Introduction
Surveys routinely show that public relations claims are broadly regarded with suspicion, a phenomenon that would seem odd given that many firms feel like they are doing more than ever to appeal to public sentiment. According to the Kantar Sustainability Sector Index figures collected between 2023 and 2025, 52% of people globally say they have seen false or misleading information about brands’ sustainability actions. ‘PR buzzwords’ have become a flashpoint in this frustration, with Preply survey figures, collected at the same time, showing that more than 1 in 5 people say when asked that they actively dislike corporate buzzwords. It seems that a growing segment of the public has grown sceptical of corporate actors’ claims to pro-social virtue, and that the seemingly insincere nature of ‘buzzwords’ undermines their use. Still, PR is a roughly $105 billion global industry. How can this be, when so much of the public claims to be growing disillusioned with it? This short article endeavours to answer why by analysing ‘PR buzzwords’ through the lens of focal points. This is a sparse area of research academically. Even so, I will argue that PR buzzwords do clearly constitute focal points, and that their use can therefore be understood as causal in achieving positive PR outcomes for clients.
Explaining Focal Points as a Concept
The concept of a ‘focal point’, initially known as a ‘Schelling point’, was first introduced by Thomas Schelling in his 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict. It has since grown into a fixture of modern game theory. In basic terms, the experiment conducted by Schelling goes as follows:
1. You are in a 2-person game
2. You are instructed that you will be rewarded for picking the same option as the other player
3. You cannot communicate with your partner in any way
The first and most famous example was that they were both to choose 1 of 9 squares, as pictured below. The twist, of course, is that 8 are blue and 1 is red. If the choice of square is random, you would expect each square to be chosen 1 in 9 times. Still, in his rendition, Schelling observed that participants overwhelmingly chose the red square.
This led him to develop and formalise the theory that people can coordinate by latching onto notable cues even without communicating. In fact, they tend to coordinate on a focal point which is in some way particularly salient. In the previous example, the red square constitutes a focal point because it is salient due to being unique. Other famous examples would be Grand Central Station when participants asked where to meet up with someone in New York, or heads when forced to choose between heads or tails. None of these choices are fundamentally correct; they simply reflect entrenched expectations, shaping rational behaviour. These types of conventions do not have to be artificially constructed like in the square experiment either. They can emerge quite spontaneously, as observed by Centola and Baronchelli (2015), whose network experiments “demonstrate the spontaneous creation of universally adopted social conventions” (p. 1989). This means common exposure and salience can create shared terminology organically, giving rise to labels and conventions supported by public ritual and repetition (Chen, 2001).
A more practical example in markets would be gold in the context of commodity markets. It is salient because it is instinctively visually appealing and can easily be melted down to make aesthetically pleasing things, but the value we assign to it is largely a result of cultural coordination over thousands of years. A more modern market-oriented example would be bitcoin. For many, it has simply settled as the ‘default’ cryptocurrency, which explains why, according to Corbet et al. (2018), other cryptocurrencies track so closely with it. The theory for buzzwords being proposed here is that they essentially represent the same thing in the linguistic realm of PR, in a hypothetical ‘market of corporate language’. What I am suggesting is that rather than being trite or repetitive, buzzwords perform a positive social function in communicating respectability and reputability as such. To prove that this is indeed happening two things need to be established: (1) PR buzzwords need to be salient linguistically, and (2) using them needs to have a positive PR effect not explained by unrelated fundamentals.
The Evidence that PR Buzzwords Constitute Focal Points: Salience
In order to establish whether PR buzzwords have a salient property, we have to explore what salience looks like in the realm of words specifically. The first requirement is fluency. Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman (2004) demonstrated that fluency breeds positive evaluations across domains. This means that easy, familiar words feel better, making them more salient and comfortable as choices. This is reflected in the realm of markets specifically, too. Alter and Oppenheimer’s (2006) work found that “[f]luently named stocks robustly outperformed stocks with disfluent names in the short term” (p. 9369). A focal point in the realm of words therefore has to be fluent; it has to roll off the tongue.
Words used as focal points would also have to be consistently repeated. This has already been mentioned with regard to Chen (2001) and is made particularly clear by the work of Dechêne et al. (2010), who found that repetition increases perceived truth across studies. This proves that repetition is positively associated with credibility linguistically, making it necessary for effective focality. Finally, a word would have to be ambiguous to constitute an effective focal point. That much is made clear by the work of Eisenberg (1984), who demonstrated in the realm of game theory that purposeful vagueness can unify diverse audiences and enable change, making organisation easier by discouraging excessive technical controversy. We have thus identified three clear conditions for a word to achieve the salience necessary to potentially constitute a focal point: (1) fluency, (2) repetition, and (3) ambiguity. PR buzzwords meet these conditions by definition. PR professionals actively sort for fluency, and buzzwords’ perceived vagueness and over repetition are routinely lamented to the point of cliche. Clearly, buzzwords are salient, and therefore legitimate candidates for being linguistic focal points.
The Evidence that PR Buzzwords Constitute Focal Points in Practice
The fact that buzzwords are salient is not, of course, enough to prove that they are focal points. They have to de facto be seen to achieve some kind of reputational benefit. The easiest way to see this is in capital or financial markets. If engaging with buzzwords can be seen to positively affect capital flows with no change to fundamentals, it becomes reasonable to assume that they have effectively achieved their desired PR dynamic. We can see clear evidence for this in the markets themselves. El Ghoul and Karoui (2021), for example, found that U.S. funds adding ‘sustainable/ESG/green/impact’ see flow increases without any performance change. Cooper, Gulen, and Rau (2005) found a similar effect for hot style names more broadly. Specifically, they found “average cumulative abnormal flow of 28% in the year after a fund changes its name to reflect a current hot style, with no improvement in performance” (p. 2825). Espenlaub, Khurshed & Haq (2017) identified exactly the same dynamic, where fund flows increased with ESG term usage even without any performance benefit. This clearly proves that not only do buzzwords make for good linguistic focal points in theory but seem to operate like they are focal points in practice. It cannot be explained by market fundamentals; and it cannot be explained by a preference for green finance, since nothing in the studied funds changed except the name. The only reasonable conclusion is that use of the buzzwords themselves increased the value of these mutual funds. Nothing changed but the public profile. The use of buzzwords achieved more ‘PR points’, if you will, making them the linguistic equivalent to gold or bitcoin in the public profile terminology market. In light of all this, their usage can in no meaningful sense be reasonably considered arbitrary.
Limitations
The lack of direct academic literature on the question of whether buzzwords constitute focal points of course makes it difficult to know for sure whether focal point theory really explains what we are seeing, and there is some contrary literature that suggests we should be careful in assuming it. Crawford, Gneezy, and Rottenstreich (2008), for example, found that even minor asymmetries in payoffs make salient focal points unstable, meaning we would only expect them to work when incentives are clearly aligned, which might not always be a reasonable assumption. Reuters coverage of the ESMA naming restrictions also noted that the meaning of these terms remains politically and technically contested, leading to controversy. Following the logic of Eisenberg (1984), focal points thus seem to potentially become limited in their salience when they enter regulatory debates.
Conclusion
So, where does all of this leave us? In the end, it is clear that buzzwords, by virtue of being buzzwords, are ideal candidates for linguistic focal points. In practice and in markets, this seems to be exactly the role that they play, at least by Bayesian logic. We thus have a lot of ground to stand on in challenging the idea that PR buzzwords are somehow meaningless. They are not. They are deliberate tools in market coordination, and public relations consulting remains more relevant than ever in helping clients engage with them competently.
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