We were driving back from a meeting and heard the piña colada song on the radio. It struck me yet again how often to this very day stations continue to play that song. It interests me how some elements of pop culture are here to stay no matter how many decades may pass. We continue to hear the song even though it is perhaps outdated by making reference to a newspaper personal ad that these days you would more likely see online.
I checked on Wikipedia later to learn what inspired the song’s lyrics. What I found more interesting is the story behind the song’s title. According to Wikipedia, the song originally was only titled “Escape.” But Wikipedia states that, although many listeners really liked the song back in 1979 and 1980, they did not know the song as “Escape.” The entry explains that after the artist agreed to add “The Piña Colada Song” to the title, sales shot up.
This reminds us of a recent conversation we’ve been having about video marketing. Businesses and organizations often refer to their services using fancy titles and descriptions. Sometimes they take this path to make their product more palatable or sound more interesting and important. The problem is their own description does not often match the every day vernacular that people use for those services. While the business may post a video and include a title and description using big words to explain what they do, the public may be typing in completely different phrases when searching. Nobody finds each other.
During media training, a woman once tried to explain how her organization makes efforts to help financially less fortunate families reach far away public parks and trails. The concept is simple, but she used such industry lingo and buzzwords to explain herself, I repeated the same question several times to understand her meaning.
Some businesses complicate matters by conjuring up complicated words and phrases to make their services shine. That’s fine. But such convoluted boilerplate language often won’t help prospective customers find your video and ultimately pay for your services. You do not need to necessarily completely dumb down your descriptions, but you might need a reality check and to find an appropriate balance between your view of your business and the way the public actually sees it and, more importantly, describes it.