Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win – and How to Design Them

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Ben.

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He is a author, a marketer and a messaging expert.

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He is also a professor.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thanks for having me, Eric.

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It's great to be here.

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Why don't we start off by you sharing with us a minute or two about who you are and what you do about?

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who you are and what you do.

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Yeah, absolutely, you mentioned my name is Ben Gutman.

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I have worn a lot of different hats, so my book simply put why Clear Messages Win and how to Design them just came out a few months ago from Barrick Colder Publishers.

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That's been a ton of fun.

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I just got an email saying we got some award for it, which is pretty cool, and that has been the culmination of a lot of other work that I've done.

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So I ran a marketing agency for 10 years.

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I sold that about two years ago.

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I've been in the classroom as an educator, as an adjunct professor, for about 10 years also.

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I think this is my 20th semester we're about to wrap up here and I've worn a number of other hats over the years.

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But when I look at the commonality between what I saw in the classroom, what I saw in the boardroom is, everybody has the same problem, which is they have something that they want to say, there's something that they want to share, but they have no idea how to get it from inside their head into the head of somebody else.

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Right, and that's why you hire a marketing agency a lot of times.

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Right, you have something that you want to tell people about as an idea.

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You want to tell people how great your widgets are, but you don't really know how to be able to get it across.

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And so I spent some time digging into this problem and I looked at what is the science of communication and messaging and persuasion, all these different pieces and I came up with the revelatory take that the ideas that work, the messages that work, are simple.

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Right, and that's going to sound a little no duh, but when you actually dig into what makes something simple and what makes something simple work and how we can get there, it's fairly difficult presently hard, and it is something that we are programmed not to do in many ways when we're the ones sending a message.

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So that's what I looked at doing.

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I looked at explaining and, simply put, was how do we get to a point where we're able to shape our messaging in a format that resonates with our receivers?

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I think that's really interesting of our receivers.

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I think that's really interesting.

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As a journalism major, I did learn in college that you have to use your words to get the message out there.

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I also learned that if I had more time, I would have made it shorter and simpler.

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So I think that those are both really awesome concepts.

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So we're ready to be inspired.

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Tell us a story about some of the marketing you've done that you're the most proud of.

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There is a power plant that is in New York City, but they changed hands a number of times over the years.

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They went from one owner to this owner, that owner was bought by somebody, and this and that, and so the people that worked in this power plant, which has been there for 80 years the logo on their paycheck kept changing over and over again.

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The logo on their hard hat kept changing over and over again, and the community had no idea who they were, because the sign out front kept changing over and over again.

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So we had this big, giant piece of infrastructure that took up a huge chunk of a prominent part of New York City, that also did incredibly important work in terms of providing energy, for New York City provided like 27% something like that of the energy used by New York City, but it had no presence in the community whatsoever, and the people who worked there were a little bit listless in terms of any sort of company pride, because they didn't know who the company was to be prideful for, even though they're very proud of the work that they did.

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And so we were hired to do an internal branding campaign for them that was meant to help them develop a visual identity for the facility so that, even if it gets sold again and again, you can still identify it, as well as what is the tagline, slogan, the brand essence that we can use to have everybody rally around.

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And when we sat there in meetings with people that were 30 or 40 year veterans of working at this power plant and I saw how proud they were of the work that they did, what I heard over and over again was not necessarily about the work in terms of we do this many kilowatts, we do this many megawatts, we do this, we.

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They would talk about it as during hurricane sandy by us producing this power, we kept hospitals open right during this other snowstorm we had it kept the schools open and the.

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The pride in keeping new york running was something that was actually the through line for all of these people internally and up the ladder into management a lot of times, and so we landed on a campaign that was, or a kind of internal campaign that was, making New York happen, and that's what they did.

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They didn't produce power.

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Power is the product.

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Nobody really wants the power, nobody really wants the megawatts.

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People want the lights to turn on when I flip the switch right.

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People want that pizza oven.

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The pizza ovens are usually gas or coal, but people want the heat to go on.

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People want their computers to boot up at their startup, they want the MRI machine to run at their hospital, and these people behind the scenes are the ones that actually make that happen.

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They're the ones that, because they go to work, everybody else can go to work and create the kind of magic that is New York City and that became this big rallying call for them.

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They put up a giant flag for this and their facilities became something that's printed on their letterhead and their morale kind of shot through the roof, because in one stroke they all had a common purpose instead of it being.

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I don't even know what I work for these days, as long as the paycheck keeps coming.

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I love it.

