Küchenzuruf Archive - The Art of Communicating

Survival of the message

Did you know that Charles Darwin didn’t invent the term “survival of the fittest”?

When he published “The Origin of Species” in 1859, he used the term “natural selection”.

His book is probably one of the most groundbreaking works in science that completely revolutionized the field of biology but its biggest influence might be due to the help of someone else.

Darwin’s book immediately spread in the scientific community. But it wasn’t until five years later when Herbert Spencer crafted the term “survival of the fittest” that the idea really took off.

Charles Darwin was quick to adapt it for the fifth edition of his book and I think the rest is history.

It might feel like just a small change, but the four words make a huge difference.

While “natural selection” is a rather abstract term that needs to be filled with meaning, “survival of the fittest” is very concrete.

You can almost see it as a mental picture, can’t you? It has a very tangible meaning, which means it’s easy to understand. And that makes it memorable. On top of that, it’s a statement made in plain and simple English.

It’s these three traits, simple to understand, memorable, and in plain and simple English that make it easy to pass along.

Herbert Spencer has essentially crafted the pass along phrase for the theory of “natural selection”, the phrase that people used to spread the idea.

Perhaps, the evolutionary theory would have found its influence regardless. But that pass along phrase has likely helped it spread faster.

Which is a good reminder that if you want your ideas to spread, it’s useful to make this as easy for your audience as possible.

So, what’s the pass along phrase for your idea, your product, or your service?

You’ve got my attention

I give you permission to use a chunk of my attention.
However, you must choose between two options:

Option #1:
You can get 30 minutes but you have to fill it with 30 ideas of one minute each.

Option #2:
You can get 10 minutes but you have to fill it with one idea and one idea only.

Many businesses instinctively pick option 1.
But is this a smart choice?

Which of the two do you think has a better chance of intriguing me?
Which one is more likely to get me to engage in a conversation?
Which one will stick with me for longer?

What would you pick?

Never delegate the hard part to your audience

I’ve just visited a business website but quickly left it utterly frustrated by the confusing messaging.

Certainly, you’ve had similar experiences with some presentations, websites, brochures, or pitches that were so overloaded with information that you just couldn’t find the point.

The business spoke about a bunch of customer problems. They mentioned a bunch of products with a bunch of features and then a bunch of ideas that they are working on. They elaborated on the company’s history, the mission, the vision, fact, stats, awards, you name it.

Basically what they did was throw all that information at you and hope that something sticks.

Essentially, they delegated the hard work of figuring out what their core message is to you.

To their audience, to their customers.

What a bad choice!

That’s work you should never delegate.

A great tool that helps you avoid this is what I like to call the “pass along phrase”. After someone listens to you or visits your website, what would they pass along to their colleagues?

That’s always short and to the point. It’s never 30 features, it’s one or max. two things.

When you have clarity on what you would like your pass along phrase to be, you can arrange your story to actually deliver it. You can decide which info is essential and which isn’t. You also know how to arrange the info cohesively so it all leads to that message.

What would your audience pass along from your communication?

The point of a presentation

What’s the point of a presentation if not to lead your audience to see something they didn’t see before?

Why even go through the hassle of preparing a presentation plus gathering everyone in a room if there’s nothing to see?

So many presentations fail because they don’t ask the questions that follow from this:

What actually is that thing that you need your audience to see?
Why don’t they see it already?
What do they see?

When you have answers to these questions, you can build a path from where they are now to where they can see what you need them to see.

To me, the ultimate goal of a presentation is to lead your audience to the point of no return, a point where you’ve shown it to them in such a profound way that they can’t unsee it anymore.

Good news!

Your audience has agreed to do the hard work for you.

If you think that you can’t boil your talk down to a simple core message, your audience will happily do it for you.

After your talk, when someone asks them what it was about, they will gladly provide an answer. Let’s call it the pass along phrase.

Here’s the thing:
That pass along phrase is always short.

If you can’t decide which of the 10 features was most important, they’ll pick one for you.

If you can’t focus on what it’s actually for, they’ll pick a focus for you.

And if the talk was somewhat confusing, they might just choose that fact: “I honestly don’t know what the talk was really about. It was somewhat confusing.”

Also:
The pass along phrase is always in their words.

They won’t bother with fancy language, tech jargon and the likes. They will choose language they are familiar with.

Let’s say it straight: You might not like their choice.

Which means that you might want to make your audience’s work of figuring out a pass along phrase as easy as possible.

You might want to pick a focus and use language your audience is familiar with.

Now, how do you make that task easier for your audience?

Great communication in a nutshell

Great communication in a nutshell:

Fade the non-essential and
amplify the essential.

Aligned on a common path

This week, I’m asking one simple but important question each day for you to ponder (on your own or with your team):

As a CEO, it’s important that you find simple answers to all of these four questions about your business:

What you do
For whom you do it
Why you do it
How you do it

Now, if you asked every member on your team for their answer, how many different answers would you get?

After the pitch

After your pitch what happens?

Often a pitch doesn’t lead to an immediate decision: “Thank you very much, we’ll think about it.”

That’s why great pitches make it easy for the decision makers to speak about your idea as they try to make the decision. A great pitch has a very clear take away message that’s easy to pass along among the decision makers during that process or when they bring in others into the decision loop.

What’s your pass along message?

Getting likes

Speaking of what you want to be known for: Make content around that, not what your audience is giving you likes for.

What works in social media is not necessarily what works for your business.

What works for your competitor is not necessarily what works for you.

What works for the audience you had is not necessarily what works for the audience you want.

What do you want to be known for?

What do you want to be known for? You won’t believe how many businesses don’t have a compelling answer to that simple question.

And yet, every action they take contributes to their fame. Every product they release. Every keynote their CEO gives. Every post they publish. Every sales presentation they make. Every call to customer support. Every mail. Proposal. Conversation. …

If these actions are inconsistent, the story of that business will be fuzzy at best.

Hence, marketing.

Huge budgets are allocated to create a public image. Agencies come up with something that sounds good and looks good. But more often than not, that image doesn’t match what customers experience when they reach out, use the product, or are otherwise exposed to the business.

What do you want to be known for?
If you don’t decide someone else will.

The biggest lever to own what the public thinks of you is to find clarity about that yourself. Uncover what a) you’re incredibly good at, b) you are passionate about, and c) makes you a profit. Based on that define what you want to be known for. The shorter the better.

Then light the path for the whole team. When the path is lit brightly (and when it’s aligned to what the team aspires to) you can trust them to do the right thing. Their actions will be aligned with the path. And so, every action anyone in your business takes contributes to becoming known for the right thing.

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