The 5 Factors for Crafting Simple (Read： Effective!) Messages
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Summary
Whether you re a teacher, parent, or entrepreneur, you want to be able to persuade your students, children, and customers with your messages. That s a tall task in the modern age when people are bombarded with 13 hours of media a day. How do you cut through all that noise to make sure you re heard? My guests would say it s all about keeping things simple.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Whether you're a teacher, parent, or entrepreneur, you want to be able to persuade your students,
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children, and customers with your messages. That's a tall task in the modern age when
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people are bombarded with 13 hours of media a day. How do you cut through all that noise
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to make sure you're heard? My guests would say it's all about keeping things simple.
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Ben Gutman is a marketing educator and consultant who's helped promote everything from the NFL
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to New York Times bestselling authors. He is himself the author of Simply Put,
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Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them. Today on the show, Ben explains the gap between
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how people like to receive messages and the self-sabotaging, complication-introducing ways
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people tend to send them. We then talk about the five factors of effective marketing that anyone
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can use to close this gap and craft simple, effective, influential messages. We discussed
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why you should highlight something's benefits rather than its features, the question to ask
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to figure out what those benefits are, how to replace and with so to create more focused messages,
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how the fad of using the F word in book titles shows the transience of salience, how to make
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your message minimal by imagining as a Jenga tower, and how minimal isn't the same thing as short,
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and much more, including Ben's most immediately actionable tip for crafting better, simpler
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messages. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash simply put.
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Thanks for having me, Brad. It's great to be here.
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So you are a marketing professor and a marketing executive, and you got a book out called Simply
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Put, where you take readers through a course on how to craft simple messages. How do you define
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a simple message as a marketer? So I define simple as a message that is easily perceived,
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understood, enacted upon. And these are the individual components of something being a
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successful message. If it's marketing or if it's kind of anything else is that we have to get it
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from out in the world, we have to make sense of it, and then we have to do something with it.
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And the way which we do that as a receiver of information is we're kind of built to do things
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one way. But then as a sender of information, we're kind of predisposed to sending messages
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in a different way. And that's really the gap that we're trying to solve here.
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And you bring in this idea about fluency when it comes to simple messages, this psychological
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fluency. Like what is this idea of fluency? How does it shape whether a message is simple or not?
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Right. So fluency is a word that we know, right? It can be fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin
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or anything else. But if you ask a cognitive scientist about the word fluency, where they're
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going to describe it's how easy is it for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in
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your head and make sense of it. And when things don't take that much work, when they're easy to do
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that, well, we're more likely to like them, we're more likely to buy them, we're more likely to trust
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them, all the things that when you're a communicator, you want. On the flip side of things, well, if
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things take a lot of work to get in, it's hard for us to read, hard for us to hear, hard for us to
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understand, and it takes these like extra brain cycles, well, we're less likely to like it, less
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likely to buy it and less likely to trust it, all the things that we don't want. And so when we're
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receivers, we want stuff that is fluent. However, when we're senders, we're pulled in this other
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direction, both kind of internally and externally, right? So internally, we're subject to what might
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be known as an additive bias, we're more likely to add than we are to subtract. Externally, we're
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pulled in a direction by the society around us by our own individual incentives to put more to
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complicate at bigger words. And that creates this rift where all the kind of really important
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communication, if it's marketing or something else, kind of just falls in.
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Okay. So as a receiver of messages, we like things simple. We like things easy to understand,
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but as a sender of messages, we have a tendency to complicate things. And we're going to talk more
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about how we do that. In addition to this rift that exists between sender and receiver,
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where receiver wants things simple, senders tend to complicate messages.
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messages. There's also other things going on that's making it harder for people to get their
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message across. What else is going on? Right. I mean, well, we are busier, we are more distracted
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than we ever have been. And this is not a particularly unique insight, right? Like we have been
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for thousands of years, actually complaining about how the world is busier, we're more distracted.
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Oh, there's too many books and it's kind of rotting our brains. Oh, there's too many newspapers.
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Oh, there's too much radios, too much television. So I'm very conscious of that historical truth is
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that we always have complained about this, but there is quite a bit of data and evidence to
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suggest that it is getting worse and it is getting to a point where it's becoming a breaking point for
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a lot of folks. The average American consumes 13 hours of media a day, 13 hours. Once you take out
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sleeping, there's really not much left. And so we're in this incredibly noisy and busy environment.
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And we are built in a way which we, when we are in an environment like that, that biologically,
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psychologically, what we do is we quickly kind of get information in and filter it and get rid of
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the stuff that's not important to us. And so when we're in this environment where there's just
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thousands of things a day kind of beeping and buzzing for our attention, well, we're in this kind
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of like fight or flight mode here. We're saying, okay, well, let's quickly get rid of all the stuff
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that's not important to us. And the result of that can often be that we're throwing out a lot
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of other stuff that could be valuable to us, but it's just not communicated in a way which respects
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that truth. So you're in the business of marketing, you know, selling people ideas,
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but this idea of crafting simple messages, what other domains is it useful in? Because I mean,
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someone listening to this, I think a lot of people might not be in marketing or sales,
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but this idea, I think I imagine is important, even if you're not.
