The Visiting Team Has to Learn the Crowd
An announcer calling a game in a language the stands do not speak is just noise, no matter how expert the call. The crowd does not adjust to the announcer. The announcer adjusts to the crowd. That is the whole job — meet people in the words they already use, or do not bother talking.
Marketing breaks this rule constantly. A business falls in love with its own vocabulary — the internal jargon, the clever name for the feature, the technically-correct category nobody outside the building uses — and then wonders why the message does not land. The customer is not confused because they are slow. They are confused because you are speaking a dialect they never learned. Speak theirs instead.
Make the Customer Translate, Lose the Customer
Every time your message uses a word the customer has to stop and decode, you have added friction, and friction loses sales. People will not work to understand you. They will move on to the competitor who already sounds like the voice in their own head.
This is a Mixed Signals foul in disguise. Your product might be perfect, but if the words around it force a translation, the signal arrives garbled. The market does not reward the most accurate vocabulary. It rewards the most recognizable one — the message that lands without the customer having to convert it into terms they already trust.
7UP Borrowed the Word People Already Knew
Here is the masterclass. 7UP had a real problem: people did not have a mental shelf for a clear, crisp, non-cola soda. Explaining the category from scratch is slow and expensive, because you are teaching a new word before you can sell anything.
So 7UP did not invent a vocabulary. They borrowed one. Everybody already understood cola — deeply, instinctively, no education required. By calling themselves the Uncola, 7UP grabbed that existing language and used it to define themselves in a single, instantly-clear word. They did not make the customer learn a new term. They met the customer inside a word the customer already owned, and let the contrast do the work.
You do not have to teach the market a new word. You have to borrow the one already living in their head.
How to Run This Play Monday
Go find the actual words your customers use and stop using yours. Read the reviews, the support tickets, the sales-call recordings, the way people describe their problem before anyone hands them your terminology. The phrases that keep repeating are the dialect you should be writing in. Customers will hand you your best copy if you listen to how they already talk about the pain.
Then run your message through one filter: does this use a word my customer would say, or a word I would say? Every time the answer is "me," swap it for theirs. You are not dumbing anything down. You are removing the translation step between your value and their recognition of it.
The Ref’s Call
Clean play — keep running it. Meeting customers in their own language instead of forcing them to decode yours is exactly the discipline that makes a message land, and it is the cure for Rule 6, Mixed Signals. Mine the words they already use, borrow the category they already understand, and say it in their dialect. Speak the customer’s language and the signal finally gets through.