Good Things Come In Easy-To-Open Packages

2 MIN READ

2018 has been an eventful year, and with Brexit uncertainty ahead, many businesses are having to work harder than ever to stay competitive.

My Christmas gift to you is to offer some thoughts on how to make things just a little easier on yourself, and maybe make it a little more possible to take a well deserved rest this holiday.

Cognitive Ease

You may have heard of the principle of ‘cognitive ease’. This concept is discussed at length by Nobel Prize winner Danny Kahneman in his renowned bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

When we are launching new products, events or initiatives, there’s usually a lot of information that needs to be communicated to the target audience. In a busy world, we’re competing against a lot of noise to get our information out there, and have it received well.

Simplify

This simple principle can help you in designing press releases, marketing and social media campaigns for maximum uptake with minimum stress.

Cognitive ease is when our most basic, instinctive operating system receives new information which feels palatable, acceptable and familiar. Unfamiliarity, complexity and effort all trigger our brains to switch into a more interrogative mode—and that can result in your audience simply turning off.

Make It Easy

For an initially positive response, choosing words, fonts and a colour palette that are easy to pronounce, assimilate and understand allows your audience to relax into a receptive frame of mind.

Come Again?

Even more effective is repetition. Kahneman describes an experiment based on social psychologist Robert Zajonc’s ‘mere exposure effect’, in which various foreign words were repeatedly (and without explanation) published on the front page of a college newspaper over a period of months. At the end of the campaign, when the newspaper readership was polled on the perceived ‘good’ or ‘bad’ qualities of these foreign words, those which appeared more frequently were rated much more favourably than those shown only once or twice.

This apparently bizarre response is explained by our historical biological conditioning to be wary of novel events. It’s not our ‘conscious experience of familiarity’, but what we perceive at a base level.

Novelty that works

You may have new or challenging ideas to communicate, and you’re certainly looking for audience engagement and response—but using familiarity and safety to reach out doesn’t mean killing creativity. In a recent Freakonomics podcast, Tessa Amabile, a psychologist and a professor emerita at the Harvard Business School, describes creativity as “essentially, novelty that works. It has to be somehow feasible, workable, valuable, appropriate to a goal.”

So there’s something about even the newest and most radical idea that has to have a hook in our consciousness; something which resonates, makes itself palatable and understandable. Something just a little familiar.

The world-renowned graphic designer Michael Bierut takes up this idea in the podcast, and expands on it, referencing a 20th century designer, Raymond Loewy, who coined the credo:

MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable… it was based on his theory that everyone has these two impulses. And one is the desire for regularity and comfort, and the other one is the quest for surprise and novelty, right? If you have too much regularity and comfort, you get bored. If you get too much surprise and novelty, you get overexcited, wired and distracted and exhausted. It’s the idea that it’s novelty with a purpose.

So when you’re planning your next communication, remember that good things come in easy-to-open packages: whatever’s in the box, get the wrapping right!

For help with writing or editing, a free consultation or quotation, please contact me@isandrews.com, or give me a call on 07988 858873 to talk more.

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Mind The Gap: Expertly Communicating Your Brand in Every Message

image credit: Matthew Henry, unsplash.com

In reaching out to customers or partners, it’s tempting to imagine that simply producing more – maximising the amount we say and how often we say it – will effectively demonstrate who we are. But just getting your brand out there, advertising, engaging with social media marketing, or churning out reports or white papers is not enough to ensure you are successfully connecting with your audience.

“Pandering for traffic is not brand building. Winning the respect of your audience is.”

— Lewis DVorkin "Journalists and Statistics, Paying Attention to the New Media World" Forbes

Reaching your customer base and clearly expressing your relevance, your core values or your unique selling points requires a clear understanding of that audience.

image credit: WDNet Studio

• What matters to them?
• What information or experience in your field do they already have?
• How much detail do they need?
• What are you offering?
• What is your call to action?

These questions are likely to be familiar to you – we’re all brands now, whether you are a commercial business with products or services to sell, a startup, a consultancy, advocacy organisation or social enterprise.

However, the next step may be tougher...

image credit: Greg Plom, pixabay

Your product or skill base may be the leanest, smartest, most effective on the market; your service may add significant value to your customer; your bid may be the most competitive – but if you can’t express that reality, you’re relying on your customers to make a big jump to close the gap.

The Hidden Logic of Success

The really good news is that being brilliant at anything is simply a matter of careful rehearsal. In Bounce, Matthew Syed debunks the talent myth, demonstrating that hours of purposeful practice builds our competence and expertise, until – seemingly effortlessly and innately – we are performing to the highest levels. When we see extraordinary prowess, in any field, "we are witnessing the end-product of a process measured in years… what we do not see is what we might call the hidden logic of success." Syed, Bounce (Fourth Estate 2011)

“After years of experience in restructuring, redrafting, and refining, a professional writer instinctively finds the right words, nuance, tone and pace to connect to and convince their audience.”

The famous 10,000 hours, coined by influential sports and business commentator Malcolm Gladwell, represents the amount of time we need to invest in a complex task to achieve mastery. Writing fluently and persuasively is such a skill – and given enough practice, anyone can become an expert communicator. After years of experience in restructuring, redrafting, and refining, a professional writer instinctively finds the right words, nuance, tone and pace to connect to and convince their audience, approaching each new project with the ability and speed of a specialist. 

So that’s the good news. But if you’re already pouring your energy and creativity into your core business, where do you find those extra hours to develop your ability to communicate? Right now, you have information you need to get into the marketplace: perhaps a report to put out, web copy to update; an article, a white paper, a summary…

That's when you should consider adding the skills of a freelance copy writer into your team – someone who has already written countless hours of material for a diverse range of services and organisations. Someone who can help you find your voice and reach your audience. Today.

 

 

For more on how I can help you to communicate, influence and explain, get in touch at me@isandrews.com

He cannot choose but hear... Engaging your audience through storytelling

“He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.
”

— from 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', Samuel Coleridge

In the age of information, how do we choose to communicate? The answer is… in the same way as we have for thousands of years. Humans tell each other stories. The medium we choose may be different: a tweet, blog, email or text – but mankind has always warned, taught and understood themselves through narrative.

In his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future the business writer Daniel Pink explains that the critical skills of the 21st century are those of story tellers: “a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers”. To stand out in a crowded market, you must make an emotional connection with your audience.

Urban myths, cyberspace anecdotes, watercooler gossip: according to evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, social conversation makes up well over half of all human discussion in public places. The explosion of social media in the last ten years is in fact merely representative of what has been happening via word of mouth since humans first spoke at all.

Over the last few days the international community marked first World Storytelling Day, and then World Poetry Day. We celebrate these forms of communication because they are instinctive to us – they create the capacity to remember and to reflect.

Consider the last two or three stories you heard – read to your child at bedtime perhaps, or watched on television? A fairy tale warning of ravenous wolves in the woods; a Scandinavian crime thriller. A story captivates us where simple facts fail. We are gripped by another’s experience, and just as the wedding guest listening to the ancient mariner, we cannot choose but hear.

And there’s a story in everything. Forget the conventional wisdom telling us a news reporter may cover a political piece, or economics, and at the end of the show you’ll have a ‘human interest story’. Was there really any other kind? 

So when you next seek to convey technical information to your customers, to share an update on a breakthrough, to celebrate a new product – do it the intuitive way. Tell them a story.