One Language is Not Enough!

The most successful engineers I know speak two languages. They talk with each other in secretive abbreviations (MPEG, FEC and BER) or complicated terms like “coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing.” But when they talk with common folks like me, they put it in terms I understand…at least the smart ones do.

If you’ve traveled to Europe, you’ve experienced the same thing: everyone speaks at least two (and many times three or four) languages. I’m grateful when I can ask and receive an answer to a tourist question in English. (Any inquiry requiring more than using the word "fromage" is beyond my ability to speak French.)

So there’s a lesson here for those of us in marketing. Put your message in words that I understand and are important to me.

How about the organization which is “playing a role in diminishing the pandemic of worldwide hunger and disease.” Why didn’t they just say, “We’re saving lives”?

And if I sponsor a child in Sierra Leone, tell me about work going on in Western Africa, not services provided in Latin America.

Speak to me in my language, and in words that a important to me. The most powerful messages are those in your own language.