Smart Companies, Dumb Words: Where Does B2B Jargon Earn Its Keep?
6 min read
"Bioresorbable hydrogel-based product candidates."
This is a real phrase from a real annual report, and we've probably all done something similar before. You're writing about your product, and a plain phrase like "self-vanishing gel" or "body-absorbing gel" is sitting right there. But somehow "bioresorbable hydrogel-based product candidates" is what ends up on the page.
Maybe this complex specificity preserves clinical accuracy for your technical department. Maybe you've fallen victim to the curse of knowledge: the fatal assumption that your audience shares your exact vocabulary. Maybe you want to inspire trust in your customers, assuming (as many of us did in university) that bigger words equal greater expertise.
But when behavioral scientists actually test out this last assumption, the results are brutal.
Psychology professor Daniel M. Oppenheimer took perfectly good texts and swapped the simple words for the grandest alternatives he could find. He published the results under the title "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly" which gives you an idea of how well the bloated texts played out. Readers experienced cognitive friction, and rated them as significantly less intelligent. They didn't blame the complexity of the subject, they blamed the author.
The difference between big words, earned jargon, and unearned jargon
Oppenheimer's study used general vocabulary. There's generally a difference between big words and jargon. Big words are just that — words used in place of a simple word that mean the same thing. They don't belong to any specific industry, and they don't save time. Like "utilize" instead of "use" or "ameliorate" instead of "fix," these words just sound expensive.
Jargon, on the other hand, can be a necessary shortcut. "Pluripotent" does that, because even the shortest way of explaining it in simple terms (the potential to become virtually any cell in the human body) takes 11 words. "Basal medium optimization technology" is jargon, but it's unearned. You can just say "our technology" and your investor would still know exactly what they're buying.
Researchers Hun-Tong Tan, Elaine Wang, and G-Song Yoo tested this kind of unearned jargon on three different types of actual investors reading a biotech prospectus: specialists, beginners, and competent in-betweeners with partial knowledge of the industry. The financial penalty became clear:
- The Specialists expected the terms that earned their place, but rolled their eyes at the unearned padding.
- The Beginners knew they didn't understand the jargon (both earned and unearned) and got overwhelmed as it piled up.
- The Competents interpreted their own confusion as a sign that they were looking at something highly specialized and expensive.
Both of the non-specialist groups felt that more jargon equated to more credibility. However, this perceived credibility did not translate into action: These groups ultimately invested less. The same language that made the company look smart made these investors feel too intimidated to buy.
You don't get to pick your reader
Reading these studies, the solution seems obvious: Use earned jargon for the experts, and plain text for everybody else.
That works in a controlled experiment, where you can hand a different document to each group. But in reality, you only publish one website. When a page goes live, it has to simultaneously speak to the specialists, the beginners, and everyone in between. A phrase that builds trust with one reader might intimidate another.
What language you use in your writing comes down to who's reading it. This distinction is what separates your marketing materials from your sales proposals.
Marketing doesn't know who's in the room
No matter how advanced analytics get, you don't know exactly who is reading your website or LinkedIn posts, or whether the person seeing your Google Ads is a specialist, the CEO, or an intern doing preliminary research. Your marketing materials have to work for whoever shows up.
Big words or jargon may feel like they're signalling authority. Even if they do make you sound more credible, they're also likely to put people off. Even with analytics on practically every platform now, is the side of the business where you know the least about your audience, so plain language is the smartest approach.
Sales knows who's in the room — and it's probably more than one person
Today, clearly-defined B2B customer persona is more likely to be a committee made up of six to ten people, each one showing up to the table with four or five pieces of independent research. The specialist who'll immediately know whether you're padding your reports with unearned jargon is sitting across the table from a finance lead who just needs to understand what they're actually paying for.
By the time you get to this stage, you already know who these personalities will be, and your best bet is to tailor the right materials to the right readers. Withholding earned jargon from a technical specialist reading the spec sheet is going to make the document longer and vaguer. Keeping it on an implementation timeline, however, is going to make the client's project manager feel lost in the weeds.
An executive framework for managing jargon
The most effective way to manage your use of jargon, company-wide, is to build a glossary. But not in the way you think.
It may seem helpful to keep all earned jargon and add a glossary, letting any reader who gets lost look things up as they go along. But a group of four researchers (Hillary Schulman, Graham Dixon, Olivia Bullock, and Daniel Colón Amill) argue that this isn't as effective as it seems. Jargon, they found, creates cognitive a friction in the exact second of reading. Their reading flow is broken before they even have time to thumb to the back of the deck and look up the definition.
The value of having a glossary is in building it for internal use, not external publication. Think about how many different ways your company's different departments may describe the exact same product: Development relies on earned technical jargon, marketing tries to replicate that jargon but add unearned padding, and sales defaults to a simplified phrase that means the same thing but annoys the client's specialists.
To a buyer, this looks like three conflicting vendors. It's a common issue in B2B, and one that is also costly: Clients who have to navigate that lack of clarity are significantly more likely to walk away from a deal or downscope to a safer purchase.
Your internal glossary is a source of truth for all of the jargon and big words that get thrown around by your departments. Have each of your departments put together a list of the words and phrases they consistently use to describe your products and services. Working with one representative for each department (or your full team if you're small enough), go through each of these terms and ask two questions:
- Is there a plain-language equivalent that means the exact same thing?
If yes, replace the more complex word with that simpler version. - Does this term carry unique, technical weight?
If yes, keep the term and define where it belongs — e.g., fine for a technical spec sheet, not for the website.
Decide on each single, authorized term, write a one-sentence definition that anyone could easily repeat from memory, and ban all of the synonyms (unless you need a simplified version of earned jargon).
In B2B — like everything else — we communicate so that others can understand us. Your use of jargon should stop where your certainty about your reader ends. Anything beyond that isn't strategic positioning; it's erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity.