Effective Communication: How to Simplify to Amplify Your Message - BM432

Susan Friedmann [00:00:31]:
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books. Today, my special guest is Ben Gutman. Ben is a dynamic marketing and communications guru and the author of Simply Put, Why Clear Messages Win and how to design them. Ben's expertise has driven success stories across major brands, including the NFL, I Love New York, and Comcast NBCUniversal, through his innovative leadership as the co-founder and managing partner at the award-winning Digital Natives Group. Currently, Ben teaches digital marketing at Baruch College and continues to shape the future of marketing as a sought-after consultant for a diverse array of clients. Ben, it's an honor to welcome you to the show, and thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor.

Ben Guttmann [00:01:39]:
Thanks so much for having me, Susan. It's great to be here.

Susan Friedmann [00:01:42]:
Ben, you know, I've had an opportunity to look through your book, and it's really needed. You know, helping people get messages out there simply, embracing simplicity. But my first question to you is, why is it so hard for us to communicate simply?

Ben Guttmann [00:02:05]:
Oh, boy. That's the big question. Right? That's the question that I would get when I was running my agency. It's a question I get when I'm in the classroom and teaching. It's a question I I look at, you know, just kind of as a user of the world. It's basically, it boils down to what makes something effective. What's an effective message? And the answer, as you kind of hinted at, is unsurprisingly simple. The messages that work are simple.

Ben Guttmann [00:02:29]:
The messages that don't work aren't. And I joke about this on the first page of the book that, you know, if that's enough for you, then you don't have to read the other 207 pages. Like, just, you know, go ahead and save your money right now. But when you look at why that's the case, it's surprisingly deep. And when you look at how we can get there, it's surprisingly hard. Right? Let's kinda quickly just outline what the why is. So let's say we have the communications equation. Right? If we are marketers and we have customers, if we're leaders and we have employees, if we're advocates, we have our audience, It all basically boils down to we have senders and we have receivers.

Ben Guttmann [00:03:10]:
So there's the 2 halves of it. Strip away everything else. When we are receivers of communication, we want something known as fluency. When you look at the word fluency, you know that right? You can be fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin. But if you ask a cognitive scientist about the word fluency, they'll say that describes how easy is it for you to take something out in the world, stick it in your head, and make sense of it. And so the easier that is, the less kind of mental work you have to do to do that, turns out all the research points in the same direction. You're more likely to like something, more likely to trust something, and you're more likely to buy something or choose something. All the things we want, right, when we're marketers or leaders.

Ben Guttmann [00:03:54]:
And the inverse of that is also true. Right? So it takes a lot of work. If it's really hard for me to see, hear, understand something, well, I don't like it. I don't trust it. I don't buy it. When we're receivers, we want something to be fluent. But the problem is, as senders, when we're wearing that hat, we are pulled in the opposite direction. We are pulled towards complicated.

Ben Guttmann [00:04:17]:
And complicated is the opposite of fluid. Right? So then it takes all the different work. We are pulled that way internally by our different biases in our brain, like an additive bias, and we are pulled that way via external factors, like our boss wanting to have more stuff in the presentation and, you know, our stakeholders wanting to have their sections on the website and all those different pieces. That creates this gulf. And in that middle piece is where everything that's not effective basically falls and misses the mark in terms of our communication.

Susan Friedmann [00:04:48]:
What's going through my head as you say that is that, especially, and this happens in academia, and I know that you work in academia and you hear people that they feel they have to go on and on about something. And I'm like, why? It's like they feel as if they're more educated or maybe they have to prove something by giving you more words than are necessary. Am I off track here? Doctor.

Ben Guttmann [00:05:15]:
Oh, that is exactly something that happens. There was a study, I forget who it was by, but they basically looked at academic papers. And they looked at a whole spectrum of different authors of academic papers, from the Ivy Leagues, the Harvard Deal, for instance, all the way down through kind of the local colleges and community colleges. And they found that there's a direct correlation between your ranking and the amount of words you would use and the amount of jargon you would use. That the higher your ranking in the US News and World Report, the less likely you were to have jargon and acronyms and all these big technical language. And all the way into the other end of the spectrum. If your school was ranked lower, well, you made up for that fact with using the bigger words. You used the technical jargon, used the acronyms.

