Advice for tech marketers rarely covers the words they should be using.
Perhaps that’s not surprising in a business that takes perverse pride in its jargon, acronyms, neologisms and quirky branding. But bear with me, because I’m going to bring my inner word nerd out to play. Don’t worry — I’ll balance that with a hefty dose of actionable information, too.
English speakers aren’t shy about borrowing words from other languages that capture a specific idea that’s otherwise hard to describe. Many of them famously come from German: angst, wanderlust, realpolitik, zeitgeist… and the delicious, vicious concept of schadenfreude.
But there’s another one that product and marketing teams should understand: gestalt. That word refers to the indivisible form and impression of a thing: the whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a fancy word that does a good job of capturing how people use and perceive the value of software.
As marketers, we need to remember that word, gestalt, whenever we’re tempted to lean on a checklist of features or specs to market a product. The reason is quite simple: user and customer experience (CX) is far more than the sum of its features. That’s critical in today’s cloud economy, where CX has become an essential quality of successful apps and services.
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