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Oh yeah. I mean, I, I ran a marketing agency for 10 years. I teach marketing and at the city
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university of New York here. And so obviously I've spent a lot of time in this space, but what I like
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to say is this book is going to live on the marketing self. If you go to Barnes and Noble,
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like that's where you're going to find it, but we are really kind of all marketers. And that's kind
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of the big, like dirty truth behind marketing is that we are all marketers in some way,
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super form. If you're, if you're in an advertising agency, obviously, but if you're an entrepreneur,
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if you're an executive, if you're an advocate or a politician, if you are a teacher or a faith
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leader or a parent, marketing is just about how do you get people to kind of hear what you have to
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say, and then hopefully get them to do the thing that you want them to do. And we all do that all the
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time. That's like the biggest thing we do as people is to try to communicate and to try to
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influence others. And so, you know, this is a book that is obviously if your job is to do that as a
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marketer, it's going to be applicable. But I think the lessons in here are something that I purposely
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tried to design to be broadly applicable to anybody, whether or not they've ever stepped foot in an ad
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agency. Yeah, I think so. As I was reading this, I was like, man, I can see this applying to all sorts
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of places in my life. If you're a manager at a job, for example, and you're trying to convey a new
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protocol that you're trying to implement in your office, you have to realize you're competing for
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your employees' attention with all these other stuff going on in their lives, the internet,
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Instagram, Twitter, their email inbox, their personal life. I mean, so you have to convey the
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message in a way that is easy and simple to understand because if you don't, chances are a
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big chunk of them are just going to misunderstand or completely miss it. Or if you're a parent,
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right, you're trying to give your kids instructions on it. Here, I want you to
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do X thing. You have to make that message as simple as possible because they've got a lot going
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on in their brain so that they understand it. Oh, yeah. Well, and the kind of big dirty secret
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behind marketing is that by default, nobody cares, right? Nobody cares about the thing that you're
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trying to sell them, the thing that you're trying to tell them. If you're running a company and you
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say, I have this great new widget and it's really important and I want everybody to know about it,
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or again, you're a manager or an advocate, say, I got this great new idea and I want people to
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understand it. People by default aren't going to do that. We care about lots of things, right? We
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wake up every single day and we care about our friends and our family and our community and our
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favorite sports teams and our vacation coming up. But by default, we don't care about your new brand
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shampoo, right? That's just not something that's on our agenda. Every advertisement you've ever seen
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has been against your will. Nobody woke up today and said, you know what's on my plans today is I'm
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going to mow the lawn, I'm going to drop the kids off at daycare, and then I'm going to go scroll
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through Instagram ads for an hour or I'm going to open up your spam email. And so once we understand
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that, it puts us in this very humble position, which, well, okay, we have to communicate in a way
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that people do care about. And so the analogy I like to use when you are a communicator, when you're
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in the position of sending a message, it's just like if you're sending a letter in the mail,
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you're responsible for the postage. When you're sending a message, you're responsible for the
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literal and the metaphorical cost of that communication. It's up to you to make sure that
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you're going to be heard. Right. If you're a parent or a teacher, your kids probably don't
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care about what you want them to do, right? Because you're probably just going to sound like
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the Peanuts mom. So you have to craft your message in a way that they want to listen to it.
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You mentioned earlier that as senders of messages, we have a tendency to complicate things. Why is that?
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We know as a receiver, we like things simple. So why as senders of messages, do we make things
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overly complicated? Yeah, it's going to sound contradictory, but complication is easy. There's
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a famous quote that's often misattributed to Mark Twain that says, I wrote you a long letter
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because I didn't have time to write you a short one. And he didn't actually say that. You can just
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kind of grab anybody's name, like Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Abe Lincoln,
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just grab one of them and they said any sort of famous quote. So it wasn't actually Mark Twain
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that said that. But the message behind that kind of stays the same, which is it's harder for us
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to do the editing. It's harder for us to get focused and distill our message into something
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that really is valuable. We have these things kind of internally, we have this bias towards
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addition and complexity that I mentioned a little bit before. Externally, there's all these kind of
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incentives here. I mean, when you look at what does complicated get us? Well, complicated is very
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just kind of self-serving in many ways, right? It allows us to hide the things that we don't
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necessarily want the receiver to get, but we want to have plausible understanding that we said
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something out there. It allows us to maybe kind of put on the show of status that we are afraid that
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we might not have. And it allows us to kind of just throw kind of a mirror out there instead of
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really a message with our audience. And so it allows us to do things that are ultimately not really
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serving us or really not serving our receiver, but it is the kind of easy path out of the hard
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task of communicating. You talk about there's three sins of complication. What are those three sins?
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Yeah. And so I just kind of hinted at them a bit. So number one is selfish. Is that when we
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prioritize us over the receiver and what are our needs and our goals as part of this. And obviously,
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that's an important component. But when we do it to the extreme, it can be something that
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actually becomes very kind of hurtful in some ways. A good example of that is like,
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look at the terms of use of all the different software that you use. By one estimate, it would
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take 250 hours to actually read all these terms and conditions that we agree to as part of our
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daily digital life. Number two is cowardly. Complicated allows us to hide behind a wall of
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words. And I mentioned the kind of lower status and higher status bit. Something that's kind of
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a half step different here, but I love the story is if you look at how different airports refer to
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themselves, this is the great little microcosm of how we use language in a higher status context,
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which is a lower status context. And in the US, there's about, you know, and forgive me,
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I don't have the numbers in front of me, about 130 or so international airports. And an international
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airport can be something like where I am here in New York, like JFK, which has thousands of flights
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coming in and out of it. Or it could be like where my grandmother used to live in Great Falls,
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Montana, which has just a couple of flights kind of going in and out of Canada. And so that's a big
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discrepancy between the biggest ones and the smallest ones. And so researchers at the University
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of Pennsylvania, they looked at, okay, well, how do these two airports talk about themselves?
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Because there's this idea that, you know, the word international connotes status, right? Like
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you're a big deal when you're international airport. Well, when they looked at the marketing messaging
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from the small airports and the big airports, and they said, how often do they call themselves
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international as opposed to saying JFK airport or JFK? Well, when you looked at how the large
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airports refer to themselves, they use it about 30% of the time. They would say, okay, you know,
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we're JFK international, so on and so on. But we looked at the small airports, they used it about 70%
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of the time. They used the word international to describe themselves. Because again, you want to
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kind of put on this dressing of status. And so that's something that comes up a lot when you look
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across, you know, a bunch of different domains, is that we will use complication to kind of make up
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for other fears that we have about our own status or about our abilities.
