Words matter in marketing because we ask them to carry enormous weight. A carefully chosen word can tell someone what a company believes, what a product promises, or why any of it should matter to them.
In college, I worked part-time at a local grocery store in my hometown called The Atlantic. On a summer break from school, the store manager pulled me aside and told me he was going to train me to be the front-end manager. I would be in charge of all the cashiers and bag boys, keeping the cash in the registers, and all that. I was already a bag boy and a cashier, so the change worked well. I wasn’t always front-end manager; sometimes I was just a cashier or a bag boy; however, on the days that I was front-end manager, my boss told me to write “premium pay” on my time card so the accountants would know that I was to get two dollars more an hour on those days.
I loved it, premium pay. I would console myself when customers were screaming at me for this and that, about some canned corn that wasn’t on the shelf, and she had a dinner party, and I did know how bad I was going to make her look. “At least I’m getting that premium pay,” I would tell myself, and that allowed me to survive the slings and arrows of a noxious public. Premium pay. The word was special to me. I was at a premium. My pay was premium. I had earned, through hard work and focus, through perfect attendance, that new word in my financial lexicon. I was making premium money.
Truth is, and I didn’t learn this til years later, that my boss never told accounting, so when they received my time card with “premium pay” written on it, they had no idea what it meant, and I was too lazy to do the math to see if I had been paid this premium on the days I managed the front end. Most likely, I did not. The point is, I was sucked in, pulled under, and placated by a word: premium. The best. Top of the line. A cut above. It was a great word, and I owned it with all my heart and soul.
The Words We Use
Words matter in marketing because we ask them to carry enormous weight. A carefully chosen word can tell someone what a company believes, what a product promises, or why any of it should matter to them. That’s why certain words become so valuable. They communicate an entire idea without much explanation. Premium used to be one of those words.
When something was premium, you understood it marked a distinction. There was the ordinary version, and there was something above it, and the word told you which was which. Even my premium pay at The Atlantic supposedly represented something specific. I had more responsibility on those days, so I was going to make more money. The word wasn’t merely there to make me feel important. Well, apparently it may have been in my particular case, but that wasn’t how premium was supposed to work. There was meant to be something tangible behind it.
Marketers recognized the word’s power, and that’s where things started going sideways. Premium sounded good. It suggested that someone had taken an ordinary product and made it better, and it communicated that idea quickly. That made the word enormously useful, so naturally it began showing up everywhere. Products became premium because the ingredients were supposedly better, services became premium because they cost more, and eventually the distinction between what genuinely deserved the description and what simply wanted it became hard to see.
That’s the strange thing about language. A word can become less powerful precisely because it was once so powerful. The more broadly premium was applied, the less work it could do. Eventually, seeing it on a package or attached to a service stopped telling us much of anything. Somewhere along the way, premium went from being a meaningful description to something closer to a sales technique.
Marketing does this to language because language is convenient. Finding a word that suggests value is much easier than explaining where that value actually comes from. But when the word becomes disconnected from anything the customer can recognize or experience, it begins to wear out. We haven’t necessarily changed the product. We’ve simply placed a flattering adjective in front of it and asked the adjective to handle the heavy lifting.
Which brings me back to my time card at The Atlantic. Someone introduced premium into my working life; I believed there was something behind it, and for a while that belief was enough to make me feel better about dealing with angry customers and their missing canned corn. But sooner or later, the thing being promised by the word has to exist. At some point, somebody is going to look at the paycheck and see whether the extra two dollars is actually there.
Premium Compared to What?
There’s something inherently comparative about the word premium. It can’t exist by itself. If you tell me you have a premium product, you’re telling me there’s another version somewhere that doesn’t meet the same standard. That difference is why the word has value. Without it, premium is just something nice we’ve decided to say about ourselves.
Think about premium economy on an airplane. The name tells you almost nothing about what you’re buying. Is the seat wider? Do I get more legroom? Am I closer to the front? Does someone bring me a warm towel and call me Mr. Kiernan? I need to know what separates the experience from the one I would have had if I’d kept my money in my pocket. The word can point toward the difference, but it can’t be the difference.
That distinction matters because brands sometimes treat language as though it can create value rather than communicate it. Change the package name, redesign the label, put premium across the top, and suddenly we’ve moved the product into a different neighborhood. Maybe we have. But if nothing meaningful changed inside the box, the customer eventually figures that out. Language can influence expectation, but it has a much harder time surviving disappointment.
This is where my imaginary two dollars an hour becomes useful again. My boss could call my front-end manager wage premium pay because there was supposed to be an actual difference between it and my regular pay. Two dollars. That was the proof. Without those two dollars, I wasn’t receiving premium anything. I was doing additional work under a more flattering name.
Brands need to be careful not to do the same thing. If you’re going to tell people something is premium, there should be an answer when they ask why. Not a paragraph of marketing copy filled with other impressive adjectives, but something they can recognize as valuable. The word should come at the end of the argument, after you’ve earned the right to use it. Otherwise, premium becomes exactly what it may have been on my old time card: a promise that sounded considerably better than it paid.
The Marketing Word Graveyard
Premium isn’t alone in this. Marketing has a habit of finding perfectly useful words, discovering that people respond to them, and then using them until they barely mean anything. Authentic suffered this fate. So did innovative. Both once communicated something worth knowing about a company. Now they appear so frequently in marketing language that I’m not sure most of us even register them when we see them.
Authentic is an especially strange one because authenticity is something other people are supposed to recognize in you. Declaring yourself authentic feels a little like walking into a room and announcing that you’re humble. Maybe you are, but the announcement has complicated matters. A brand earns authenticity through the way it behaves and whether those actions match what it claims to believe. The word itself can’t create any of that.
