Message_Gap

Your biggest worry …

… could be a blank sheet of paper. It can happen when you’re challenged with a dire business imperative but lack inspiration. Or perhaps you’re inspired to act by a charismatic chief executive but not sure where to bring all that energy back to the day’s work. Momentum comes to a screeching halt.

Going back to the drawing board, per se, is not such a bad idea. Get the right people in the room, ask the right questions, and see what happens.

If someone asked you what marketing activity would help you grow your business over the next six to nine months, what would you say?

A handful of senior executives at a large professional services firm pondered the question recently during a quick interview to update marketing plans. Their responses carried a consistent theme:

“Help me articulate what our industry is all about in North America and what we are doing in a differentiated way.”

“Help me tell the consumer story and package our offerings both externally and for the sales force.”

“Marketing can help me refine our messages for a really good client presentation.”

“I need a basic toolkit — case studies, points of view, packaging of our offerings.”

This year’s volatile economy has thrown a lot of business plans into a tailspin. It’s likely your message – and what you’re selling – have shifted a bit. Getting back to basics is top of mind.  Now’s the time to step back and articulate who you are, what you do, what differentiates you. And to make sure everyone agrees before you take the message on the street.

These executives’ marketing wish list includes a tookit — a set of basic marketing communications materials. So far we’ve scoped out a customer presentation, point of view paper, and case studies. (And that presentation aims to feature an incredible shrinking story that hooks the customer at the onset.)

Every organization has different needs and preferences. I’m curious: What’s on your wish list for the ideal marketing and sales toolkit?

Promoting a single product attribute is a gamble. Last week I opened the morning newspaper to find a full page color ad about tomato soup, of all things! Campbell’s was touting its use of a sea salt so “naturally flavorful” that it could reduce the sodium in its iconic product.

Bento box - Haruo Iida via Flickr.com

I questioned the relevance of the nutrition claim. And considered a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup – my favorite comfort foods – for lunch. My nostalgia for the brand was stronger than the potential benefits of a natural sodium booster.

What makes proof palatable? I vote for a variety of essential ingredients to make a compelling story. Let’s call it the Bento Box Effect.

Making a bento meal, imaginative food displays in sectioned boxes, goes back centuries in Japan.  National contests are held in the craft of creating a colorful box lunch in a container about the size of book. Deciding what colors, textures, flavors to feature must be a big part of the design challenge.

Kenya Hara, who designed the opening and closing ceremonies of the Nagano Winter Olympics, weighed in on the beauty behind bento box lunches.  While the Japanese are known for an aesthetic sense, Hara notes they also have an incapacity to see ugliness:

We have a special ability to focus fully on what’s right in front of our eyes. We tend to ignore what is not an integral part of our personal perspective.

We ignore that our cities are a chaotic mess, filled with ugly architecture and nasty signage. And so you have the situation where a Japanese worker will open a beautiful bento box in a stale conference room or on a horrendous, crowded sidewalk.

Each compartment of a bento box presents a different taste sensation. Collectively, the compartments add up to an alluring and satisfying diversion. A story with the right ingredients has the same appeal for routine business dialogues.

What if you packed a bento box of proof to enliven today’s conversations?  Here are three ingredients sure to bring a richer dimension to an otherwise mundane communication:

• A dose of humanity — Tell a story from the point of view of a real person who matters to your company’s success.

• Genuine differentiation — Share the truth about one thing you’re doing better than your closest competitors.

• Winning practices and principles — Your company is strong. Describe a company practice that makes you proud.

Too often we rely on statistics alone to support marketing and sales messages. Numbers make an impact but they’re difficult to digest quickly. Try packing a bento box of proof that’s real, true and strong. Add the points to your next presentation, conversation or collateral draft. That’s enough to make anyone pause right in the middle of their tuna sandwich.

Lately I’ve been obsessing about how to make a big story very small.  Specifically, I’m planning to shrink a mountain of information to three pages in an industry presentation. And use pictures not words to tell the story.

Ha! Good luck, you may think. Well, with my antennae up for a plausible approach, I’m inspired by people who’ve “been there, done that” in this mission of creating the incredible shrinking story.

An executive from Levi Strauss once shared a parable at the national conference of Business for Social Responsibility, now known as BSR.  Still early in its development, BSR was struggling to define its itself. Though the organization had a singular focus on making the world a better place through sustainable business practices, the needs of its constituency ranged widely. The little guys didn’t necessarily have the same agenda as the big corporations. Hearing a parable about a king who persists in having his messenger cut his life’s story in half, over and over, until it fits on one page was a worthy lesson for the task before the membership. (Years later, it’s interesting to see that BSR references itself only by its acronym — that’s taking shrinking to the extreme!)

And then I found a soulmate in Josh Silverman, President of Skype. He shared his career path in the New York Times article, “Learning in Business by Following the Heart.” Silverman’s first  job on Capitol Hill taught him a lesson or two in leadership communication:

In Washington, no matter how complex the issue, you have to boil it down to one page. That’s an invaluable skill for a leader.