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Okay. And so that's number two. What was the third one?
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Oh, and the third one is dangerous, right? So this can hurt us. Complicated by virtue of being an
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ineffective form of communicating. It can hurt us in business. It can hurt our relationships
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and safety. So, you know, this is the number one cause of aviation accidents, the number one cause
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of healthcare accidents. Bad writing alone, except an estimated can cost businesses, you know,
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$400 billion a year, right? So it's not kind of a victimless crime to be a poor communicator.
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What's an example of a complicated message that doesn't need to be complicated?
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Well, by the way, I'm not innocent from all this too. Sometimes, you know, I'll be in a meeting
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there and say, oh, I don't have good news for the client. I don't have a good answer to something.
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And you kind of just filibuster it in a way. So that's certainly something that comes up.
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You know, one thing, if I want to talk about kind of an example of a message that I think is simple
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versus one that is complicated, that to go completely like far away from marketing to show
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how this can apply to a lot of domains, is I like to talk about something my dentist told me
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not too long ago. I've always had kind of bad luck with my dental genes, I guess. And I was at the
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dentist and they were digging away there and it was bleeding. It was horrible. And he said,
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you only have to floss the teeth you want to keep. You only have to floss the teeth you want to keep.
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He understood it was a very empathetic message and it was salient in a way that was, it stood out.
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It was the language I needed to hear. And since then I flossed my teeth like every day. And if you
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compare that to something like what my old dentist might've said, which is, you know, use of floss to
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prevent plaque buildup below the gum line. There's nothing incorrect about that sentence.
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There's nothing, you know, that's really kind of terrible there, but it's something that just
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wasn't where I needed to be. It wasn't the thing I needed to hear at that moment. It was
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a little more complicated than it should be. You give some examples too of the parking signs when
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you're out, you know, driving in a city. And I'm sure all of us have encountered those signs where
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it's not just one sign. It's like three signs that are sort of mishmashed into this Frankenstein sign
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where it'll tell you, you can park here during certain times on the weekdays. And it's, you look
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at this and you're like, I don't understand what's going on here. Am I going to get a ticket?
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And you just kind of, sometimes you're just like, I'm just going to, I'm going to risk it.
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Maybe I'll get a ticket. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'm parking at the right time. Who knows?
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But that's another example of overly complicated messages that don't need to be complicated.
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Oh yeah. And if you want to hear kind of the contrast of that. So this is, you know,
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again, bring it back to New York, my hometown here. If you go back a few decades, we had a
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mayor, Ed Koch, who was kind of this very, you know, very New York caricature of a guy.
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He had his department of transportation put up signs for parking that said, don't even think
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of parking here, right? Don't even think of parking here. It was so popular of a sign that
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it was direct. It was clear. It was translated into Chinese and Yiddish and a bunch of other languages.
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And they still sell copies of it, by the way, for souvenirs that you can get. And when you compare
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that to something like what you're talking about, there's a kind of Byzantine sign of a bunch of
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different this and that. Well, the kind of more Byzantine sign there, that's nice. The other sign
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isn't nice. It's not being nice to you. It's like, don't even think of parking here, but it is kind,
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right? And so there's a difference between kindness and niceness, which is the kindness. You care about
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the results. You care about the outcome. And that's really what you're looking for when you're looking
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for a simple communication. And it's better to be kind than to be nice if you can only choose one
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of them. And in that situation, don't even think about parking here. It's not being very polite,
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but it's being much more respectful of the outcomes of the receiver.
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All right. So let's talk about how we can craft simple messages. And you highlight five factors that
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make a message a simple message. And the first factor is beneficial. A message should highlight the
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benefits of what we're trying to sell or persuade on. And you use, I love this. I thought this was
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really useful. Use the example of trying to sell a power drill. And I think if most people were given
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the assignment of selling a power drill, they're going to focus on the features. Like it's got this
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torque, it's got a flashlight, it's got this magnet that can hold your bits. But you argue that selling
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the features is not effective because you're ignoring the real reason someone is buying a drill.
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So what's the real reason someone is buying a power drill if it's not for the power that it has?
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Yeah. So to borrow a quote from a famous marketing professor, Theodore Leavitt from the 20th century,
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he said, people don't want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole. People don't want a
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quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole. They don't want the thing. They want what the thing
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gets them. And if you've ever been in sales or in marketing, you've probably come across this idea
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is that there are features and there are benefits. We don't really buy features. We buy benefits. We buy
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how our life is better because of this product or service. We buy how the world has changed in the
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direction we want because of this thing. And you can talk all about that battery. You can talk all about
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the magnet and the flashlight and the grip and all these different things. But that is not going to
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resonate with how people actually make their decisions. This is a slightly nuanced thing. If
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you're talking with some highly technical sales reps for manufacturers and distributors, you have to
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figure out where you want to invest your communication resources. But for most situations, the more you can
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talk about benefits, the better you're going to resonate with how people actually make decisions.
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And there's a really easy way to get from a feature to a benefit and to start to put your mind in the
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right place. And it's the question, so what? So what? What does it matter? And if you look at the
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feature and you say, well, so what? Well, then you're going to get to that first level of benefit, which I
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call a functional benefit. If you say, so what? Again, you're going to get to what I'll call the
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emotional benefit. It's where you start to realize, okay, this is getting a little bit deeper. And if
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you do it again, you're ultimately going to get to what are our kind of driving motivations.
