White papers are a staple of B2B marketing. We write them to explain complicated topics or products to our customers. We read them to try and glean what our competitors are really doing. Did you even wonder why they are called white papers at all? Since most documents are printed on white paper, the modifier “white” would seem redundant, and too generic to differentiate from other documents. The term was coined by the British Government to distinguish shorter informational documents with … [Read more...]
Marketingspeak: Who Coined the Term ‘Funnel’?
The funnel is a shorthand term for describing the route by which prospective customers, or prospects, become customers. The visualization of the process looks like a funnel. A larger number of prospects go in the top and are reduced to a smaller number of customers who come out the bottom. Marketers use the term every day, but who came up with the funnel visualization in the first place? Interestingly, the idea for the funnel visualization was a refinement of a previous visualization, also … [Read more...]
Marketingspeak: Why’s It Called ‘Boilerplate’?
Marketing is full of jargon, anachronisms (B-roll comes to mind), acronyms, and new expressions dreamed up almost every week. We use them all the time, almost without thinking. I've done my best in The Professional Marketer to dig in and find their origins. This week, from my chapter on the press release, is boilerplate: "Boiler plate" originally referred to the small metal plate that identified the builder of a steam boiler. The term was borrowed by the printing industry, where plates … [Read more...]
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