Innovative has a similar problem. Innovation used to suggest that someone had done something genuinely new or found a better way to solve a problem. Now a company can change the shape of a bottle cap and somebody in marketing will be tempted to call it an innovation. Nothing technically prevents them from doing so. No governing body reviews the bottle cap and issues an official innovation certificate, so the word is available to anyone who wants it.
That freedom is part of what wears these words out. The cost of using them is zero. A company doesn’t have to demonstrate authenticity before putting authentic on its website, just as nobody has to prove a product is innovative before describing it that way. When enough brands make the same claims without offering much evidence, customers learn to ignore the claims. The language becomes familiar noise.
This doesn’t mean the ideas behind those words have lost their value. Quite the opposite. Genuine innovation still matters enormously, and people absolutely care whether the companies they support behave in ways that feel authentic. What has changed is our willingness to accept the words themselves as proof. We’ve heard them too many times.
That’s the real danger in exhausting useful language. Eventually, a brand can possess the very quality a word was created to describe and discover that saying the word no longer helps. Marketing hasn’t destroyed the idea. We’ve simply made the shorthand for it considerably less useful.
The Problem Isn’t the Word
I don’t want to suggest that we should stop using premium. I’m not advocating for a moratorium on authentic or demanding that innovative be removed from every company website by sundown. These are perfectly good words. They became popular because they describe things people actually care about. The problem begins when we expect the word to create a quality that isn’t evident anywhere else.
If you make a genuinely premium product, call it premium. But give me a reason to believe you. Maybe you use a material that costs more because it lasts longer. Perhaps your service includes something your competitors decided wasn’t worth the trouble. Whatever the difference is, that’s where the marketing should begin. The word should help describe the value you’ve created rather than being asked to manufacture that value on its own.
This requires a little restraint, which isn’t always easy in marketing. We want language that elevates what we’re selling, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a point where elevation becomes inflation. If we keep reaching for the biggest available word, eventually we leave ourselves nowhere to go. Everything becomes exceptional by declaration, and the customer is left trying to determine which claims actually deserve attention.
There’s also something more interesting available to brands when they stop relying on these exhausted words. Specificity is harder, but it gives people something they can understand. Telling me a jacket is premium asks me to accept your judgment. Telling me why you chose a particular fabric or why someone spent twice as long stitching the damn thing gives me information I can use to make my own judgment. You no longer have to insist on the conclusion because you’ve given me enough to reach it myself.
That’s what good marketing language should do. It shouldn’t stand between the customer and the truth, trying to make everything sound more impressive. It should make the truth easier to see. Premium can still be a useful word, but it needs something underneath it. Otherwise, it’s just my old time card again, with a lovely promise written across the top and no guarantee there’s anything extra waiting at the bottom.
What Are You Actually Trying to Say?
There’s an interesting thing that happens when you take words like premium away from a brand. Suddenly, someone has to explain what makes the product worth buying. You can’t simply announce that it’s better and move along. You have to figure out where the difference actually lives, which can be an uncomfortable exercise if nobody has bothered to ask that question in a while.
This is one reason so much marketing language starts to sound alike. Companies operating in the same category tend to reach for the same vocabulary because they’re trying to communicate similar ideas. Everyone wants to be seen as the better choice, so the language drifts toward words that imply superiority without requiring much explanation. After a while, competitors that may be genuinely different end up describing themselves in almost identical ways.
The opportunity is to stop searching for a more impressive adjective and start looking for something true. What is it about this company that customers would actually notice? What happens here that doesn’t happen somewhere else? There’s usually an answer, but it may not sound nearly as polished as premium when you first find it. That’s fine. In fact, that may be exactly what makes it useful.
At ThoughtLab, this is part of what we’re looking for when we work with a brand. We’re not trying to find a cleverer way to call something exceptional. We want to understand what makes it worth calling exceptional in the first place. Sometimes that distinction is buried in the product. Sometimes it lives in how the company behaves, or in a decision somebody made years ago and has never thought to mention because, to them, it’s simply how things are done.
Those details give language something to hold onto. Instead of asking customers to believe a flattering description, you can show them something specific and let them decide what it means. If what you make is truly better, you shouldn’t have to spend much time insisting it’s premium. Tell people what makes it different, and they may arrive at a much more valuable conclusion on their own.
The Takeaway
I still love the phrase premium pay. Even knowing there’s a pretty good chance I never received it, I can remember exactly how those words made me feel. I wasn’t just the kid bagging groceries anymore. On certain days, I was the guy responsible for the front end of The Atlantic, and somewhere in the mysterious machinery of payroll, I believed two additional dollars were making their way toward me. The words gave the job a little more importance, and apparently that was enough to keep me going when someone’s dinner party was being destroyed by our failure to adequately stock canned corn.
That’s an impressive amount of work for one word to do, and it’s why language matters so much to brands. The right word can change how we understand something before the thing itself has changed at all. That power is tempting, particularly when you’re trying to convince someone that what you make deserves their attention or their money. But it’s also why we have to be careful with the words we choose. Once we use them carelessly, we begin spending the meaning they accumulated over years.
At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time thinking about language because branding depends on it, but the goal isn’t to find bigger words. It’s to find accurate ones. Sometimes the strongest thing a brand can say about itself isn’t impressive at first glance. It’s simply specific and true. When the language comes from something real, you don’t have to inflate it. You don’t have to keep reaching for adjectives that have already been stretched beyond recognition.
Maybe premium isn’t dead. I hope it isn’t. I have fond memories of the word, even if my relationship with it began under somewhat fraudulent circumstances. But if we want words like premium to mean something again, we have to stop treating them as decorations and start treating them as promises. If you put premium on the time card, there had damn well better be two extra dollars in the paycheck.