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So to pull another example, kind of from like the dental space, again, for some reason, let's look
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at toothpaste. You know, you have mint toothpaste. That is a feature. The flavor of the toothpaste is
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a feature. It exists in the world. You experience it with one of your five senses. But that's not why we
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buy the toothpaste. So you say, okay, mint toothpaste. So what? Well, that means I'm going to have
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fresh breath, right? Okay. Well, that's getting a little bit closer to why we're actually going to
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buy that toothpaste. Okay. Well, I get fresh breath. That's not actually what I want, but so what about
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the fresh breath? Well, that means I'm going to have a more successful date tonight. And so, okay,
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well, that's the emotional benefit. That's starting to get a little bit deeper as to what actually drives
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us to do things. And if you ask it again, well, then you can look at, you know, you're going to get
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down to that bedrock level of kind of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the thing you've seen in a thousand
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textbooks. Well, it's okay. Well, this is going to align with maybe my physiological benefit needs,
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maybe my love and belonging needs. And then when you understand that you can kind of flip it on its
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head and begin to craft sales or marketing messaging that starts from the right place
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and eventually gets down to the features. You say, well, it's about having a better date because you
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have fresh breath because it has mint flavor. That is a much more aligned message than just saying,
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buy our toothpaste is great because it has mint flavor.
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All right. So you want to keep asking, so what, so what? So you get down to that sort of basic
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primal need. One thing you talked about, one challenge that organizations have is as they get
00:22:08.600
older, they might've started off, you know, being able to really tap into the needs of their customer
00:22:14.880
or their audience. And they're able to really craft their messaging that hits that need. But as they get
00:22:20.240
older, they start to focus on their features. So instead of focusing on the hole, they start
00:22:26.920
focusing on the drill. Why is that? Why does that happen?
00:22:30.480
Yeah. So the features, again, the battery, the magnet, the light, those types of things,
00:22:35.920
they exist in the real world. They're very tangible. You can, you can see, smell, taste, touch
00:22:42.200
these different features. And that's the same thing for mint flavor in your toothpaste. That's the same
00:22:48.260
thing for every feature, you know, the heated seats in your car, whatever it's going to be.
00:22:52.160
And so as you get further and further away from the kind of entrepreneurial moment or the launch of
00:23:00.380
a product or a campaign where you're really trying to solve a problem and you start to get, you know,
00:23:05.600
bureaucratic layers away, you start to get time and space away from something. Well, those tangible
00:23:10.960
features still look just as clear, but the need that people have, the problem that you're solving
00:23:19.600
starts to get more and more diffused because oftentimes people who are doing marketing in
00:23:24.300
kind of this, you know, bigger institutional context may not be as in touch with the users,
00:23:29.860
as in touch with the buyers as they were when they were first starting out. A politician that hasn't
00:23:36.400
done door knocking in, you know, in 10 years is going to be less kind of with it than somebody
00:23:42.180
who did do door knocking, you know, just yesterday. And it was able to talk to the voters and what
00:23:46.100
their needs are. So you can see this, you know, something like Microsoft, you know, I, I hate to
00:23:51.000
kind of pick on them, but Microsoft, when they first launched like Microsoft Excel, they were really
00:23:56.180
sharp about it. They were talking about, it was really cool ads actually about all the things that
00:24:00.180
it does and, and it helps you do that you couldn't do before. But today, if you go to Microsoft
00:24:05.020
office and you try to buy their product, they don't tell you anything about what it really does
00:24:10.560
for you. They just assume, you know, what Excel is. And you know, this is how you go download it.
00:24:14.720
You know, this happens with, with lens crafters versus something like Warby Parker. If you just
00:24:18.800
look at these two websites and you compare them, you'll immediately see somebody who is still
00:24:24.280
kind of understanding what customers want versus somebody who's just saying, well, we're the big
00:24:29.260
company. So you're going to come here anyway. We're going to take a quick break for a word from our
00:24:33.880
sponsors. And now back to the show. All right. So, uh, the second factor of a simple message
00:24:44.560
is focused. How can we craft more focused messages? And I guess, what do you mean by focused?
00:24:51.040
So we can really only handle one thing at a time. You know, there's this persistent myth of
00:24:56.980
multitasking that we can understand. We can do multiple things at a time that we can pay attention
00:25:01.480
to multiple things at any one time, but it just hasn't rung true. When you look at the research
00:25:06.120
across the board, it's just not how we work, but we still like to do it. We still like to go out and
00:25:10.720
say, well, buy our product because of X, Y, and Z, but we don't really care about X, Y, and Z. We care
00:25:16.280
about just X, right? And so we can only really pay attention to that thing, you know, once, and then
00:25:22.900
we can pay attention to the Y and we can pay attention to the Z after them. The example that I talk
00:25:27.960
about kind of the open that chapter is what I call the Frankenstein idea. And so in my class that I
00:25:33.680
teach, I asked my students, I say, here's a brand, go out, develop some marketing ideas. Like give me
00:25:38.200
a campaign pitch for this brand. And they come back and without fail every semester, I see the same
00:25:43.820
thing happen with them that I see happen in boardrooms or large teams kind of across the world, which is
00:25:49.760
they come back with what I call the Frankenstein idea. If you read Mary Shelley's book about Frankenstein,
00:25:55.600
how she describes the monster is that every individual piece is great, is selected to be
00:26:01.760
beautiful. It's got lustrous black hair, pearly white eyes, big, strong muscles. But when you put
00:26:07.360
them together, it's this gruesome composite. And that happens with creative ideas too, which is if you
00:26:14.260
might have one really great thing you want to say, but as soon as you dilute it with thing two and
00:26:19.720
things three and things four, even though those are all individually great, well, it becomes worse than if
00:26:24.220
you just had the one message that you're trying to convey and you went all in on it.
