Why Companies Have Trouble Distinguishing Themselves

 

 

You Know Too Much About The Topic

 

A common mistake made by intelligent people tasked with trying to convey a complex message is that they assume the audience has a greater base of understanding than they actually do.  Because it seems relatively straightforward to you, you naturally assume that the audience, the consumer of your content, will understand the material with as much ease and understanding as you.  All you need to do is lay out the facts and the conclusion will be obvious to an intelligent person.  This is what we call the Burden of Knowledge.

 

This is starkly illustrated in some research done at Stanford University in 1991 by Elizabeth Newton.  The research, commonly known as “Tappers and Listeners,” goes like this.  A group of research subjects was divided into two smaller groups.  Half were “Tappers” and half were “Listeners.”  The Tappers were given a few easily recognizable songs like Happy Birthday and were told to tap out the tune using a pencil on the desktop.  The Listener’s job was to guess what the Tapper was tapping. 

 

The interesting thing about the research is that the Tappers predicted that they would be able to convey the tune 50% of the time.  In point of fact, the Listeners were only able to guess the tune 2% of the time.

What does this tell us?  It tells us that the Tappers already know the tune; they hear it in their head, they sing along in their mind as they tap and it seems so obvious that they can’t image the Listeners not getting it.  The Tappers can’t "un-know" what they have learned. For this reason, it is difficult for them to put themselves in the position of the Listeners.

 

When you are presenting your wonderful solution and thinking to yourself what a great job you’re doing, imagine that the “Listeners” are only getting about 2% of what you are saying.

 

 

 

More Facts Don’t Help

 

Daniel Pink, author of The Whole Mind, presents a rather profound hypothesis in his writings.  He contends that we are no longer living in the “Information Age” where facts and left-brained, analytic thinking is king.  He contends that we have moved into the “Conceptual Age,”  an age where appealing to the rational and logical needs of your audience is no longer sufficient to win the day.  Pink contends that mastery of design, empathy, and human emotion is now the way for firms to stand out in a crowded market place.

 

The “Information Age” has made a lot of people a lot of money and our natural inclination is to keep doing what we have always done since it has led to such great success.   Marshall Goldsmith puts it simply in the title of his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.  As you prepare your written proposal or orals presentation, you think that an outpouring of facts about your product or service, your company and people will be such a compelling and overwhelming argument that you can’t help but win.

But, we’re not in the “Information Age” any longer.  Facts are ubiquitous and they are free.  Providing more of something that is free isn’t the way to distinguish your solution from your competitors.

We help our clients tell their story in a human and empathetic way while balancing the need for details and facts.  As described on the Collateral Design & Build page of this site, we have developed techniques that allow you to both convey your story in a human and empathetic way and also to allow the consumer of your message to drill down into the facts in a way that is meaningful to them.

 

 

 

Presentation Tools Haven’t Kept Pace

 

If you were to compare any company’s website to their site from 20 years ago, the differences would be obvious.  The web and the principles behind it have changed everything from the way we buy services and products to the way we interact socially. 

 

By way of stark contrast, if you were to compare a PowerPoint presentation or Word document created 20 years ago from one created today, you would be hard pressed to tell which was which.  That’s because there has been relatively little progress made in presentation or document creation technology over the past 20 years.  Presentations and documents are built and “consumed” today in pretty much the exact way they were built and consumed 20 years ago.

Presentations (and documents) are a very sequential, linear, non-interactive, devoid (for the most part) of rich media, and inflexible medium.  They do not reflect the current realities of how people consume content.  And they certainly, as used by most people today, don’t provide a good vehicle to help communicate a complex message and allow a company to stand out and distinguish its solution.

 

 

 

GEN Y Sees The World Differently Than Boomers

 

It has been asserted that individuals born after 1985 or so have brains that are hard-wired differently from people born before that date.  The constant exposure to interactive stimuli such as video games and the internet create neural circuits that process information in a radically different way than those whose formative years were spent learning from film strip projectors or overhead transparencies.

 

So is it any wonder that when presented with a PowerPoint Presentation (or KeyNote Presentation or ….) or Word Document (or PDF or …) the GEN Y consumer doesn’t find it a particularly natural way to consume the content?

 

 

 

You Force People To Consume Your Content The Way You Think They Should

 

Within the constraints of existing presentation and document creation tools, you must build out your content in a linear, sequential way.  You must build it in a certain order and at a certain level of detail which dictates that it will be consumed in pretty much that exact sequence and level of detail. 

 

The problem is that not everyone wants to consume your content in the order you, in your infinite wisdom, think they do or at the level of detail they should.

One of the scales in the Myers-Briggs personality test defines, roughly speaking, how people like to process (i.e. consume) information.  The scale ranges from those who are strong “Sensors” to those who are strong “Ntuitors” (yes, we spelled it correctly, the “i” was taken on another Myers-Briggs dimension).

Strong “Sensors” are generally thought of as the detailed people, accountants perhaps or engineers.  They are people who like to see the facts and analysis fully developed before reaching any conclusion.  Ntuitors, on the other hand, are the big picture people.  They like to see the overall answer and, if it seems to make sense to them, then they may decide to review some of the supporting facts and analyses.

 

Do you see the problem?  If you are a big picture person you will put together your 60 slide deck with the conclusion first and then 59 slides of detail.  If you are a detailed person, your first 59 slides will be charts, graphs and facts and slide 60 will contain the conclusion.  Either way you go, you’ve lost half your audience before you even open your mouth.