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By SCOTT BARANCIK, Times Staff WriterJust what exactly does a company sell? You'd think it would be easy for them to say. But you'd be wrong.
The co-author of Why Business People Speak Like Idiots has suffered through a lot of corporate jargon.
"Let's face it," his book begins. "Business today is drowning in b-------."
But Jon Warshawsky said he's rarely seen a worse case than Danka Business Systems.
The one-paragraph self-description Danka puts in its news releases says the company "delivers value," "implement(s) effective document information solutions," and "empower(s) customers to benefit fully from the convergence of image and document technologies in a connected environment."
Reading it, you might never know that Danka - a British company with U.S. headquarters in St. Petersburg - sells and services printers and copiers made by Canon and other manufacturers. The words "printer" and "copier" never appear; Danka deliberately removed them from the boilerplate in 2002.
"They can't tell me succinctly what they do," Warshawsky said. "It's horrible.' '
It's standard practice to end a news release with a one-paragraph statement from a company describing the business. Often introduced under the heading "About (Company X)," the boilerplate explains what products or services the company sells and how it fits into the global marketplace.
"To me, the boilerplate is very much like the flag of the company: this is who we are, this is what we stand for and this is what we do," said Robin Kovaleski, a former investor-relations consultant who helped craft boilerplates at several Tampa Bay area companies. "A salesman can basically recite it on an airplane trip. The CEO can use it in company and community dealings. It's a rallying point."
A bad boilerplate doesn't foretell failure, just as a good one doesn't guarantee success. Still, a company's boilerplate is a leading indicator of how well, or poorly, it communicates its purpose to a broad audience that includes investors and potential customers.
But doing so clearly, it seems, isn't easy. Here's a sample of how some Tampa Bay area public companies define themselves.
"Paradyne provides a broad family of IP-based Broadband Access solutions, including BLCs, MSANs, DSLAMs, Ethernet in the First Mile bonded solutions, IADs, and CPE," one begins. The Largo maker of equipment for Internet service providers might be a little caught up in its own jargon.
"Syniverse is a leading provider of mission-critical technology services to wireless telecommunications companies worldwide," starts another. The Tampa company might be a "leading" provider of roaming services for cell-phone companies, but its boilerplate offers no proof.
"First Advantage Corporation provides best-in-class, single-source risk mitigation and business process solutions for enterprise clients," says a third. What does the St. Petersburg company sell? Background checks on job applicants.
Fred Ferguson, a PR Newswire executive whose company distributes news releases for more than 40,000 clients worldwide, called the opening sentence of First Advantage's boilerplate "impossible to fathom."
Some Tampa Bay area companies do a better job.
Brown & Brown Inc. of Tampa backs up its claim of being one of the industry's "largest" insurance intermediaries by citing a ranking in Business Insurance magazine.
Checkers Drive-In Restaurants Inc.'s boilerplate is a taut two sentences. The Tampa company smartly brands itself not as the country's 11th-largest burger chain but, memorably, as the "largest double drive-thru restaurant chain," a category largely of its own invention.
Drug manufacturer GeoPharma Inc. of Largo goes beyond the norm. Its boilerplate describes the company's "competitive advantage" in the marketplace, information that could be intriguing to potential investors. GeoPharma says it "develop(s) high margin generic or novel drugs for niche markets with high barriers to entry," and that its strength "lies in its ability to circumvent or overcome the challenges in these markets."
For many local companies, however, the No. 1 challenge simply is to be clear about what product or service they sell. Many fail.
In their book, Warshawsky and co-authors Brian Fugere and Chelsea Hardaway suggest several reasons why so many otherwise smart people resort to corporate-babble.
One is a desire to impress or sound smart, which can lead to the use of overly technical language, buzzwords and embellishment. Another is our tendency to romanticize what we do for a living. Some companies, like Enron, might throw up verbal smoke because they have something to hide, such as a poor business plan.
"I think a lot of the jargony boilerplate and just-can't-understand-it boilerplate is left over from the (dot-com) days," said Rachel Meranus, PR Newswire's director of public relations.
Her advice, in so many words: dumb it down. A company that can't clearly explain in two or three sentences what it does or sells is sending a bad signal.
Ferguson, the PR Newswire executive, offered several rules of thumb for boilerplate-writers.
Use as little jargon as possible. Keep it short. And only cite examples of excellence or scale that can be proved, such as membership in the Fortune 500 or the receipt of a prestigious award.
"They really need to steer away from claims that are unsubstantiated and, in essence, hype," he said. "It's going to turn off the (news) reporter."
Danka's boilerplate wasn't always so jargony.
Until a corporate restructuring and management shuffle in 2002, the company's boilerplate called it an "independent (supplier) of office imaging equipment and related services" and specifically mentioned its work with copiers and printers.
Don Thurman was the person charged with overhauling Danka's boilerplate, shortly after he joined the company as chief marketing officer in January 2002. He doesn't see a problem with his handiwork; the company even hired an Atlanta consultant to help polish it. "I think it still hits exactly what we want to communicate to a customer or to an investor," he said.
One aim was to clarify that Danka isn't just a distributor of copiers and printers; through service contracts, the company keeps them running smoothly.
Danka also wanted to show its understanding that the era of stand-alone copying machines is passing, Thurman said. Printers, copiers and multifunction machines increasingly are hooked-in not only to computer networks but the Internet.
Finally, Danka wanted to emphasize all the ways it can help customers, from improving productivity to reducing costs.
"Could (the boilerplate) be better? Certainly there are ways to improve it," Thurman said. But its purpose "is to get people's interest, not necessarily to be the end-all communication. ... I think most people would go to the Web site for additional information."
Warshawsky, whose day job is a consultant with Deloitte Services LP, sees the Danka boilerplate differently.
Still, he said, he understands the kind of pressure Thurman and others are under to make their employer sound sophisticated.
"I'm actually working on a recruiting brochure right now for - you'll laugh at this - our "Human Capital' practice," he said.
"It's an unfortunate name."
Scott Barancik can be reached at 727 893-8751 or barancik@sptimes.com