00:26:29.740
I mean, you have this neat trick to help you refine your message, make it more focused. And that is
00:26:34.000
when you're looking at a sentence, you want to replace and with so. How can that help us refine
00:26:40.980
our message? So the word and is this kind of magic word. It allows us to put together a lot of things
00:26:49.400
that may not make a lot of sense together, but sound like they make sense together.
00:26:55.180
You know, our alarm bells don't really go off when we hear a sentence that has, you know, X and Y and Z.
00:27:01.040
And we think, oh, that kind of makes sense. And we move on with it. But if you replace the and with the
00:27:05.560
word so, the sentence itself may be a little grammatically funky at that point, but you start
00:27:10.420
to realize, well, okay, well, Y doesn't come from X and Z doesn't come from Y. And so we don't actually
00:27:17.200
have one concrete idea here. We actually have three ideas in a trench coat. And so it's important
00:27:22.200
for us to make sure that we're, you know, we're kind of thinking sequentially and focused more than
00:27:31.060
So it would be an example of how that can help you focus your most. I mean, you gave one about like,
00:27:36.100
there's a company, they're going to develop a loyalty program. And they say, we're going to
00:27:40.280
develop a loyalty program for a cafe and release a line of collectible mugs. Like, okay, it sounds
00:27:46.800
like it goes together, but let's replace and with so. So it says, we're going to develop a loyalty
00:27:52.580
program for a cafe. So we're going to release a line of collectible mugs. And you're like, well,
00:27:58.560
that doesn't connect, actually, when we think about it.
00:28:01.900
Oh, yeah. And then if and so something that does make more sense would be saying, well, we're going to
00:28:05.960
develop a loyalty program for a cafe. So we'll build a mobile app to allow a
00:28:10.260
customers to track their points, something like that. Well, it actually follows that,
00:28:15.100
you know, kind of the mobile app makes sense in relation to the loyalty program in a way that
00:28:21.500
All right. So the focused idea is, this is helping you avoid our tendency to add. So don't just be
00:28:27.400
like, and, and, and, and, because that can just, you're going to create a Frankenstein of a message,
00:28:32.720
keep it down to just one thing. I mean, how focused do you need to get? I mean, can you do like
00:28:37.780
two messages or two things you want to convey? Like, or are you really a stickler for,
00:28:44.960
Well, I like to say this, every thing you add takes away attention from everything else that's
00:28:50.440
there. Our focus, our attention is ultimately a zero sum game. And you can kind of borrow a little
00:28:56.460
bit here and there, but it's important that we understand what that trade-off is. If in our
00:29:01.600
marketing message, our, you know, our kind of warning message, whatever it is that we're trying
00:29:06.080
to get out there, if we're trying to say multiple things, we're doing it at the expense of the focus
00:29:10.840
that would be given to each one of those individually.
00:29:13.420
Any examples of a focused message that you've seen out in the wild that you think really exemplify
00:29:19.980
Yeah. I mean, one of the ones that I like a lot comes from Walmart. Walmart's always been
00:29:23.820
very focused about what is their benefit? What is the reason that people come to Walmart?
00:29:29.400
And it's about saving money. And so they had a great slogan not too long ago called save money,
00:29:33.640
live better. It was very straightforward. There's no and in there, but you could understand, okay,
00:29:39.920
well save money and live better makes sense, but save money. So live better also makes sense,
00:29:45.500
right? And when you contrast that with something like Sears, which, you know, has kind of gone the
00:29:51.060
way of the dodo and they say they would careen from offering to offering over the years. One of
00:29:56.180
them was there's more for your life at Sears. Nothing's wrong with that. Those are pretty words,
00:30:00.800
but it's not really focused about what is the reason that people are, are coming to the store.
00:30:07.700
Okay. So third factor is salience. What do you mean by salience?
00:30:11.680
So salience means, does it rise to your attention? Is it noticeable? Is it, does it zig one other zag?
00:30:18.780
Is there contrast? And the truth is we only really notice things that are salient. We only notice
00:30:24.780
contrast. It's not really an option. We only notice figure from ground. So it's important that when
00:30:31.860
we're competing in this marketplace of again, thousands of messages over the course of 13 hours a
00:30:38.580
day. Well, we have to stand out. We have to do something that's different than everybody else
00:30:44.020
in order for our little bit of communication to stand out from the noise. And you, you talk about
00:30:49.760
how salience is hard because we have a tendency just to follow the crowd. And you mentioned something
00:30:55.620
in the book that I noticed too, I'd say about 10 years ago, eight years ago, there was this trend
00:31:00.480
in the publishing industry to produce these F word books, right? So it's like F this, or, you know,
00:31:06.960
don't give an F about this. And I think maybe the first time one of those F word books came out,
00:31:12.400
it was like, Oh wow. That's, I haven't seen that before. Now it's just a cliche. Whenever I see a
00:31:18.020
book that comes out with the F word in it, I'm like, this is probably dumb and I'm not going to
00:31:23.460
even pick that up. I think that's, that's one of my favorite examples of this, right? The first time
00:31:29.060
this comes up, it is something where it stands apart in the sea of everything else. That's like,
00:31:34.480
you know, rich dad, poor dad, or the, the, the who moved my cheese, all these different types of
00:31:38.580
kind of cliched titles. And when you see something of the subtle art of not giving an F or, you know,
00:31:44.640
well, that ends up being something that, wow, this is different. This stands out. And these books sell
00:31:52.080
a lot. They sold millions and millions of copies over a very short period of time. But then as you're
00:31:58.420
saying today, if you go to the bookstore, literally the entire like personal development section
00:32:03.640
is just overrun by like the George Carlin, you know, seven words you can't say on television,
00:32:08.500
right? It's lost its effectiveness. Something can be salient at one point in time, and then can lose
00:32:14.840
that when all of a sudden everybody else kind of catches up to it. Any tactics on how to make your
00:32:20.640
message more salient? Well, I would say that the most important thing you can do is to play it. If you
00:32:27.160
want to do something that's different than what everybody else is doing, you have to play by
00:32:31.060
different rules. And so I argue that constraints, imposing constraints across multiple different
00:32:37.360
dimensions can push you to do something that's going to be different than what everybody else is.
