Does anyone else get more confused with marketing buzz-word hell?

I periodically hit pages where I can't tell what a vendor's product does. Or I already know what it does, but it's so full of buzzwords, trademarked terminology, and bafflegab I'm lost. VMWare's web site was a good example of that, last I bothered to look at it.

If a product is promoted as a "solution", that normally indicates it's over-priced, under-featured and not worth looking at further.

There are still a few companies out there so proud of their products they not only don't want to post the price of their products, they want us to pay a consultation fee so they can "craft" a "solution" for us. Uh, no. We're not a Fortune 100 company or a state agency; if you won't tell us at least a ballpark price up front, you're simply wasting our time.

Final fail: companies that only give you a bare outline of what their product does, but fail to tell you important details. You're supposed to leave voicemail for one of their salesmen, who will call you at his convenience to give you the hard sell. No. I'm the guy with the purchase authorization; you dance to my tune.

It is mostly based out of FOMO and what the Competition is doing. Imagine your landing page saying "A database that can replicate automatically" vs "Web Scale performance at incredible speed". The latter sounds more interesting and vague enough because no one wants to admit that they are selling "just a database". But but , we are more than that.

Funny enough, YC talks about this in their videos where they reject applications with marketing buzzwords.

Once you are well known though, you could get away with more marketing buzzwords. For example, if you visit Docker's landing page right now, it says "Develop faster. Run anywhere.". Ok WTF. What does that mean ? But since we already know that Docker is containerization tech, we don't care about its landing page anyway. But do they seriously think anyone landing on docker doesn't already know docker because "develop faster" doesn't mean anything.

I work in marketing and you would not believe how many meetings I have been in about this very topic.

There are specifically two forces at play:

1. Marketing copy has to be very risk averse. If your company loses a major deal because a buyer somewhere thought your product didn't check a single specific niche feature, you better believe the sales team will be crawling all your site to remove any non-vague verbage.

2. You and I and any technical user of a platform may not get any meaning out of vague-buzzwords, but we share the curse of knowing too much to bother wasting money on shiny new tools. The kinds of people who actually spend money don't.

Buzz words are sometimes used to hype up something, so be skeptical when you encounter them. Sometimes they're used to conceal something very complex, when it should be explained simply to a five year old. Think Blockchain, AI, NFTs, etc

There is something called "If you cannot convince them, then confuse them" :)

Most of the products are "also ran" products. They have nothing new to sell. So, this simple trick is used to disorient the readers.

Can you give a single example of a buzz-word or a site that includes paragraph after paragraph of “buzz-word hell”?

Odds are it’s that you are playing dumb and really think you’re much smarter than the person who wrote the page and you also don’t have much respect for marketing work.