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Simply put, well done, that's great.

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That's really awesome way to get people inspired about what they do and the impact they have on people.

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So tell us a little bit about your book, why you wrote it and why you think it's important for marketers to to absorb it and learn the concepts you have in there.

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The introduction here is that there's this problem that we all have.

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We have things we want to share, we have ideas that we want to spread, but we have a hard time getting them heard.

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And the reason why there's this gulf, it turns out, is lies in this idea of fluency.

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So if you've heard the word fluency, you think of oh, I'm fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin, I can be fluent in a certain TV show, or cheese, or whatever it is that you're fluent in.

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Wherever things are easy, things are fluent.

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That's what the word means.

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It comes from the Latin root for the word, flowing, actually, which is what it feels like.

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But if you ask a cognitive scientist about the word fluency, that describes to them how easy is it for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in your head and make sense of it?

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How easy is it for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in your head and make sense of it?

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How easy is it for you to perceive something, to understand something and act upon something?

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And when you look at the research behind fluency, it all kind of points in the same direction, which is that the things that are more fluent, that take less mental work for you to see, to hear, to understand.

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We like them more, we trust them more and we're more likely to buy them right.

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All the things that we want when we're the ones kind of communicating right.

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We want, like trust, purchase, intent, all those important things.

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Now, the opposite of that is also true, which is that when things are less fluent, when they take a lot of work and mental cycles and sweat for us to see and understand and really make sense of the communication coming our way, we don't like it, we don't trust it and we don't buy it.

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All the things we don't want.

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So we want to get to the state of fluency, but the problem is we are pulled in the opposite direction.

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We have forces internal and we have forces external that pull us towards the complicated and that can be something like we have an additive bias in our brains we're more likely to add than we are to subtract.

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We like to see more complex patterns than simpler patterns.

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That, combined with the pressures we have from putting more lines in our resume, from our boss wanting more slides, from everybody wanting more stuff in the news, from all these things externally that are also pushing, pulling us in that direction, and that creates this gulf where receivers want something to be simple and senders are pulled in the direction of complicated and everything just falls in the middle.

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And so that's really what we're trying to address when we're talking about simplicity, and in the book, I've identified five different design principles that we can use to help us move closer to where the receivers need us to be, and I'll quickly go over them.

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The first one is beneficial, right.

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So what does it matter to the receiver In the word marketing?

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This is like marketing 101 stuff, right, features versus benefits.

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But you'd be surprised how many people don't do that basic piece.

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Number two is focused.

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Are you trying to say one thing or multiple things at once?

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Is it one idea or is it three ideas in a transcript?

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Number three is salient.

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Does your message stand out from the noise?

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Is it noticeable?

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Does it grab your attention?

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Does it zig another zag?

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The fourth is empathetic.

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Are you speaking in a language that the audience understands?

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Are you meeting them where they are, in terms of their language, but also their emotions, their motivations?

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And then, fourth is minimal.

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Have you cut out everything that isn't important and left only what is right?

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Is it everything you need, but only what you need.

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When we talk about minimal, it's not the same thing as brevity, right?

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We're talking about minimizing friction, not about minimizing time or words or pages or anything else.

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We want to make it the easiest possible to convey.

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Yeah, all of those make a lot of sense.

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I think those are great.

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Those are all great strategies for how to keep things simple.

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So any final thoughts on messaging for marketers, anything you would recommend to them to do in addition to what you just shared to be successful at keeping things simple and compelling.

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Yeah, so I'll give you the one big shift that everybody can benefit from when they're in a seat of communication.

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So that is marketing or that is leadership or anything in between.

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Just as when you're sending a letter, it's your responsibility to pay for the postage, it's your responsibility as a sender to make sure that your message is heard, it's not the receiver's responsibility.

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We all woke up today with a thousand things we cared about our family, our friends, our sports teams, our deadlines, our vacations, a leaky roof, or friends or sports teams, or deadlines, or vacations, a leaky roof but nobody had on their list.

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I want to go watch some Instagram ads.

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I want to go open some spam emails.

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I want to go watch a commercial somewhere.

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Every advertisement that you've ever seen has been against your will, and so we have to respect that reality and to come in with humility in terms of how we communicate with our audience.

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I love it.

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Thank you for sharing your story and these great insights Encourage everyone to get Ben's book and I will link to it and your website and the show notes so everyone can check that out and get in touch if they'd like to learn more.

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We really appreciate you sharing this with us today and for being on the show.

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Thanks so much for having me, Eric.

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It's been a ton of fun.