00:32:43.220
These can be the amount of time you have to produce something or that, or that, the, how long of a
00:32:48.940
message it can be. This can be in terms of your space. This can be in terms of, you know, how many
00:32:54.360
characters can you use or, or this can be in terms of your tools. You can say, well, I only do this in
00:32:59.200
black and white, or I can only do this using letters, you know, words that don't have the letter
00:33:02.360
E. And these can sound kind of silly, but by doing these, these different kinds of creative exercises,
00:33:08.080
it pushes us out of our rut. You know, a rut is formed by a wheel going over and over and over
00:33:14.540
the same spot. And a creative rut is the same thing, right? If we do the same thing over and over again,
00:33:20.820
what we're, what we're being creative and we're doing our, our messaging, it just kind of digs in,
00:33:25.520
but you need to have that jolt to the wheel to be able to, to pull yourself out of it and explore
00:33:30.440
new territory in a, in a way that's going to contrast of everything else and ultimately become
00:33:35.240
salient. Right. And you gave some examples of salient messages. The one you mentioned about the
00:33:39.600
parking, don't even think about parking here. It's like, you don't see that typically when you're
00:33:44.460
out driving the streets, looking for a parking spot. So that's going to get your attention.
00:33:48.080
And the famous one from the Clinton era, it's the economy, stupid. That was another salient
00:33:54.320
message. Any other examples of salient messages that stand out to you?
00:33:59.220
Well, one of my favorites is from the truth campaign, the anti-smoking PSA that was very
00:34:04.340
popular a couple of decades ago and has been kind of coming back. Every other anti-smoking PSA was
00:34:10.760
kind of very dry. It was, you know, Philip Morris had one that just said, think, don't smoke.
00:34:15.540
They were court ordered to do it. And I don't think they put their back into it, but the truth
00:34:19.320
campaign, if anybody remembers these kind of initial, like shocking ads that they did
00:34:24.880
is they go out to a street corner in front of a tobacco office, they have 1200 body bags dropped
00:34:33.300
off. And so one guy gets in a megaphone and says tobacco kills 1200 people a day, ever think about
00:34:40.060
taking a day off. And this is something that's so different than everything else that was airing
00:34:45.860
during that commercial break, everything else that was happening in the same kind of anti-smoking
00:34:50.080
universe, that it kind of shocked people into paying attention. And when researchers later on
00:34:56.960
looked back at, well, did this campaign actually work? They found that it did. They found that it
00:35:01.040
significantly decreased attitudes towards smoking. And then when you look at that kind of Philip Morris
00:35:06.540
one, that did the opposite, you know, that actually increased interest in smoking among teenagers.
00:35:11.280
Okay. So let's talk about the fourth factor and that's empathetic. And this is, you have to do the
00:35:15.260
work to get inside the receiver's head to figure out what's important to them and not just what's
00:35:21.180
important to you. So are there any sorts of questions you can ask yourself to under, to uncover some of
00:35:26.380
the erroneous assumptions you have in your messaging? Because I think all of us as a sender, you have,
00:35:30.960
when you put something out there, we often make assumptions about what the receiver is going to think
00:35:36.200
when they get this message. Yeah. And, and so when we talk about, uh, empathy, it's about saying,
00:35:43.180
are you speaking in the language that your audience understands both literally in terms of the
00:35:49.220
language and the words you're using, but also what are their motivations? Uh, what are their emotions
00:35:53.780
and how can you kind of fit into their life? And it's intimately tied in with benefits, right?
00:35:58.200
You know, what, what matters to them? So, you know, what, one of the easiest ways to do this
00:36:04.760
is also going to be the thing that it's the biggest, like no duh thing about, about crafting
00:36:10.840
an effective message, but it's also the one that people really hate doing, which is to go test your
00:36:15.340
message. Like go find somebody that looks like your audience. You know, you can go out and hire a
00:36:20.200
marketing research firm and do all these, you know, kind of big focus groups, or you can call up
00:36:26.140
somebody and ask them a question, test your message on them. I've gone and I've like stood on the
00:36:31.600
street corner on the concourse at grand central here and flag people down to ask their opinions
00:36:36.220
on things in the past. And it's really awkward, right? People don't like to do this because you
00:36:42.040
know, it's, it's, we're just not built for it, right? We're not built to go out and just kind of
00:36:45.240
flag ran people down and talk to them. And that is something that, you know, you have to kind of get
00:36:49.620
over that hump. But the other piece of that is we often don't like to get feedback because we think
00:36:55.060
that feedback might be something that is negative. We think that we might not hear what we want to
00:37:00.160
hear that the thing we're working on is not, you know, as good as we think it is. So ultimately
00:37:04.960
that ends up being the big challenge here, but there is really no replacement. If you're crafting
00:37:09.560
a marketing message or writing a new proposal, just to get a second set of eyes on it, because
00:37:14.240
it's so easy for us to kind of stay in our bubbles and to convince ourselves that what we are saying
00:37:18.800
is right and genius and very compelling when it might not be any of those things.
