Communication 101: Penetrating the Audience Brain Portal

Communication 101 is a random series of statements about business and marketing communication which may or may not occur in coherent order. Or make sense. Or be useful. Thank you.

You know what makes a joke work? It's not the punchline, it's the setup. (It's a real art and I come from a long line of very good joke-tellers.) You have to prepare the listener just right in order for the payoff to work. Likewise in video, if you prepare an audience appropriately, they'll buy whatever you're selling. But preparation includes making the emotional connection which allows them to hear the content. If you don't get them to trust you, they simply stop listening. Most mistakes are made in the first few seconds. 

Your video needs to say the right thing to make your audience relax. But finding that target is usually hard, and hitting it dead on is even harder. 

To properly visualize this challenge, remember how Luke Skywalker popped a missile into the only vulnerable port on the Death Star in Star Wars IV - a tiny hole two meters wide on a sphere the size of the moon? (Come on, geek out with me for a minute!) Well, that's about what it's like to find the perfect sales handle on a video - the one that penetrates your prospect's protective shields of fear and suspicion and ignites the deeply-hidden impulse to buy. But doesn't that make you want to find it even more?

"the perfect sales handle on a video ... ignites the deeply-hidden impulse to buy"

(If you're now thinking about that egg-and-sperm video you watched in 8th grade health class, don't worry. Your odds are better than those of one random sperm in 140 million.)

To more fully appreciate how audiences decide things, I recommend a very readable and popular book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for psychological research into rational decision-making. In his work, he discovered two systems of thinking which guide the human brain. 

The first, known as System One, is highly active and efficient - it runs all the time unless you're asleep. Among its functions are jumping to conclusions, making snap decisions based on little or no evidence, and responding quickly to new situations based on what's worked safely in the past. System One loves celebrity spokespersons, attractive human models, and easy choices. It can't solve complex problems or think critically. 

The second is called System Two. (The names provide a clue as to why brain scientists are world-renowned for their work in brand identity.) System Two thinks critically. It challenges assumptions, searches for factual evidence, and conducts complex activities. Doesn't that sound like a great system to have running in your brain? One problem: it's incredibly lazy and inefficient and after it's worked for a short while, it demands sugar - like a kid who's been promised a bag of M&M's for doing chores - and then shuts down.

Kahneman's research appears to confirm everything grifters and magicians have known about human nature for centuries (later prostitutes and ad people) - Smart more or less sleeps unless properly motivated, while Stupid guards the door. 

"(Critical thinking) works for a while, demands sugar, and then shuts down"

What communicators can take away from this is the firm knowledge that video, with its colorful moving pictures set to music, is without doubt the preferred medium of System One. And it's loved by advertisers because it's the most likely to make a sale without having to wake up System Two. 

But even with a really flashy video, your message might not penetrate unless the audience hears their trust-message first, a combination of pictures and sound that rings their bell and says, "Hey, these are cool people who made this. Relax and trust." Or, "You can be sure of keeping your job at this point." Or, "We understand your fear of pain and humiliation - here's another way to avoid it." 

Even an off-center hit on the audience 'portal' will get you partway in. With research (such as surveys, informal conversations, cornering subjects in the washroom to demand answers), we can discover how prospects truly feel about our offer. And once you know what they need to hear from you, all that remains is to say it correctly.