The process of distillation isn’t easy. I recall one CEO telling me to “cut it in half” after presenting a positioning statement that was already half the length of every previous articulation of the company’s value proposition.

Done.  Two sentences. Now, back to those three pages I mentioned earlier.

The amazing pace of technology melding its way into our brains at work and play is posing a fascinating challenge for communicators. The fast-changing media environment isn’t standing still for lengthy messages or complicated distribution strategies. Consumers are setting the communication agenda. Getting the message to the target where they are is the challenge.  Sustaining the pace while delivering substance keeps us all on our toes.

Information design firm XPLANE sums it up handily in this video. Recently updated, “Did You Know 4.0″ is chock-full of stats and facts to make your head swim.  The pause button will come in handy!

The provocative headline caught my eye: Management Consulting: Help or Hazard? Only minutes into the blog, my brain disengaged.  Why?

Not because the writer disparaged the entire industry in the second sentence. And not because he plugged his own book in the sixth sentence.

What turned me off came next: Examples of missteps at Levi Strauss and AT&T prior to 1994. A string of bullet points from a book published 11 years ago.  A nod to a Peter Drucker book dating to 1993. Implications that work completed more than a decade ago was the downfall of two prominent brands. Without fresh data I wasn’t convinced.

I scanned the entire post – all 3,043 words! In 60 seconds I went from being lured by the headline to being aggravated by stale information. With all that text looming on the screen my brain went into sorting mode. Where were timely references? The synapses failed to fire upon information I found insufficient to support the headline.

When faced with information overload, our brain struggles to find meaning. The diagram here shows one way I conquer information overload. Everything gets sorted into categories to establish their relevance to my personal preferences. I tend to think like a journalist:

• Logistics (what is happening)
• Benefits (how will this help me)
• $$$ (how much does it cost)
• Timing (when is/was this happening)
• Sources (what makes this credible)
• Values (why does this matter to me)

Sorting is the only way I can begin to digest the two daily newspapers, weekly and monthly magazines and countless blogs I monitor to stay on top of issues important to my clients and my business. If a story contains a nugget or two within those categories, I’m far more likely to retain the intended messages.

I’m curious to learn how others boost their message recall.  What categories of information hold your interest?

I was listening to Seth Godin’s book The Dip the other day. It’s an oddly encouraging tome about when to quit and when to stick. Instead of mulling over implications for my business I found myself thinking about a recent hike in Yellowstone National Park and what I like to call our Most Magical Moment of the trip.

Conquering The Dip

Seth talks about The Dip involving a long slog between the initial excitement of a new adventure and the mastery required to take advantage of it.  Most people, when they get bogged down in the tedium of becoming a master, simply give up. Our hike was not so different.  We were in search of a petrified forest on an unmarked trail high on an exposed ridge in bear territory.  That’s all the detail we had.  About two thirds of the way through the very vertical hike we were just about ready to quit. A group who had started ahead of us perched on a lookout just off the trail. “We’re not going any further, we have no idea where those petrified trees are.”  We decided to stick it out.  How often do you have a chance to see trees frozen in time for 50 million years?

We pushed on up the next ridge and into an open meadow where I saw a glimmer of fur in the sagebrush. “Wait, I’m not sure what that is but it’s too small for a bear!” It was the most beautiful red fox.  Foxes are common in Yellowstone but rarely seen.  In fact the book I brought home of wildlife in the Tetons and Yellowstone had only one photo of a fox out of the hundreds of creatures featured. We stood watching quietly as the fox scanned the brush, looking for its meal.  She looked at us directly and then looked away, acknowledging that humans were in her presence but that she had no interest and we meant no harm. We were mesmerized.  She then ambled toward us to reach some shade trees to bed down for an afternoon nap.

It was a magical moment. If we had not pressed on and overcome our aggravation with a steep rocky path, we would not have observed this wonderful example of wildness.  I recalled our rare encounter as I listened to Seth, thinking that companies that forge ahead, ask the hard questions, pursue mastery are ultimately the winners.

It’s easy to skip the hard questions, but those very questions give us the answers we need to more effective in communicating with target audiences.  Among the first questions we address when planning a message strategy:

• Who are we really selling to? If we did not have the rapt attention of this audience, would our business survive?

• Who are the top three competitors most likely to steal business from us?  What are they doing better than us?  What customer needs are they failing to address? Stumbling upon that answer is a golden opportunity to communicate your differentiation to customers.

Found the Petrified Forest

And the more elusive Red Fox

Seth notes there’s no shame in quitting when you’re in a hopeless situation.  But if you’ve decided to be the best in your field, you need to stick.  Being committed to what you know to be true, regardless of the apparent obstacles, can indeed reveal a magical moment.

Slogging it out in Yellowstone, we found those petrified trees, but the chance encounter with the Red Fox set that hike stand apart from all others.  It was the defining Magical Moment.