Ben Guttmann [00:06:05]:
Because we felt like, well, this is puffing me up a little bit. I have to make up for this perceived lack of status with the language. And that ultimately ends up backfiring almost every single time. Another study looked at while they took grad school applications and they said, well, here's the essays of grad school applicants. Let's take a version of these essays and make them more complicated. Let's swap out words for bigger words. And they had judges look at the 2 piles, and they said, well, the ones with the bigger words, those applicants are less likely to be accepted, and also the rate is less intelligent. And then when they did the same thing going the other direction, they took those same essays and they made the work simpler and made them easier to understand.

Ben Guttmann [00:06:46]:
Well, they were rated as more intelligent and more likely to be admitted to the program. So this does happen all the time.

Susan Friedmann [00:06:53]:
Yeah. I mean, the number of times that I've been in conversations and been in board meetings, and it's like people feel that they can't say it simply. That even if they've said it, then they have to keep going with what they're saying like, Perhaps you didn't get it, so let me keep going with this. Yes. It's frustrating, to say the least. Now, I know that in your book, Ben, you talk about 5 attributes of keeping your message simple. Can we ask you to go through those and give us a little taste of what those are and how we can actually go about making our messages simpler?

Ben Guttmann [00:07:39]:
Certainly. We talked a little bit about the why. That's the first half of the book as we look at what is simplicity, why is it so effective, why is it so hard. The second half of the book about how. How do we get there? And when you look at the science, we can pull out 5 different design principles, and that's my background. My background is in design. And I look at this through that lens. You know, you're dealing with constraints and needs and all of them and stakeholders.

Ben Guttman [00:08:03]:
And if we look at this, it's not a checklist or a rubric or a schedule, but it's 5 principles of the better we're able to adhere them. The better we're gonna be at getting simple. The first 1 is beneficial. What does it matter to the receiver, but what's in it for them? If you ever worked in sales or marketing, this is the features versus benefits, kind of debate. The second 1 is focused. Are you trying to say 1 thing or multiple things at once? Is this 1 idea you're communicating, or is this 3 ideas in a trench coat? The third is salient. Does this message stand out from the noise? Does it rise to your attention? Is it noticeable? Does the zig went on or zag? The 4th is empathetic. Are you speaking in the language that your audience understand? Are you meeting them where they are in terms of the actual words, but also their emotions, their motivations, and everything else? And then finally, it's minimal.

Ben Guttmann [00:09:03]:
Have you cut out everything that isn't important and kept only what is? And when we talk about minimal, it's not the same as brevity. We're not talking about the fewest number of words or paragraphs or pages. We're talking about the least amount of friction. That's what we're looking for for minimal. And taken together those 5 principles, the better we can act upon them, the simpler our message is gonna be, the more fluent it's going to be, and ultimately the more effective it's gonna be.

Susan Friedmann [00:09:29]:
You were so right in the beneficial, going back to that famous, and as you said, in sales, it's the WIIFM, are you tuned into that radio station, the What's in it for Me radio station that gets drilled into you? And that's the question the receiver is asking. What's in it for me? That's what they're really concerned about. I love that. And then speaking their language, being empathetic, I think that's a tough 1 for people. Talk to us a little bit more about that 1.

Ben Guttmann [00:10:03]:
I'll go back to beneficial for a second too because if you wanna kinda sum this up in 1 bit, there's a sentence that I tell my students every semester. And I tell them, if you forget everything else from this course, if you forget everything else from this degree, if you just remember this, you're gonna be more effective than pretty much every other business leader I've ever met. It's not even my sense, by the way. It's from Theodore Levitt who taught at Harvard in the sixties. He said, people don't want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole. Right? I don't want the thing. I want what the thing does for me.

