Earlier this month, I was alarmed to see a blogger label a pricing action taken by JetBlue as following “the battered wife customer service model.”  While the author may claim to “lead a movement to inspire people to do things that inspire them,” I find little that could be inspiring about the thoughtless application of this phrase to the airline’s decision to charge for a pillow and blanket kit. 

I sort of chalked this up to bad taste and moved on.

Then this week’s AdAge showed up with an article on the front page entitled “Brand vs. Brand:  Attack Ads on the Rise.”  Attack?  The article asks whether it’s the tight economy, or the effective PC vs. Mac ads, or maybe the Presidential election that have “set the tone” for some “pretty aggressive” comparison ads.  Except… there’s no there there.  When you read the article, the ads discussed include the Pepsi Challenge, Dyson vs. Hoover and Time Warner vs. Verizon.  None of these strike me as “attack” ads. I don’t think that anyone experiences the PC vs. Mac executions as “attack” ads.  Even the head of branding at Dunkin Donuts, which is currently running ads taking direct aim at Starbucks, says that it’s important not to get nasty.

So what exactly is being “attacked?”  Perhaps the publication’s own need to drive circulation and ad revenue (this is, after all, the same pub whose front page screamed about clients losing business due to the economy, while the inside featured a full page about agencies who employ their own bartenders), because there is nothing in the article itself to warrant its title.

Do marketers have any responsibility to use language that does not deliberately offend when discussing the average no-big-deal topic?  I think we do:  as marketers and as humans.  The word “attack” may be appropriate in the title of an article about Obama supposedly consorting with terrorists, but it’s just gratuitous when applied to a taste test ad comparing Progresso to Campbell.