Technical jargon: What does "aggregate" actually mean?
Benno Maggi explains marketing and communications terms in his column "Technical jargon".
Anyone who understands marketing as what it was originally intended to be (namely, to promote the sale of goods and services by analyzing, serving, seducing and looking after customers, and doing so in a never-ending cycle) must now accept that only what aggregates counts.
In the past, the use of the word was left to investment banking, management consulting or IT, but thanks to the digitization of almost all areas of business, you hear it at every meeting today. But anyone in the industry who asks what the word means exactly is usually met with perplexed faces.
Aggregation is comparable to set theory: apple, pear, apricot, giraffe - find the mistake. Something belongs or does not belong to a group. Technically, aggregation is the process of creating metadata from data. In this process, this data is assigned to a specific group, which allows general statements to be made about the group as a whole. About the group of fruits, for example, to which the giraffe definitely does not belong. Or the group of pome fruits, to which the apricot (stone fruit) then also does not belong.
Aggregation was also the basis of arguably the most successful marketing tool of recent decades, introduced by Amazon in the late 1990s and copied millions of times: Customers who bought this also bought that. So anyone who uses the word "aggregate" without knowing what it means is virtually aggregating themselves in a simple "is-part-of" relationship with all the other copycats.
*The author: Benno Maggi is co-founder and CEO of Partner & Partner. He created the column "Vom Fach" in the NZZ Folio and was in charge of it for years. He presents and decodes words and terms that can be used either for small talk, being important, getting excited, playing Scrabble or simply for fun.