Ben Guttmann [00:10:35]:
There's another version of this, which is, you know, people don't want a mousetrap. They want dead mice. Right? That's the beneficial 1, couple nuggets there. Going back to empathetic, what I talk about a lot in this chapter, it's kinda subtitled, welcome the enlightened idiot. And that's a a bit of an exercise and being salient, by the way, so that it's noticeable. But the enlightened idiot, how I describe it, it's an aspirational term. It's idiot. When you go back to kind of the roots of that word, it means the common man and enlightened means somebody that knows something you don't.

Ben Guttmann [00:11:06]:
What does that mean? It means it's your audience. It's somebody that knows something you don't. It's the people who are outside of your bubble. We're all enlightened idiots in many different regards. And it's important for us to not just assume that everybody has the same experiences and the same preferences and the same understanding, the same vocabulary as we do. It's important that we reach out and talk to our audience. We reach out and understand where they're coming from. And this can take a lot of different forms.

Ben Guttmann [00:11:36]:
You can go and hire a big marketing research firm. I know people that work at these firms, they do lots of great work, but they can also cost a lot of money. Or you can go and just call somebody up. You could stand on the concourse at Grand Central Terminal, which I've done, and flag people down and ask them some questions. People really don't like to do this. It's kind of the most no duh piece of the book is to go test your message. But it's the part that most people will ignore because it's awkward, number 1, but also number 2 is we might hear feedback we don't like. Right? Somebody might come and say, I don't think that makes any sense.

Ben Guttmann [00:12:09]:
And we are inherently kind of fearful of that.

Susan Friedmann [00:12:12]:
Yeah. You don't want anybody to negate what you've said. You want them to agree, and you as you said, you assume that just because you think 1 way or you said it 1 way, that somebody else is going to understand it the exact same way as you do. I mean, that whole word assume, I remember when sales, they said, you know, just cut it up, the ass of you and me, you know, if you assume something. So you're making an ass of you and me. And having lived overseas for many years, you get an appreciation that people think differently. Even different parts of this country, people think differently. Sometimes it's shocking that it's nothing like the way you would think.

Susan Friedmann [00:12:59]:
And that's theexercise of going to the station and asking people.

Ben Guttmann [00:13:04]:
Absolutely. It's awkward. Right? It's really hard to do it the first couple of times. I didn't wanna do it. Everybody I know doesn't wanna do it. And then you get 2 or 3 reps into it, and it starts to get a lot more comfortable. 1 time when I was in high school, I had a summer job that was, like, kind of 2 steps away from telemarketing. I had to call up a bunch of hospitals around the country and ask for something.

Ben Guttmann [00:13:27]:
And I had to make, like, a 100 phone calls a day as part of that process. At the time, it wasn't very fun. But I'll tell you this is that that exercise of spending a summer making thousands of phone calls was probably 1 of the most important things that I ever did in terms of developing that comfort level of getting rejected, developing the comfort level of speaking to strangers, developing that all the reps of saying, how can I say something a little bit differently here, a little bit differently there that might get a different response?

Susan Friedmann [00:14:01]:
Understand for their readers. As you say, there's the sender and there's the receiver. So we've got to take what we have and then add that fluency, that simplicity. I mean, Einstein didn't he say, make it as simple as you can? How can we do that with our own writing?

Ben Guttmann [00:14:20]:
Yeah. Within all of these different principles, there's lots of different tools that I've I've identified and put in the book. I'll give you a few of them. Number 1 is this kinda smaller tool when we talk about focus, which is I call it interrogate your ends. The word and is this magical little piece of language that will allow a bunch of different things to be stuck together that don't always actually make sense together. It's just a bunch of string and tape that ties together a few different ideas and lets it slip past your kind of watchful brain to figure out if something makes sense. So I'll give you an example of this. And this is a very simplistic example, but you could see a website that might say something like, we have the best customer service, and you will get a great deal.

Ben Guttmann [00:15:08]:
There's nothing wrong with that sentence. Right? That's a grammatically correcting sentence. Doesn't throw up the red flags. But it's not actually 1 idea. It's 2 ideas. You only notice that when you replace the work and with the word so. I do believe the word so is the most versatile here, but you can use however or yet, or there's a number of different kind of little joiners there that we can use instead. But so was the most personal.

