Vy Blog

Touchstone

I keep running into that word in various marketingspeak I've seen.  It feels like one of those words that is sort of airily used without really saying much: "Our positioning will be the touchstone of our strategy and messaging."

I admit I didn't exactly know what a touchstone actually is.  If you want to know, according to the actual definition, in the root, literal sense:

a black siliceous stone formerly used to test the puruity of gold and silver by the color of the streak produced on it by rubbing it with either metal.

In the modern, the correct usage would be with this concept at the fore:

a test or criterion for the qualities of a thing

As an example, Henry Kissinger said once that "the qualities of courage and vision that are the touchstones of leadership."

He means if you don't have courage and vision, you're not a leader.  To meld the figurative and the literal, you test for leadership by rubbing someone on a touchstone -- if courage and vision don't show up on the streak you leave on the rock, you don't have a leader.  According to Henry, that is.

So, I'm pretty sure this is used incorrectly more often than not.  I think people who use it are trying to allude to something that is a foundation element, or the nucleus, or some kind of non-negotiable standard-bearer.

Am I right?

Overused word/line of the day

"Last time I checked..."

Overused cliche of the day

"You do the math."

Commoditize

Here's a word:

commodity

Or, "commoditized."  As in, "Cell phones have become fully commoditized."

If you look it up, a commodity is an instrument of trade -- usually a hard good, often agricultural, that's sold or traded through futures contracts.  But in today's marketingspeak, it usually is used to mean a product that is so pervasive its sellers can find little opportunity for margin.

I'm pretty sure this is a misappropriation of the word, but maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe the financial minds that brought you June soybeans or barrows and gilts knew that farming often brought damn little margin (which I know to be true) began applying the term generically to thin markets.  Anyone, anyone?  Bueller?

So, anyway, Hugh has an interesting post today about commoditization (how you like that word, huh?).  He's introduced the "Wal-Mart China curve" to describe the evolution of profit margins in certain industries -- that is, China does the manufacturing, Wal-Mart does the selling.  What a world we're living in.

Worth reading.