The annoying buzzword worth billions

I rolled my eyes when I saw the tagline:

[If you can’t see the image, it says “Skechers: The Comfort Technology Company”]

The former journalist in me scoffed, “They’re brazenly forcing the word ‘technology’ into their branding so investors somehow value them like a tech company.”

Then I remembered my similar reaction to a company’s buzzword-laden branding about 10 years ago. Since then, the CEO of that company bought both an NBA team and an NHL team – which one of us was right? 😉

I’m talking about Qualtrics, a software company that was on my radar early because it sits about 10 miles from my house.

At its core, Qualtrics allows its customers – businesses and researchers – to deliver fancy online surveys. You might be more familiar with a competitor, SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey’s total valuation is $3.1 billion. Qualtrics went private in 2023 at a value of $12.5 billion. What explains the difference?

Qualtrics stopped describing itself as a survey company.

Instead, they coined their own phrase for what they do, something no one else was using. They are an “experience management” company. “XM” for short, because all useful tech company phrases need a non-intuitive acronym. 🙂

So their press releases, their pitches, their conversations with journalists, would all be riddled with this phrase. Back when they first started doing it, you might have called it jargon or a buzzword.

But it wasn’t. It was a deeply entrenched strategic decision top management made to create an entirely new category of software. Their tools tell companies how their customers and employees are feeling, and that allows the companies to “manage their experience” better. There is obviously big $$$ in that if you can pull it off.

Instead of avoiding the unfamiliar term, the Qualtrics marketing and PR team took on the challenge to educate journalists and others why the term makes sense. They succeeded.

Your takeaway: Zealously guard against buzzwords when clearer options exist – case in point: leverage. But when your employer is going all-in to create a new position in the minds of journalists and their audiences, rise to the occasion and figure out how to make it stick.