We have a company that leverages the way it treats its employees for an outdoor, B2C advertising campaign. That could be a first. It is a sign that customers are more considerate in their decisions, and the criteria on their radar go beyond product functionality and price.
Other taxi and ride-hailing apps have missed a huge opportunity to cover this space and dominate it. They gifted Uber with time to go fight in courtrooms and come up with a strategy that is the exact opposite of what Uber execs claimed only few months ago. Following the leader has taken them off track.
You have one single product and multiple ways to tell about it.
That does not mean that you have to tell a different story every time you talk to a different audience. It means that you need to be sensible enough to adapt your story to match the language and the background of the audiences you care about (i.e., that make you money).
The drill goes like this.
Work on your story.
Identify your audience.
Research your audience.
Translate your story in a language that your audience can understand (without changing it).
You can’t have 2, 3, and 4 if you have not started with 1. And at the same time, you can’t pretend 1 to be effective if you are not following up with 2, 3, and 4.
When you get to 4, that’s the time to be consistent, over a period of time, to see if you have worked, identified, and researched well.
We are social. And we are used to communicate through speaking. We talk to those we know, we catch hints on their understanding, we monitor their behaviour, their eyes, their face, their expression. We are asked to clarify when something is not clear, and we can then continue.
With writing, though, everything is more complicated. The reader exists only in our imagination. And to ensure that communication actually happens, we need to take some extra care.
It is not about following a list of rules and directives.
It is about having a good understanding of the make-believe world in which we pretend to communicate.
To achieve such understanding, classic style can be helpful.
The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world. The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it.
Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
Classic style makes the reader feel like a genius. The goal is to make it seem as if the writer’s thoughts were fully formed before they were put into words.
Classic style is about:
Cutting an argument to its essentials;
Narrating it in an orderly sequence;
Illustrating it with analogies that are both familiar and accurate.
This is made more difficult by the curse of knowledge, and particularly by chunking – when we put together ideas and concepts so that they are easier to memorize -, and by functional fixity – the more we become familiar with something, the less we think about what it looks like and what it is made of.
We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from “I think I understand” to “I understand,” we need to see the sights and feel the motions. Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images.
Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
There are things we can do to become better writers.
Reading is the essence of good writing, and we should take the habit of lingering over good writing when we find it – what makes it so good and memorable?
Have somebody, possibly from your audience, read what you wrote.
Read what you wrote out loud.
Re-read what you wrote after some time has passed.
Right-branching – In Sophocles’ play, Oedipus married his mother.
Left-branching – Admitted Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan attacker Brian Sean Griffith dies.
Center-embedded construction – The view that beating a third-rate Serbian military that for the third time in a decade is brutally targeting civilians is hardly worth the effort is not based on a lack of understanding of what is occurring on the ground.
Before adding something to a sentence, make sure that what comes first is clear – keeping sentences open for too long puts a strain on the reader. Also, save the heaviest for last (topic, then comment; given, then new).
Use similar sentence structures to make it easier for the reader – e.g., avoid changing the subject from one sentence to the other, or going from active to passive voice.
Ensure coherence throughout the text by
introducing the topic early;
stating the point (what you are trying to accomplish) early;
using indefinite (e.g., an Englishman) first, then definite (e.g., the Englishman, him, he) to refer to the same;
using the same form to refer to the same thing – being mindful of avoiding too much repetition;
connecting ideas and thoughts with examples, explanations, sequences, causes, effects.
Look things up, as memory is fallible.
Have sound arguments, that can easily be verifiable independently by the reader.
Don’t confuse an anecdote or personal experience with the state of the world.
Understand that disagreement and criticism are ok, and it is not the role of the writer to prove everybody wrong, or lazy, or stupid, or motivated by the wrong values and principles.
If you lead a team, you typically have 30-minute (minimum) weekly meetings where you do most of the talking and then go around the room.
Why not trying a weekly digest instead?
You send it out once a week.
You share key decisions from management and executive team.
You highlight important messages (from internal communication systems) that are relevant to your team and that might have been missed.
You update on your main focus for the week and praise people’s achievement from the previous week (you should be able to get that from a project management tool).
You add a personal touch, a story from your weekend, something you have learned, a practice you are developing.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is an extremely popular experiment in social psychology. It featured normal people taking on the role of prisoners and guards. And most importantly, it featured fights, abuse, dehumanization, nervous breakdowns, bullying, and more. Despite a series of dubious practices, for decades it was considered a legitimate study.
The BBC Prison Study is a not-quite-as-popular experiment in social psychology. It featured normal people taking on the role of prisoners and guards. And most importantly, it featured camaraderie, compassion, some moderate conflict over food, negotiation, the institution of a commune, and long discussions on how to govern the whole group. Despite the fact it was reality TV, it led to a number of academic papers that were eventually accepted in official psychology curricula.
The point is, not always the story that is closer to facts and reality is the most popular. A story just has to be repeated enough times to become plausible, and when that happens, it is very difficult to later convince people it was a hoax, and actually things work in a different way.
This is something we know.
And it is our responsibility as marketers, advertisers, communicators, and change-seekers, to use such power with great care.
You've got this 