Tag: communication

Do not bother asking

FabrizioLeave a comment

If at the end of a fairly long and ambiguos onboarding, you are displayed the following message, chances are you are going to abandon the product and never come back.

Of course, there’s the fact that automatically charging the customer’s credit card after a free trial period is a truly bad practice, and a way to signal you do not trust they would subscribe otherwise.

And there’s also a bigger failure, a messaging failure. Details are presented in a long, complex, repetitive way. A way that does not belong in an onboarding. Because what it says is not “trust us!”, but rather “no refund after the trial, even if you are no longer interested, so do not bother asking!”

What if, instead ..

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Gap

FabrizioLeave a comment

And of course, this is a direct consequence of the fact that concepts are susceptible to different interpretations.

As long as organizations will continue approaching culture as a list of evocative words, the gap between culture (what management wants) and climate (what employees experience) will remain wide. And values statement will be abstract, generic and aimless.

Say it isn’t so

Fabrizio1 Comment

I have always been fascinated and vaguely astonished by the fact that, at times, communication is successful.

We do not put enough emphasis and preparation into it, and we have so many different ways to look at the world and interpret it, that it is quite a thing that two persons can come together at some point and understand each other.

What is your mental image of a tree? Of a car? Of a house? Of course, with such physical objects we often get past the ambiguity. But what with more complex concepts?

What do you think when you hear about honesty? And productivity? And work-life balance? What is your intent when you use words such as “democrat” and “republican”, “conservative” and “progressive” and “liberal”, “capitalist” and “communist”?

I promise you, it is different from how the person sitting next to you thinks about them.

And so, why are we not training for better communication? Why is this not a matter taught in school? Why are we left growing up under the false impression that everyone around us understands what we mean? And shares our same set of assumptions and priorities?

Communication is unorganized chaos for the most part, and when it succeed it truly is a work of magic.

Mantra

FabrizioLeave a comment

This is a mantra worth reminding, as marketers seem to forget it all the time.

No one wants to hear about your product.

And there are beautiful examples of what can be achieved when this becomes an assumption underlying your content strategy.

It also works, by the way.

Graceful humility

FabrizioLeave a comment

If your story is about how good you are, how much money you make, how big of a house you own, how many cars you have, how resounding your title is, how easily your product sells, how fantastic your company is, how many employees you have hired in the past year, how much revenue you made last year, how many new features you have released in the past six months.

Why should we care?

Tell us about the challenges instead, and we will be hooked. Even better, we will empathize.

If you cast a corporation as protagonist, do not brag about its size, its reach, its wealth, its influence. If you cast a product as a protagonist, do not brag about its newness, its hipness, its celebrity. The world spares no empathy for an overdog; market with a graceful humility.

Robert Mckee, Thomas Gerace – “Storynomics”