Blog posts tagged collective nouns

A meddle of marketers?

I like collective nouns. I love the idea that a group of crows together is a “murder” of crows, as if they are plotting darkly to perform sinister acts. When you look at them, it feels right. I like it that bishops together are known as a “bench”, and picture them all sitting neatly in a row, dressed in identical vestments.

Collective nouns are picturesque, evocative and reveal something significant about the subject described that neutral terms like “group” do not. Some are very common - a swarm of bees, for example; others are reminders of a world and a way of describing it that we’ve almost forgotten. Who knew that a collection of pedlars is a “malapertness”?

There are hundreds of them. But, as far as I know, there’s no collective noun for people who work in marketing. So I figured we should invent one - after all, we’re creative types, right, and our job is to use language persuasively and picturesquely? On Wednesday, I asked our Twitter followers what they would call a group of marketing people in a room together.

“I’d be careful asking that!” warned Mags Halliday. And, unsurprisingly, there were a fair few satirical descriptions. Here are my favourites:

A melee of marketers Lucy Whittington

A buy of marketers Ian Blackford

A stunt of publicists and A broadcast of marketers David Buchanan

An engagement of social media gurus Gabrielle Laine Peters

A mystique of marketers Claire Dowdall

A fizz of PRs Emma Porter

An inspired Adrian Malpass had a stream of suggestions:

A focus of marketers

A hype of marketers

A smarm of salespeople

An invasion of PR execs

Adrian also suggested a snooze of HR people and the rather creepy feel of life coaches.

Some suggestions were less kind:

“I think it's the same as the collective name for a group of baboons,” smirked Ben Park.

A rather cynical Andrew Gerrard offered a cartoon. “Your question immediately reminded me of this: http://twitpic.com/1h9jzc. Can't possibly think why...” he remarked.

For some reason we started talking about politicians and got calamity, spin, contradiction and, in the wake of the David Cameron egg-throwing incident, a scramble of politicians.

My own marketing suggestions including a meddle of marketers, an exaggeration of marketers and an evasion of PR execs. But here’s my final, somewhat more sensible, list:

A mix of marketers

A sample of salespeople

A press of PR executives

A persuasion of publicists

A subdivision of market researchers

Thanks for all your suggestions. I’d love to hear more, so feel free to add them below.