fancy Archive - Lead with Clarity. Communicate with Impact.

Do your words need more bang?

If you feel your words need more bang, the words are almost certainly not your problem.

It’s much more likely that you yourself don’t trust the idea yet.

Because if you would, you wouldn’t need to push so hard.

You’d just say what needs to be said.
Plain and simple.

But when you’re unsure, that doesn’t work.
The simple words feel a little awkward and sound slightly off.

So you add more words. Fancier words. And invest more energy.
Not to improve the idea, but to fix how it sounds.

And that’s a trap. You think you need fancier words.
But fancy words won’t fix an unfinished idea.

The path to a better idea runs straight through the search for plain and simple words.

If it doesn’t feel right saying it simply, it’s a clear signal that there’s work to do on the thinking behind them.

Sure, the simple words maybe aren’t themselves the fix.
But they’ll certainly show you where to look.

Keep lighting the path!

Sounding professional

Somewhere between “value proposition” and “north star” the thing that really needed to be said got lost.

This has nothing to do with bad intentions.
Most leaders want to bring clarity.

But somehow, the meeting got stuck in the performance of sounding professional. Eloquent. Ambitious.

And so the one statement that would’ve made everything click never made it into the room.

It didn’t sound “eloquent” enough.

Plain and simple words rarely do.
But they are the ones that bring clarity.

If someone finds the courage to surface them in all of that alignment talk, synergy talk, roadmap talk …

It’s usually someone who’s not looking to impress,
but to create an impact.

Keep lighting the path!

Does it sound smart?

A big irony in communication:
the more you try to impress, the less you usually do.

The fancy ads, the larger-than-life promises, the forced storytelling … how often have you found yourself quickly skipping over those, feeling totally unimpressed, indifferent even.

Tangible beats sensational.
Relatable beats fancy.
Every time.

The confusion is perhaps that it’s never about the communicator being smart. You want your audience to feel smart.

Simple, true stories often achieve this better than fancy, larger-than-life stories.

That’s why the “of course effect” I spoke about yesterday is so powerful. The “of course” happens in your audience’s minds—they’ve realized something so true, so obvious, they can’t believe they didn’t see it before.

That doesn’t happen when it sounds fancy. It happens when it’s clear, relatable, and tangible. “Can they see it?” is a much more helpful guiding principle than “Does it sounds smart?”.

It needs to sound sexy

Who doesn’t like a sexy slogan for their product, one that matches the big player’s most creative ads.

And so, a lot of marketing agencies are paid a lot of money to go looking for fancy and spectacular.

Only that, most of the time, the sexiest slogans are neither fancy nor spectacular. They are relevant and tangible. Using plain English.

A thousand songs in your pocket. Melts in your mouth, not in your hands. And many more just paint a picture of what the product promises in the most vivid way.

These slogans make the customers see – and then feel – how the future will look like if they buy the product. In plain English.

Empathy is a lot more valuable to find sexy slogans than a big budget. Relevance creates resonance. And resonance creates results.

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Do your words need more bang?

Sounding professional

Does it sound smart?

It needs to sound sexy

Spread the Word

Dr. Michael Gerharz