00:37:27.140
So one of my other kind of favorite marketing slogans, and this goes back also a few decades
00:37:33.120
is when FedEx was kind of coming on the market and they had, I think one of the most empathetic
00:37:40.380
and in many ways kind of also salient slogans, which was when it absolutely positively has to be
00:37:46.760
there overnight. When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight is speaking in the language
00:37:52.140
that somebody in an office who has a document that has to get to the other side of the country
00:37:57.820
is saying. That is actually, those are the words saying this absolutely positively has to be at the
00:38:02.780
client tomorrow. And that's something that is how a human speaks. And when you compare that with what
00:38:10.300
UPS, one of its most famous slogans, which is what can Brown do for you? Well, what do you really mean
00:38:16.460
by that? Those are pretty words. It's very easy in marketing and in any sort of communication to write
00:38:22.900
pretty words, but they don't mean anything ultimately. So what can Brown do for you doesn't
00:38:28.120
actually talk about what I need and what I'm looking for. But when it absolutely positively has
00:38:33.880
to be there overnight, well, I understand what the benefit is. And I then know that you understand
00:38:41.140
it as well. Okay. Let's talk about the fifth factor and that's minimal. What do you mean by
00:38:45.260
minimal? Is minimal the same thing as short? No, it's not. And so that's the biggest problem,
00:38:51.500
I think, to kind of, to get past when we talk about simplicity is that we are not talking about
00:38:57.220
the fewest number of words, the least amount of sentences or paragraphs or pages. We are talking
00:39:02.600
about the least amount of friction. If it is harder to get from point A to point B, if it is harder for
00:39:07.940
somebody to get to what you want, what you want to understand, that is more friction. And sometimes
00:39:13.680
more words or more sentences or more pages actually has less friction than putting everything,
00:39:20.300
you know, kind of distilled into one piece of it. And the reason this one's at the end is it's kind
00:39:25.420
of hard to answer the core question here, which is, do you have everything you need, but only what you
00:39:29.260
need? It's hard to know that unless you've thought about some of these other pieces, right? About
00:39:33.320
empathy and salience and focus and benefits. And so minimal is, is a very important piece of it,
00:39:38.380
but it's also very easy to just assume, well, I want the smallest word and I want the, you know,
00:39:44.280
the fewest number of paragraphs because that's going to be simplest.
00:39:47.640
Okay. So shorter is not always better because you might, because by, but by making it short,
00:39:52.220
you might miss out on too short. You can't convey the benefits. It might not be focused.
00:39:57.040
So what can you do to craft more minimal messages, but in a way that it ensures that you actually get
00:40:05.400
across what you're trying to convey? So I would say one of the tactics that you can kind of play
00:40:11.480
around with is by playing Jenga with your message. So if you play Jenga, you have all the tower of your
00:40:17.020
blocks and you can pull them out and imagine your email or your proposal or whatever it is,
00:40:22.140
is a Jenga tower. As you pull words out and you pull sentences out and you pull features out,
00:40:28.520
well, does it still stand? Right. And then eventually you're going to pull that last brick
00:40:33.040
and the whole thing's going to collapse. And so if you look back, just kind of go back one step and
00:40:37.360
say, okay, well, this here is the minimum viable message. This is the message that has the fewest
00:40:43.340
number of pieces to it that still works. And then you can use that as your baseline and say, okay,
00:40:49.420
well, maybe I need to add a little bit more here, a little bit more there. But instead of starting
00:40:53.040
of kind of the big thing, it helps us oftentimes to start with the smaller thing and then grow out
00:40:57.780
from that. Another tactic to use, it's similar to that is you can just use like the 900, I think
00:41:03.620
it's like the 900 most frequently used words in English. And they're all very simple words and
00:41:08.800
just craft your message with that. Oh, absolutely. So that's the, the 10 hundred most commonly used
00:41:15.280
words, which sounds like a really weird thing to say, but 10 hundred is a thousand, which the word
00:41:21.960
1000 is not actually one of the thousand most commonly used words in English language. There's
00:41:28.260
an author, Randall Monroe, who wrote a book called Thing Explainer, which he explains all sorts of stuff
00:41:34.160
from like the big bang to nuclear reactors using just the thousand most common words. And it's funny,
00:41:40.960
you know, he's, he's a web comic and it's a fun constraint to be within, but you get the point
00:41:46.000
across where actually, if you can explain like the visible light spectrum by using just a thousand
00:41:51.800
most common words, well, that's a really powerful ability. And you can kind of, again, go up from
00:41:57.500
there, right? If you test your messaging against that, and it's all sorts of tools online where you
00:42:01.040
can kind of just go in and copy and paste your stuff. If you understand that where you stand in
00:42:07.680
terms of the thousand most common words, well, then you're going to have a good place to start
00:42:12.940
as you start to add some of the color back in. I mean, you also recommend imagining a single person
00:42:18.640
as you craft your message to help you craft a minimal message. How does that help?
00:42:23.740
Oh, I think if there is a immediately actionable piece of advice to leave behind, it is this crowds
00:42:31.860
don't exist. We can be in a crowd, but we can't really speak to a crowd because we don't make
00:42:37.680
decisions collectively. Every time you've ever heard something, whether you're at a political rally
00:42:42.840
and there's a thousand people there, or you heard an ad on the TV watching the Superbowl where millions
00:42:47.240
of people were listening. If you made the decision about who to vote for or donate to, or what product
00:42:53.440
to buy, you made that decision in your own head. It's really still a one-to-one communication.
