Relevance Archive - Page 11 of 20 - The Art of Communicating

The complete picture

Many communicators struggle with the challenge to convey a complete picture of their topic to their audience. After all, it’s quite a complex topic to understand if you care for the details. Also, your product is a masterpiece of craftsmanship.

Yet, the actual challenge might be much simpler than that.

Because effectively, all you need to do is to tell me one thing that makes me curious to hear the next thing.

When you’ve achieved that, all you need to do is to tell me one more thing that makes me curious to hear the third thing.

Step by step.

When you do this repeatedly, eventually you’ll have told me everything but it doesn’t feel nearly as tedious as we’re used to from the usual approach to communicating.

When you want me to understand the complete picture of your idea, the challenge is not to tell me everything.

The challenge is to figure out what’s the one thing that makes me want to know more.

If you want me to get the complete picture, get me to want the complete picture. A much simpler approach. And much more related to what matters to your audience rather than to yourself.

5 new clients every week

It’s easy to speak with clarity.

What’s hard is to speak with clarity about the things we deeply care about.

“This program will bring you 5 new clients every week.” is about as clear as it gets. This statement is also really easy to come up with if you don’t care about its truthfulness.

When you speak about the things you care about, you do care about truth.

… This new service you were building over the last three years. That product that demanded from your team months of blood, sweat, and tears. The lessons you’ve learned on your path to becoming the leader you are and that you want to share in a keynote. …

These things are complex. We know so much about them that we easily fall under the Curse of Knowledge. We struggle with what to leave out and what to focus on. We’re unsure about the promises we can confidently make. We use language and abstraction that might be hard to get for others. Ultimately, we are so deeply expert in our field that it’s hard to look with non-expert eyes.

And yet, it’s precisely these things that require clarity. If only because we must not leave the field to the bullshitters.

8 million

Each year, more than 8 million children die due to poverty (source).

That’s a huge number. But how large is it, really? The human mind has no easy way to “see” that number. For our brain, it doesn’t make much difference whether it’s 8 million or 80 thousand. Both is basically “a lot”.

Things change when we translate the numbers into dimensions we can relate to. 8 million per year means that every 4 seconds a child dies due to poverty.

Basically, during the time it takes you to read this sentence, a child dies due to poverty.

4 seconds is an easy to grasp value. 4 seconds is easy to experience. It has a clear meaning in our everyday life and therefore, it makes the abstract specific. It’s still the same information, but it’s much more tangible – even more so when you support it with a finger snap.

It’s hard to see 8 million children, but it’s easy to imagine one – which is precisely what most of us do when we hear that finger snap. With each finger snap we see a child.

Translating difficult numbers into values that make sense in our everyday life also makes it a lot easier for our audiences to understand what the numbers mean. It makes it a lot easier to relate to the info we’re trying to convey.

If marketing was a bakery

We would probably hate cake.

As a baker, when your cake doesn’t taste great, the best thing you can do is to learn to bake a better tasting cake.

The default approach of many marketers is different. They will take the cake and decorate it beautifully. Invent a story about how the recipe is an ancient and long forgotten secret of someone’s grandmother. Throw some incentives in so you can get three if you buy two (although you might not even want one). And have a celebrity, who never tasted the cake, tell us how delicious it is.

And then, when you’ve tricked the customer into buying that piece of cake, trust erodes as the experience falls short of the expectation.

The first bite is with the eye. But sooner or later, the customer gets to experience the actual taste. If the actual bite isn’t great, that first impression will quickly be forgotten.

The default approach to marketing is prone to deception: Give me what you have and I will make it appear attractive and find ways to persuade a customer to buy it.

Lighting the path is different because it starts with a great cake. You decorate a great cake not as a means to hide a weakness but because it makes a great cake even greater. You don’t invent a story about the recipe to make it appear cooler, you tell the actual story because it’s fascinating, let’s say due to the breathtaking attention to detail in making the cake.

Now, when the actual bite confirms the eye’s bite, it builds trust. And we might fall in love with the cake. And buy a second one even without any incentive.

Avoiding your audience’s autopilot

Our audiences have a lot of bad (or good?) habits that affect us.

When they read a boring headline, the scroll-further habit kicks in.

When they see a PowerPoint deck, the boring-PowerPoint-lets-check-Instagram habit kicks in.

When they read a generic first paragraph of a blog post, the this-is-irrelevant-lets-just-skim-over-it habit kicks in (or maybe even the lets-check-my-phone-and-get-lost-in-social-media-instead routine).

