just have to put up with it from time to time.
Now back to Lateral Thinking.
I think we’re all looking forward to the weekend more than ever simply because the stock exchange is closed. I’m not even going to make a portfolio joke now because it’ll just crash and burn (like my portfolio!).
A graduate applying for pilot training with a major airline was asked what he would do if, after a long-haul flight to Sydney, he suddenly met the captain of the airplane wearing a red dress in the hotel bar.
What would you do?
An answer, as usual, at the end.
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Do you do the double speaky?
What’s double speak, I hear you double asking?
Double speak means using language in a way to deliberately confound or mislead the intended audience.
If you’ve ever worked in a corporation, you know this as every day talk.
Instead of saying the market is crashing and burning, you say it’s experiencing a period of negative growth.
For all you advertising people out there, Coke won a famous Effie award years ago by saying they had “positive negative growth” (meaning their sales reduced less than their competitor’s and framed that as a success).
Is that a success? Hell if I know. But it’s a damn brilliant use of double speak.
Now, double speak has a negative connotation. Because of that, some might call it storytelling. Others will call it “framing”.
Lateral thinking, in a sense, uses a lot of double speak. It uses certain words to set you on the wrong track and trick your brain.
Negative connotation or not, we see it all around us and it’s part of our life.
Some people might scoff and even say that they’re too smart to be fooled by doublespeak. They are not.
They might be more savvy and you won’t fall to the obvious, but they will fall eventually.
It’s like the guy saying “advertising doesn’t work on me” while he is neck deep in his 6th Apple product.
This is a great video covering double speak. To summarize for you, here are 4 types of doublespeak:
Euphemisms, words or phrases used to avoid a distasteful reality. Negative growth example works perfect here
Jargon. This one’s easy, but FYI, don’t get caught up on all these KPIs because EOD all that matters is that we make sure our assets have synergy
Gobletygook (which is now my new favorite word), overwhelming the audience with words - hello, politicians and corporate spokespeople. This one’s easy
Inflated language - designed to make the simple seem complex or give it an air of importance. You are not a secretary, you’re an office manager. Or calling people “junior executives” because executive used to mean something very different years ago
Remember these because they’ll make your life easier. You can use them to get ahead or use them to figure out who is genuine or who isn’t.
I use a very efficient trick to figure out if people are genuine or if they really understand a subject. Act dumb. Ask them to simplify.
If they’re not able to, it’s most likely double speak. Or they truly don’t understand the subject.
Answer: You buy her a drink, of course.
Yes, this one’s similar to the “I can’t operate on him, he’s my son” popular anecdote that made the rounds years ago, but it’s still a nice one.
Didn’t catch the latest post? Here it is again.