Adjectives Can Make You Look Like a Liar

What if we said we had a "great offer" or an "amazing product" to tell you about? What would be your first reaction?

Chances are, you would be skeptical, and much more so than if I had simply told you I had an "offer" or a "product" you might be interested in. The culprits are the adjectives "great" and "amazing." They immediately raise eyebrows. We see them, and modifiers like them, attached to marketing campaigns all the time and know them for what they are: meaningless clichés.

So why do copywriters use them?

Avoid Lazy Writing

Often it is a case of laziness. When marketers put meaningless adjectives or adverbs in front of nouns, they are often trying to obscure their own indecision regarding their message. If you choose to be imprecise in the characterization of your product or service—if you just call it "great" or "unique"—you don't have to fully think it through. In other cases, the writer uses vagueness to avoid accountability. If you're not precise enough in the characterization of your product or service, you can't be held accountable for what you say about it.

The Most Common Offenses

Unfortunately, the impression left on the consumer by the misuse of modifiers is that someone is trying to hide something about the product or offer. Some of the most common offenses include:

• Redundancy or obviousness–adding an adjective whose meaning is already implicit in the noun it's modifying. Take the term "smart marketing," for example. Shouldn't all marketing be smart? Shouldn't all offers be great? The consumer might think, "Why would anyone offer me something that's not great? What are they not telling me?"
• Pom-pom adjectives–terms that are designed to generate false enthusiasm. The most common is "exciting," as in "exciting opportunity." Customers don't want your rah-rah adjectives to tell them if the offer is exciting or not. They can decide that for themselves.
• Adding adverbs to the mix–if "smart marketing" or "exciting opportunity" don’t seem persuasive enough, sometimes writers will throw in a meaningless adverb for good measure. What about "truly exciting opportunity?" The writer seems to be saying, "Look! We're really serious. This is an exciting opportunity." Now it sounds desperate and even less believable. Instead of making the message more persuasive, the writer has just further buried it under two layers of modifiers.

Make Nouns Your Friends

Simple concepts and expressions are more powerful and get more results. They are clear, direct and require less mental processing by your reader. This generally means relying on carefully chosen nouns and using adjectives and adverbs sparingly, and only when they add something to your message.

An effective way to test if your adjectives or adverbs are problematic is to substitute their opposite (or at least a contrary term) in the expression. If it sounds weird, then your original modifier wasn't adding any information. Two examples are drawn from above: "a great offer" and "a truly exciting opportunity." Let's try their opposites. "A terrible offer"—why would anyone try to sell you something terrible? And "a falsely depressing opportunity"—what does that even mean?

On the other hand, what if you write, "a limited-time offer?" The opposite of this would be "a non-time-limited offer." There are such kinds of offers, and knowing the difference is important to your customer. "Limited-time" is therefore a useful modifier, clarifying your message.

Streamline and simplify your copy, and watch your marketing become more powerful.