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Forget the meaningless cliches and empty promises. What really matters is what customers take away about a business. That’s what a recent Business Week Article tells us.

The words we choose and use make a big difference and, according to the article, there are five big no-no’s:

Quality - every product worth buying is a quality product. It may be high-priced quality or it may be low-priced quality, but it’s quality either way. That means every company believes it can use the word "quality" in its advertising. Too many have, and as a result, now it has become just seven empty letters.

Value - like quality, is in the eye of the beholder, and every product or service has its own value equation. Saying "we provide the best value" is, therefore, virtually
meaningless.

Service - Have you ever seen an advert promising lousy service? Of course not, which is the reason why claiming good service just falls on deaf ears. It’s funny, but the companies that make the claim of good service the most tend to be those that deliver it the least.

Caring - Do you really believe your company cares more about your customers than your competition does? It may feel good to say so, but the claim flies in the face of
common sense. If your competitors didn’t care about their customers, they couldn’t stay in business.

The above four words all fail for essentially the same
reasons. Not only are they overused, they’re based on variables that
will be different for everyone. There’s a quality/value/service/caring
continuum in each person’s mind for every purchase occasion, and it is
a continually moving target.

But the fifth word is different. The fifth word doesn’t work precisely because it’s not variable. The fifth word is binary.

Integrity - A
company either has integrity or it doesn’t. It’s either honest or it
isn’t. And most people give companies the benefit of the doubt in
believing that they operate with integrity. When a company talks about
integrity in its advertising it’s for one of two reasons, neither one
of them good: They’re either trying to cover up some lack of integrity
(which never works) or they’re implying they live by a higher standard
than their competition.

Every
company needs to have integrity. No company needs to advertise it.