00:42:57.520
And so if you act on the sender side, like you're speaking to one person, it puts you in this kind
00:43:04.820
of subconscious place where it changes what words you use, changes the inflection you use,
00:43:09.200
and it makes you a much more effective communicator. And you know who the best person
00:43:13.920
kind of right now is at doing this? It's Taylor Swift, right? And I appreciate her. My wife's a much
00:43:20.460
bigger fan. And we went to go see her, her movie and she pulls off this magic trick across space and
00:43:27.460
time in this theater for millions of people that the same one she does in front of, you know, 70,000
00:43:32.760
people in the stadium where every song lyric, and especially every piece of like banter on the stage
00:43:37.720
feels like it's a one-to-one conversation. And she is kind of the best in the business of doing this
00:43:43.640
right now. You mentioned Bill Clinton before he was very famous at doing the same thing.
00:43:47.260
And one way to kind of cheat ourselves to do it is take out a post-it note, draw a little stick
00:43:52.840
figure on it, put it on your monitor and say, this is who I'm writing this email for. It's this one
00:43:56.900
person. Right. The particular is universal is what I've heard. Okay. So we talked about these five
00:44:03.860
factors. Does a message need all five of these factors or do you just need one or two in order
00:44:09.500
for it to be an effective message? Yeah. I don't look at these as a checklist or a rubric or a step-by-step
00:44:16.420
plan. I look at these as like kind of five design principles. And so the better you can activate
00:44:21.680
upon them, you know, individually or collectively, the better you're going to be. You don't have to
00:44:26.880
do every single one of them in order, but these are just important kind of bits of knowledge or
00:44:32.520
frameworks to keep in mind as you're developing a message. The better you are across them, the more
00:44:37.800
effective you're going to be, but it's not necessarily, you know, a step-by-step plan.
00:44:42.280
What role does repetition play in ensuring a receiver remembers and understands a message?
00:44:48.880
So there's a good deal of research that shows, they call it the mere exposure effect. The more
00:44:54.700
you kind of say something, the more you message, the more people like it. But there's also some
00:44:59.660
research that shows that it's kind of like it goes up and down. People, if they hear it a few times,
00:45:04.440
they like it more, they trust it more, they believe you more. But at a certain point, you know,
00:45:08.420
you start to go in the opposite direction where people, you know, they don't want to buy your
00:45:12.500
stuff or whatever it is. So you have to figure out, you know, in each individual situation what
00:45:16.680
that is. But generally, it's better to be a little bit more, to edge on the side of communicating a
00:45:22.760
little bit more than to communicating a little bit less. And I'll leave you kind of a quick example of
00:45:26.760
this, is I'll talk with clients and businesses that they send out their email, like email newsletters,
00:45:32.900
they might send it out once a month. And even if they get like, world class open rates, like 50%,
00:45:39.400
well, that means half the people on their email list don't hear from them for two months, right?
00:45:44.060
And so you have to think of all your messaging in this way, which we're competing against
00:45:48.560
so many other options for people to place their attention. And so if you're able to repeat your
00:45:55.540
message a little bit, be able to get more opportunity, that's only going to give you kind of
00:45:59.440
more, more balls of the dice to get what it is that you ultimately want to get across.
00:46:04.380
Yeah, I've seen this when an organization is trying to convey a new policy. And so, you know,
00:46:09.000
they do a good job of keeping the messaging simple, but if they just send out one email
00:46:13.440
or they just announce it once, people are going to miss that because they got their inboxes inundated
00:46:18.440
with stuff. They're getting text messages, they're getting Facebook posts. So I find it useful,
00:46:22.060
even though it might annoy some people who are conscientious and they're just paying attention to
00:46:25.680
everything. They might be annoyed by the repetition, but to ensure that you get as many eyeballs on it
00:46:32.740
as possible, you might have to send out the same message two, three, four times.
00:46:37.520
Oh, certainly. And I've seen this too. I've had folks I've known that have worked on a book for a
00:46:43.660
year and they tweet about it once and they never talk about it ever again, right? And it's like,
00:46:48.700
when something's important, you should treat it like it's important.
00:46:51.120
Right. And then you said, once you crafted your message, the way you can test it is just ask
00:46:55.420
people, pull people aside on the street, call a friend, call some family members, present it to
00:47:00.980
them and see how it lands with them. So I thought that was a really important idea too.
00:47:05.920
And the only caveat I'll just give on that is make sure that they are representative of your audience.
00:47:10.420
If I'm designing something, a message that's important for carpenters, it doesn't matter how
00:47:16.100
many accountants I talk to. That doesn't really help me. If I talk to 400 accountants versus talking to
00:47:20.760
four carpenters, I'd rather talk to the four carpenters.
00:47:24.400
Well, Ben, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:47:28.980
Yeah. Thanks, Brett. This has been a total blast. I loved it. If you want to learn more about the
00:47:33.780
book or to grab a copy of it, you can head on over to bengutman.com. It's not a great name for radio.
00:47:40.040
You got to do two T's and two N's. If you don't, you're just not going to get there. But if you go to
00:47:45.060
bengutman.com, you can go by the book. It's at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, everywhere else.
00:47:48.640
There's a free chapter. You can go download that. And I also send an email every Tuesday
00:47:53.320
that's also free. And I encourage you to sign up for that. Otherwise, reach out to me on LinkedIn
00:47:58.120
or email. And I'd love to hear how this work has affected you.
00:48:01.360
Fantastic. Well, Ben Gutman, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:48:04.000
My guest today was Ben Gutman. He's the author of the book, Simply Put. It's available on
00:48:08.980
amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website,
00:48:13.140
bengutman.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash simply put, where you find links
00:48:20.040
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
00:48:31.460
artofmanly.com where you find our podcast archives. And while you're there, make sure to sign up for
00:48:35.560
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00:48:39.580
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00:48:43.520
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00:48:50.960
we get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time,
00:48:54.820
I'm Brett McKay. Remind you to not listen to AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.