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Three ‘C’ Words of Marketing I Actually Hate
The ‘C’ Words. We hear them all the time. Sometimes I even catch myself saying them out loud. But they honestly drive me crazy. Here they are in all their underwhelming glory: Content. Copy. Consumer.
What’s wrong with those ‘C’ words?
I hate them because they diminish. They misrepresent. They give permission to go low when we really need to GO HIGH. They may sound innocent enough at first, but I believe they need to be considered further, and their meanings need to be redefined.
Content
Content sounds like filler. Good, clean, strategic filler, but filler nonetheless. “Let’s get some content out there to please the algorithm.” “Fill the pipeline with messaging.” Content Marketing is a term to describe a myriad of activities: blog writing, social posts, and editorial placements. When approached as creating Content, it sets the bar so low that almost anything can qualify. The proliferation of AI-generated content is making generating it easier than ever, so now there’s even more of it.
Let’s redefine Content. Instead, let’s tell stories. Stories move people. They make them feel something. They entertain, enlighten and inspire. And they stay with the reader long after the story has been told.
Ask yourself, “Why am I telling this story?” What purpose will it serve? Great stories, the ones people love and appreciate most, are rooted in the writer’s experience. Stories contain a meaningful message or lesson. Storytelling is an art form. Storytelling is not filler. It’s craft. It’s intention. That’s a much higher standard than “posting content.”
Copy
In marketing, copy refers to the text used in advertisements, websites, emails, and social media designed to persuade, inform, or motivate an audience to take a specific action, such as buying a product, signing up for a newsletter, or clicking a link. It blends persuasive language with brand messaging to convert customers.
Copy can also mean to replicate, steal, and imitate. It already sounds suspicious. Copywriters are actually writers. If someone writes “copy”, it can bring the act of writing down to the level of generating, guess what? Content!
So let’s redefine the term Copy. Let’s call it writing. And what are we writing? Stories. Doesn’t that feel better already? Whether it’s a long-form article, a short social post or a micro tagline, if we remember that we are telling a story, we are more likely to bring some magic to the challenge.
Consumer
Do you ever think of yourself as a consumer? One who consumes? Does anyone? Even when I’m eating, I don’t think of myself as a consumer. Yes, I know I’m technically consuming my steel-cut oats and coffee, but even then I think of it as nourishing my body, savouring the flavours, imbibing, quenching my thirst.
When we market to consumers, we target them. We use personas and data-driven insights to analyze them. Does any of that sound human? Emotional? Authentic?
How do we redefine the term Consumer? Let’s call them what they really are: People. People don’t like being sold to. We love to be entertained. Informed. Enlightened. We like being treated as people.
So what do we do instead of generating Copy to make Content to target Consumers?
Let’s tell compelling stories written for people.
It’s essentially the same task. The same deliverables. The same channels.
But the mindset shifts everything.
When we aim higher, the writer finds more meaning in the work, the audience finds more value in the message, and the client sees stronger results.
It’s a win-win-win.
And it starts by retiring three small words that have been quietly lowering the bar for far too long.
