Delivering a Message
A good, general rule of thumb is that nobody cares what you have to say. However, as people and businesses with many important thoughts and insight, this can create a few issues. While there is no guaranteed way to capture your audience’s attention, there is a tried and true formula that works more often than not.
One of our favorite books at Relic is Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath who address this problem specifically. The book itself is absolutely fantastic and we would highly recommend it to anyone who plans on communicating with people in the future (so everyone). In the book, Chip and Dan lay out six important principles that all effective messages carry, regardless of the contents contained. We won’t address all six principles (read the book!), but we will look at three that stood out most to us.
Simple
All great messages are simple in nature. If you’re trying to get into the nitty-gritty of your subject, you’ll quickly lose the attention of your audience. But most people know that already. The issue lies not with cutting out the unimportant aspects of your message, but rather with pruning the important down to the absolute essentials.
In Made to Stick, they talk about “finding the core” of your message. That is, what is the ONE essential factor that you need to people to remember? After you have identified the core of your message, you move out from there. Beginning with the essentials forces you to think about how critical certain aspects of your message truly are. Think of your message as that one way-too-overconfident guy in your gym. He does curls and bench presses to achieve the appeal of working out, but he never does the essential core workouts that result in true strength. Power starts in the core — an important phrase for both messaging as well as lifting.
Unexpected
Simplicity is required to get your audience’s attention, doing something unexpected will keep it. Now, the idea here isn’t to do something crazy for the sake of doing it. Rather, you want to do or say something that keeps your audience on their toes while still staying on message and staying true to your voice. A good question to ask yourself is, what is the most counterintuitive thing that I could do within the context of this message? You don’t necessarily do that thing, but you work backward from there until you reach an unexpected act that fits your message.
A good example of delivering on the unexpected comes from Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin, who is an absolute Picasso at delivering messages. For those that follow the show and books, it is common knowledge that this series notoriously likes to kill off main characters. Throughout the entire first season of the show, you begin to learn about and grow to care for who you think is the “main character” of Game of Thrones. You are lulled into the false sense that this show will be like every other fantasy story you’ve enjoyed, and the honorable hero will defeat the villain in the end. But then they do the unexpected. The closing scene of the first season is (light spoiler alert if you plan on watching the show) the death of the main character, which put fans into a frenzy. The simplicity of the fantasy story brought the initial rush of fans, the unexpected nature of killing off the main character kept them into the show for the long haul.
Emotional
If you want to deliver an effective message, you have to connect with your audience emotionally. This doesn’t mean you have to make them cry like a tear-jerking movie; rather, you just have to encourage them to feel something when they hear your message, be that joy, sadness, anger, hope, love, or any other emotion. Keeping the focus on these emotions is critical. When people begin to use the analytical part of their brain, it can detract from your message and cause them to lose focus.
To illustrate the effect of emotion versus reason, Made to Stick talks about a group who studied the effect of soliciting funds for starving children in Africa via two appeals. The first message was an appeal based on statistics, while the second focused on a single named child. Of course, the latter won, which was unsurprising. But there was one shocking result they found. The surprising part of the study was that any time reason was evoked, the effectiveness of the message on the single child decreased. For example, if they used both the statistics and the individual child, response decreased. If they asked a person to do a simple calculation, not related to the charity, even this decreased the response to the child. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently; they hinder our ability to feel. As we try to create that emotional connection with others, it is important that we remain focused on creating empathy for specific people, things, or ideas.
While simple, unexpected, and emotional messages are certainly not the only messages that can have an impact, these three principles can go a long way in creating the connection that you need your message to have. Again, we cannot recommend Made to Stick highly enough. This book has changed how we deliver our messages at Relic to leave a lasting impact on our audiences, which is critical for an advertising agency. What do you guys think? Have you noticed other principles that the best messages carry? Let us know your thoughts!
