By Ahmed Al Akber/Manama

How many times have you been in a situation where someone tells you what they do for a living, only to leave you clueless about what they mean? “I’m a business development and operations leader” or “I’m a marketing strategy consultant” - most people don’t know why those positions are needed or what they entail.

And more often than not, roles with the same titles have responsibilities that differ from one organisation to the other.

Those familiar with the terminology, concepts, and value of their own work (sometimes unknowingly) mystify it by using their own language and ways of communicating. This can make it difficult for people on the receiving end to fully grasp what it is that people do or what ideas they have.

Whether you are a CEO or full-time mom, we all have ideas that we need to communicate: a new product coming to market, a strategy you want to sell your boss, values we are trying to instill in our children. But it can be very hard to transform the way people think and act.

The book Made to Stick describes this phenomenon as the curse of knowledge. This happens when our ideas are masked by abstract ideas that fail to drive action: “becoming consumer-centric” or “world-class customer service” are along these lines. They may be very clear in the minds of the executives that advocate them, but the employees that are charged with implementing these general concepts won’t really know what to do.

In 1990 a Stanford PHD dissertation was carried out by a psychology student named Elizabeth Newton to further understand the curse of knowledge. As part of the research she created a game where a group of people were each assigned one of two roles: “tapper” or “listener”. Each tapper was asked to pick a well-known song, such as “happy birthday” and tap out the rhythm on a table. The listener’s job was to guess the song.

Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly: a success ratio of 2.5%. But what made this research worthy of a Stanford PHD dissertation was the answer she received when tappers were asked what they thought the success ratio would be. They predicted 50%!

The tappers got their message across in only 1 out of 40 taps, but they thought that they would get it across in 1 out of 2. Tappers were busy tapping away while singing the songs in their heads, but it was coming across to the listener as a series of taps similar to Morse code.

It can sometimes be very hard for professionals to get away from this mysterious coded language and communicate the value they provide in a way that makes sense to the listener. One way to do this is to think like your audience, and ask: “What’s in it for me?” from their perspective.

With a little thought and structure, this can become a very powerful way to speak to people. For those looking to attract new clients, seek out a job, or simply be known for what they actually do, I offer the following structure: Target, Issue, Outcome, and Story.

 

Target

Who ideally do you serve or sell to? Based on your capabilities, interest and objectives, what niche should you be targeting? Define who the best clients are for your services. This includes identifying clients’ demographics and/or psychographics.

“Our average client company is based in the Bahrain or Saudi Arabia and is losing between $100,000 and $500,000 one each year due to attrition.”

 

Issue

What problems, issues or challenges do you solve? Why do your clients need your services in the first place? Why do they need you? What’s frustrating them? What are they struggling with? What’s missing for them?

“These costs are mostly for rehiring and training and add up to an average of $227K per executive.”

 

Outcome

Your promised ultimate outcomes. What exactly will your clients get if they use your services? How will they benefit?

“We provide a turnkey “Attrition Turnaround” Program that is guaranteed to cut attrition by 37% saving our average client $4.2mn in the first year.”

 

Story

Case studies, stories or proof. Perhaps the most powerful kind of marketing communication is stories. Stories not only communicate who you work with, what their problems are and the outcomes you deliver, the format of a story makes this much more real and much less conceptual. Who has used your services and what results did they get?

“I worked with a client who was losing $1mn a year due to attrition. The client was working hard to reduce this figure but was not making much progress. We worked together to restructure the  hiring and training process. Now, instead of losing that money on lost talent it is being fed into the clients bottom line.”

 

Answering “what’s in it for me?”

The Target, Issue, Outcome, Story framework is simply a matter of putting your marketing communication in the right order. When your marketing ideas follow this order, they more clearly answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” to your audience.

We can all prevent ourselves from getting too caught up in our own understanding of what we know by avoiding the curse of knowledge. Many times this can be done by simply reviewing the ideas we want to communicate and structuring them in a way that makes it easy to understand.

A simple framework like the one above can be an effective way to structure your message and sell big ideas and attract new clients.

 

♦ Ahmed Al Akber is the managing director at ACK Solutions. For nearly 12 years, Ahmed worked his way up to senior positions at Philip Morris International, Dell, and The Coca-Cola Company, in countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, The Netherlands and Bahrain. Questions or comments can be directed to him on ahmed@acksolutions.com