Effective communications depend on two factors; a clear message and an optimal channel to convey it. Over the past 10 years or so, tremendous improvements have been made at the delivery end of the communications spectrum: cell phones / PDAs, text messaging, high-speed Internet, wireless, instant messaging, GPS, and the list goes on. The message clarity side of the equation, however, has not kept pace.
Whether you’re instructing your employees, pitching an idea to a client, or creating a new marketing copy for your website, the quality and clarity of your message is the key to getting others to do what you want them to do.
As a small business consultant, I frequently come across ad campaigns that are meant to get people to act, but are so nondescript that they are completely ignored. Regardless of how well you think you know the value of what you offer or what your customers want, sending a clear and direct message using your print or digital media can be a serious challenge.
Consider a study by Elizabeth Newton in 1990. Ms. Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people one of two roles: “tapping” or “listeners.” Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday to You” and “The Star Spangled Banner.” Each tapper was asked to choose a song and play the rhythm to one listener (hitting a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the beat being played.
The listener’s job on this game was quite difficult. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were played. Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs – 3 out of 120.
This is what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the participants to predict the probabilities that the listeners guessed correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 percent. The extractors got their message out 1 time out of 40, but they thought they were getting their message out 1 time out of 2. Why?
When a puncher hits, he is listening to the song in his head. Go ahead and try it for yourself: tap “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It is impossible to avoid hearing the melody in your head. Meanwhile, listeners can’t hear that tune, all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected touches, like some kind of weird Morse code.
In the experiment, the tappers were stunned at how hard the listeners seemed to be working to pick up the melody. Isn’t the song obvious? The expressions of the tappers, when a listener guesses “Happy Birthday to you” from “The Star-Spangled Banner”, are priceless: How could you be so stupid?
It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given a knowledge (the title of the song) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it is like to lack that knowledge. When they are tapping, they cannot imagine what it is like for listeners to hear isolated taps instead of a song. This is the curse of knowledge. Once we know something, we find it difficult to imagine what it was like not to know. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And we find it difficult to share our knowledge with others, because we cannot easily recreate the mental state of our listeners.
In my Orange County Business Coaching business, part of the process is revealing the message that is being received from a consumer or client point of view. Too often, the business owner’s insider knowledge of their business prevents them from fully understanding that their marketing message needs to change.
The tapper / listener experiment is repeated every day all over the world. Extractors and listeners are small business owners and employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, merchants and customers, writers and readers. All of these groups depend on continuous communication, but, like extractors and listeners, they suffer from huge information imbalances. When a business owner announces “the value of your service,” there is a tune in his head that the customer cannot hear.
It’s a tough problem to avoid – a small business owner can have thirty years of daily immersion in understanding and running their business. Reversing the process is as impossible as stopping a bell ringing. How do you get the melody in your head to be understood by someone who doesn’t know what you know?
As a small business advisor, in my experience, most marketing programs (phone books, brochures, coupon delivery, etc.) have a return of less than 1%. This is even less than the tapper experiment in terms of communications that get the desired results. In many cases, it’s not about the delivery vehicle, but about the quality and clarity of the message it contains.
Successful small business marketing strategies depend on the owner’s ability to convey a clear and concise message that is immediately understandable to the customers they want to attract. So the next time you’re getting ready to launch that new ad campaign or update that website, ask someone who knows nothing about your business to tell you what they heard. Most marketing programs are too expensive to risk not getting the message!