The issue isn't that marketers are taught to be ambiguous. It's that, as a tech company, it's difficult to find a marketer who can grasp your technology well enough to write about it unambiguously and accurately. So instead companies just settle for any marketer and give them a wordbank to use when writing emails, making landing pages, and attending events.
Unfortunately this never turns out well. Even if the marketer uses the prescribed wording, it'll look like marketing BS to any engineer ("web scale," anyone?). If the marketer steers clear of any specifics, then... well, we get posts like this.
The solution is to push your marketing team to understand your product well enough that they can talk about it with accurate specifics, at least to some extent. Or hire marketers who have some basic understanding of software (cough cough).
This. Another problem is that companies often want to sell a long-term vision vs. a solving a specific problem. The end result is an abstract description of the company that doesn't connect with the end buyer.
Finally, a big issue I see is that companies use internal language to describe their software, rather than using the language of their prospect. They do this to "raise up" their messaging, but the result is often a word blob mashup of internal language and industry buzzwords which don't connect to the problem the prospect is trying to solve.
> Another problem is that companies often want to sell a long-term vision vs. a solving a specific problem. The end result is an abstract description of the company that doesn't connect with the end buyer.
Perhaps it represents a bias towards investors rather than customers?
Unfortunately this never turns out well. Even if the marketer uses the prescribed wording, it'll look like marketing BS to any engineer ("web scale," anyone?). If the marketer steers clear of any specifics, then... well, we get posts like this.
The solution is to push your marketing team to understand your product well enough that they can talk about it with accurate specifics, at least to some extent. Or hire marketers who have some basic understanding of software (cough cough).