Business Buzzword Warning: Proactive!

Today’s post is the first in a series of “business buzz words,” which I expect will be a fairly regular appearance on this blog, as there appears to be no end in sight for the business buzz words.

And, of course, the first business buzzword is proactive.

This is a pretty popular word to deride, so I suspect that I don’t have to say too much about it. Even Encarta starts off its entry: “When people name words they despise as jargon, proactive is often on the list.” And indeed, it's a word that people love to hate.

I'm going to try to avoid just jumping on the hatin' bandwagon. Instead, I’d like to add to this discussion my perspective on the marketing disadvantages of “proactive,” which I think are many.

(1) It is definitely a word that annoys a lot of people. Just the sight of it sets some people’s teeth on edge. Yes, they could be wrong, and they could be judging a word unfairly. But, still, if you know some of your readers are likely to feel that way about a word, why use it--especially if there is almost always a perfectly suitable replacement?

(2) It is overused to the point of meaninglessness. Proactive is a word that has been thrown around so much by so many different companies that it is almost absurd. Your few readers who don’t instinctively hate the word will pass over it without much thought because they’ve simply seen it way too much. It has become another false promise—a word marketing folks use because they think it sounds “cool” or “responsive,” but most readers recognize that it is just a marketing term, not an accurate description of a business process or a firm.

(3) You can almost always replace it with a better, more descriptive alternative that is much less likely to bore and/or annoy your readers and much more likely to surprise or interest them. The next time you catch someone using proactive, consider “assertive,” “active,” “dynamic,” or even “anticipatory,” though it’s not my favorite. It’s important to note that proactive almost always describes an action—either explicitly or implicitly. And it’s almost always better to show action than just describe it. So, rather than claiming that your firm has a proactive research team, you might instead write a sentence or two that shows what that research team does. For example, “Our research team monitors investment news closely and aggressively responds to…” rather than saying, “Our research team take a proactive approach to important market events.”