Marketers and presenters: spell out your acronyms

The BBC News today has an article that cites a Nielsen/Netrating study with a conclusion that's an oldie but a goodie: Geekspeak still baffles Web users. Particularly notable were the poor showing of technical acronyms:

Acronyms in particular foxed users. 75% of online Britons did not know that VOD stands for video-on-demand, while 68% were unaware that personal video recorders were more commonly referred to as PVRs.

Millions of people keep in touch via instant messaging but some 57% of online Brits said they did not know that the acronym for it was IM.

"The technology industry is perhaps the most guilty of all industries when it comes to love of acronyms," said Mr Burmaster.

"There is a certain level of knowledge snobbery in so far as if you talk in acronyms you sound like you really know what you are talking about and if others don't understand then they are seen in some way as inferior," he said.

And this was a study of online consumers; the effect is even worse in the general population.

There's a moral to the story here for marketers. Use words, not letters, to describe your products. Words will communicate with a wider variety of people and they will be less prone to misunderstandings. And instead of an acronym, try looking for a short word to represent the product instead. The iPod could have been the Apple DMP, but I would argue, that with that name it would have been DOA -- I mean dead on arrival -- instead.

Technorati Tags: Communication, Marketing, acronyms