Join host Brandon Laws in this episode of Transform Your Workplace as he sits down with Ben Guttmann, a marketing professional and author of Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win. Together, they delve into the ins and outs of effective communication, offering insights on minimizing friction, eliminating unnecessary details, and refining your message. Tune in for this meaningful discussion on the art of crafting clear and impactful messages.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Ben Guttmann is a marketing executive, professor, and the author of Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win — and How to Design Them. His passion lies in using his marketing knowledge to help everyday people craft clear and simple messaging.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
SAYING WHAT WE WANT TO SAY
Recent guest Ben Guttman, a marketing expert, says that we’re all actually marketers in some aspect of our lives. That’s because challenges and problem-solving strategies in marketing are often similar to those faced in other roles, such as being a spouse, voter, consumer, neighbor, and family member.
And if we want people to hear our message, it’s all about fluency, a word that emerged during Ben’s exploration of why some messages are more effective than others. In this episode, Ben delved into two types of fluency: perceptual fluency and processing fluency. He emphasized that the easier it is for individuals to understand and process information, the more likely they are to engage positively with that information — whether it’s buying a product, trusting a message, or liking an idea. It turns out that the most effective messages are those that distill information to its basic, simple, and clear terms.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Keeping it Simple
“When I talk about simplicity in messaging, it’s not about it being minimal in terms of the smallest number of words or the smallest number of sentences or paragraphs. It’s about being minimal, and the least amount of friction, and something being as easy as possible to make use of. […] When it is easy, we have all these positive associations with it, but when things are more difficult, when they make us sweat, when they make us really work, when our brain has to work overtime on it, well what happens? We’re less likely to buy, less likely to trust, less likely to like, and those are all the things that we don’t want to achieve most of the time when we’re the ones communicating.”
The Trouble with Adding
“There are senders and there are receivers. […] If you’re a marketer, an advertiser, a politician, a CEO, you’re a sender. If you are a buyer, a voter, a donor, a student, you’re a receiver. […] When we’re a sender, we are facing an internal and an external battle against simplicity. So internally, we have what’s known as an additive bias, or we’re much more likely, when we’re asked to improve something, to add instead of subtract — that extra page, extra paragraph, extra slide, extra attachment to that email. All of those things come to us more easily when we’re in production mode than removing does. So that’s one of the internal mechanisms.”
“Externally, we’re also faced with a challenge because, well, every force […] pushes us towards more, right? Well, it’s better to have another slide because this other person can go and claim credit for something. It’s better to add another paragraph because the lawyers want to make sure that we’re covering our bases on something. And so there’s this credit problem, but also there’s this use of defense that we have when we talk about complication. Because if you get into a client meeting and you get into a job interview and you’re saying, ‘Yeah, I don’t really have a great answer for that. But you know what? If I throw enough words at them, maybe I’ll be able to get out of this alive. I’ll hide behind the complication.’”
Removing Distractions
“The thing that we want to eliminate is friction — because each bump in the road is an opportunity for somebody to get distracted and go attend to one of the other thousands of things that we could attend to at any moment. […] If you look at e-commerce websites, well, you start adding something to your cart, and then you click and you go in, and you start attending to your cart… shipping information and your credit card information. Well, what happens all around the website there? All the other bits of friction are gone. All the other off-ramps, the little buttons to go to the different sections or the ‘About Us’ or the blog, they all disappear. So we understand this when it comes to dollars and cents, but we have a hard time sometimes applying this to every other mode of communication.”
The Truth about Complicated Messages
“Complicated messaging is selfish, cowardly, and dangerous. So selfish… we talked about [this] a little bit before with the terms of use and the license agreements. They’re often used to hide things that we don’t necessarily want the receivers to know about, but we have to somehow get out there. So, we’re prioritizing our needs over somebody else. Cowardly… Well, that’s an example of we’re not very good at expressing the truth through complication. Simplicity requires that we are honest and that we know what the ultimate truth is for it, but cowardly is a way for us to hide behind that wall of words […]. Sometimes the truth is something that’s not as enjoyable, that can be painful, and that’s ultimately what we have to face. And the last one is dangerous. I use the illustration in the book where I talk about the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster as a communications breakdown. Well, that’s also the case with the Challenger disaster. That was also the case for most aviation disasters. Most healthcare accidents come from miscommunication. […] There’s a real cost we pay when we’re not clear.”
Strike it Out
“If you look at all of the famous writing advice from the past 100 years, at least 50% of it boils down to ‘write fewer words,’ right? Like make it shorter. Eliminate everything you don’t need. And it’s all true. It’s very important to eliminate redundancies and to avoid big words or run-on sentences when you can. That’s easier said than done, right? The one tool that you can use is [to] play Jenga with your sentence, or your paragraph, or your message. If you remember the game Jenga with the little jumbling blocks, as you pull pieces out, it starts to wobble, and maybe at some point you pull out the last one, and it falls down. If you have a sentence, you can pull out a few words and see if it still makes sense. […] Well, eventually, at one point, it won’t, and it’ll fall down. And right before that, that’s when you know you have a structurally sound message.”
An Audience of One
“Quickly identify who might be the type of person who is the ideal person in your audience and who’s the median person in your audience, and speak to them. And if that means grabbing a stock photo off the internet, if that means kind of writing a quick biographical sketch and saying, ‘Hey, my product is for Kevin… I’m speaking just to Kevin on this, or I’m speaking just to Nancy on this one.’ Well, that makes it a lot easier instead of you thinking I’m speaking to everybody who’s a follower. […] That helps you get a lot clearer.”
LEARN MORE
Find everything from Ben’s latest book, Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win — and How to Design Them, to his newsletter or other valuable resources at his website, benguttmann.com.