Serialism is better — Ep. 2: Recognition

Among the many benefits of serial communication, today we’ll see a fundamental one: recognition.

Welcome to the second episode of our series about serialism. We already analysed it in “Serialism is better” — the first of a series of articles trying to shed light on serialism. The idea is that organising communication in a serial perspective could facilitate the communicator’s duty and enhance the effectiveness of the message.

Today we’re going to speak about recognition.

We borrow this concept from psychology, which usually defines recognition as the behaviour provoked by the contact of the subject with something that he/she already knows, and that stimulates an immediate and routed-from-previous-experiences reaction.

To better explain recognition, we will use four concepts:

• Sign
• Meaning
• Signal
• Action

The subject continuously emanates SIGNS, both knowingly and unknowingly. When another subject intercepts some of these signs, MEANINGS are associated with them. In the subject’s life, that meaning will be the same over time, but for each one, the meaning will be different — I’m referring to the unconscious mind because, in the conscious mind, meanings can change. The subject realizes the meaning, and this implicates a response SIGNAL that triggers an ACTION.

When the person detects an already-known sign, he/she makes a recognition. The above-described process is skipped, and the corresponding action is activated.

If a known sign causes a specific and predictable action, automatically and immediately, communicators can take advantage of these dynamics to produce and instil desired actions among their audience.

For example, think about the red traffic light. It represents danger being the sign of a sign (that is a collectively shared meaning).

In communication, for example, when we share content on Instagram, we can plan and design it with a serialist view. We could start telling a story by establishing a setting, that is a context and a defined situation (conceptual or felt by one’s senses) in which we are framing a message and telling the facts. We could also associate some of the setting elements to positive and engaging sensations.

Later, when we develop the storyline in the following chapters, we could recall said elements to cause an already-experienced sensation in the reader, in addition to what we are clearly stating.

Serialism is an effective way to generate recognition. The recipient becomes subject to unconscious conditioning that enhances the effectiveness of the clarified content.

A bookseller specialized in books for children, who want to build an effective communication strategy on Instagram, could start by telling a story of her love for books. She could talk about the importance of reading during childhood and she could remember the very first book that excited her when she read it with her mother. The tale could narrate of celebrations, the times she received books as a gift, and the places where she flipped through the pages with her family.

She could recall the smell of those long homely afternoons sweetened by oven-baked cakes. Through these tales, she could start a relationship with her own audience.

Later, when she is continuing to feed the Instagram communication flow, talking about new books, special offers, and book presentation events, she could sometimes recall some of the instilled signals.

The reader — who immersed themselves into said elements before, enjoyed the enthusiasm started off by the childhood tales — will feel profound emotions and unconscious feelings (so useful to influence), and they are conditioned by the content clearly shared in the actual message.

Serialism, in this case, is an effective way to generate recognition. The recipient becomes subject to unconscious conditioning that enhances the effectiveness of the clarified content.

Recognition is effective when there is a relationship, when there is a shared past, and when there is a connection between the sender and the recipient.

In the next article of “The serialism is better”, we will talk about relationships.

Stay tuned.

The Italian version of this article can be found at this link.