Habits are a big deal because they take over our audience’s brains (more or less) automatically. Once someone experiences a trigger (e.g. the boring headline), the habit kicks in.

The most effective way to avoid this behaviour is to avoid the trigger. And that’s why it matters to a) find trust in your own voice and b) understand what matters to your audience.

If you speak about what matters to your audience in your own distinctive voice, the just-like-everything-else trigger doesn’t fire and so your audience’s attention remains with you.

The not-so-rational argument

Fact: The glass is half full.
Which is the same as half empty.

The more relevant question is what conclusions do we draw from the fact?

These can be rather different depending on your take regarding half empty or half full, e.g. because they imply a different sense of urgency.

The thing is that arguing rationally based on facts can be just as frustrating as arguing emotionally when we don’t agree on the meaning of the facts. Even more so … because everyone is so deeply convinced that their take is right. After all, the facts prove them right. It really is a factual argument: “But the glass is half empty! You can’t deny that!”

Why then does the other party, based on the facts, arrive at a different conclusion? And how come they are just as convinced of their conclusion?

The problem is that facts are just facts and the argument is not about the facts. It’s about what the facts mean. It’s informed by our experiences and expectations. It’s influenced by our values and principles.

And this means, that it only masks as a rational discussion unless we agree on these things. It’s a rational discussion relative to our values and principles. Only when we agree about these will a rational argument lead to the same conclusion for all participants.

Are you clear about the values that influence the meaning of a fact to you?

The of course effect

Of course a tablet turns on instantaneously. Yet, before the iPad came out we were used to minute-long wake-ups from computer laptops. For many users, finding their device ready to use the instant they turned it on was a revelation.

Go through your office or your house and you’ll find dozens – if not hundreds – of these “of course” product features. The kind of feature that when you’ve used it even just once, you ask yourself how this could not have existed before. Why had no one thought of this before?

Many companies chase the wow effect in their marketing – a spectacular decoration of the product or a breathtaking story they can tell around the product – but overlook the fact that the down to earth “of course” effect is often way stronger.

What’s yours?

Fear of missing o…

A couple of things that FOMO, the fear of missing out, helps us with:

What if the world is going crazy about a tennis player who wants to travel to Australia but is refused entry to the country and we don’t know about it.

What if a new word puzzle sets the world in addiction mode and we’re the last to hear about it.

What if a friend has just commented on my picture on Instagram.

What if another friend has just posted an update on her morning routine.

What if someone just sent me a snap.

We better don’t take the risk of missing out on that. So, let’s just quickly check our phone to catch up on things, shall we?

Rather than speak with the person sitting right next to us. Make a personal connection. Embark on a conversation about a topic that’s so much more exciting than we thought as it turns out the person sitting next to us is a real expert in that field.

Fear of missing out is a major component of the fuel that social media brews to hook us up. They brew it so masterfully that they convince us to miss out on a lot of other opportunities without the same level of fear – such as the things that happen offline in the space we’re at right in that moment.

When I enter a workshop room, it’s not uncommon that I have a dozen brilliant people sitting in front of me and not one is talking to the other but all are staring on their phone.

The offline world is not at all good in brewing the same addictive fuel of missing out. Apparently, we fear so much more what we miss out on online that we overlook what we miss out on offline.

It takes conscious effort to act on this.

Is it a product?

Is it a product? Or a bunch of features?

Can you say why it exists without saying how it does what it does?

Can your customers?

For great products, the features are there for a reason. They serve a cause. That cause sparks a story and that story can be told and retold.

For bad products it’s the other way around. The features are the reason the product exists. There is no clear and concise cause and therefore, there is no simple story to tell.

This is usually the point at which a marketing agency is hired to come up with a story. Which they do. And it might be a good story. Or it might not. In which case, it becomes really hard to sell the product.

I’d suggest starting with the cause so the story is built into your product. It simplifies the whole marketing.

Good intentions gone wrong

“I’m just going quickly over this graph!”

And she’s doing it with good intentions. Because that thing she’s going quickly over is not that hard to understand. Also, it’s probably not the most exciting part of her presentation. So, just going quickly over it seems like a great service to her audience.

Except that it’s the exact opposite.

Because she’s going over it so quickly that her audience doesn’t even have the time to read the graph, let alone understand it, let alone question it.

What was easy for her is hard for her audience. If only for the simple fact that it is new.

When in doubt, assume that it’s harder to see the point than you think it is. Rather than go quickly over something that is easy ask yourself how to focus on the most relevant bits. Rather than go quickly over something that is unexciting ask yourself how to make it more exciting.

Lighting the path is the presenter’s job, not the audience’s.

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