Ben Guttmann [00:15:33]:
Let's run that back through. We say, we have the best customer service, so you will get a great deal. That doesn't actually make any sense. Right? Your customer service is not necessarily tied to being a good value. And all of a sudden that becomes something that does throw up those red flags. Right? That does alert you a little bit saying that kind of feels clunky. Right? That's not really 1 concept. You could update this, for instance, to be like, we have the best customer service, so you will leave happy.

Ben Guttmann [00:16:00]:
That's 1 idea. Right? 1 piece flows from the other. There's a connective tissue between the 2 of them. You don't actually have to use the word and in your final wording. But by using it as the test, it can be something that will allow you to really interrogate the focus of your message.

Susan Friedmann [00:16:20]:
I love that. That's a great example because I know when I look at my work and I'm thinking, I don't need that and. Let's put something else in there. Looking through it with that lens now, I love that. So continue. Yes.

Ben Guttmann [00:16:34]:
Yeah. That 1 is 1 of my favorites. And then I'll give you another piece too. This 1 is something that can often make your writing, let's say you're writing your own book to be much stronger. But it's something in your speaking that's also very important, which is right for 1 person. Crowds don't exist. Crowd, yes, you can see a lot of people together, but every time you've ever communicated with somebody, it's 1 to 1. In your brain, you're the 1 person that's receiving that commercial, that's broadcast to millions of people during the Super Bowl.

Ben Guttmann [00:17:05]:
You're the 1 person that is hearing that speech that that candidate on stage in front of 500 people is speaking. Crabs don't really exist. Individuals exist. And that's how we're making our decision. How our decisions, our judgments, our opinions. It's important when we're in the sender role to don't just be like, hey, everybody. This is for the crowd. I'm just kinda shouting it out.

Ben Guttmann [00:17:27]:
You don't get any response from that. You wanna choose 1 person and speak to them. In your writing, in your speaking, in your presenting, that's important in your designing of a website. That's 1 I feel like a lot of people are really bad about is they talk to everybody on their website instead of talking to the 1 person that's scrolling through it at that moment. And you know who's the best at this, by the way? Do you want a really good example? No, ma'am. Taylor Swift. Did you see the heiress tour concert

Susan Friedmann [00:17:54]:
move? Snippets of it, but she's brilliant.

Ben Guttmann [00:17:56]:
She's brilliant. My wife's a huge fan. You know, I appreciate her as well. But if you watch that movie, she pulled off this magic trick where in front of 70, 000 people, she made every single person feel like she was just talking to them. That also translated across space and time with being on a movie screen, thousands of miles and hundreds of hours later in the theater. It made every single person there feel like he's speaking just to them. That's a wonderful example of the power of speaking to 1 person and how that can change in many subtle ways, how everything you're doing is shaped and how it works.

Susan Friedmann [00:18:36]:
I love that because I'm going to use that now. So many authors, when I ask them who their book is for, they say to me, well, the book is for everyone. So I say, well, if it was just 1 person, who would that be? I'm gonna change that. I like that. What about mistakes? What are some common mistakes that you see people make with this whole concept?

Ben Guttmann [00:18:59]:
The biggest 1 has to be the beneficial piece that people miss. And I think I know exactly why people make the mistake there. There's features versus benefits. Features exist in the real world. Right? You can crack open your 5 senses, and you can see something, taste something, smell something, feel something. They are very tangible. But benefits are often intangible, and they often are separated in time and space from where you are as the person talking about the thing. When you're maybe a founder or an inventor, you might be a little bit better about well, this was the pain point I've tried to solve with this.

Ben Guttmann [00:19:36]:
But as an organization gets bigger, as you get further away, again, both time and space, from the problem, that becomes blurrier and kind of more and more invisible. But the feature stays as clear as day as they were on day 1. A lot of organizations and a lot of individuals will speak in terms of, well, this has this much horsepower. This has this many gigabytes of RAM. This has this many pixels on the screen, this flavor of toothpaste. Nobody cares about those things, really. We don't want those things. You mentioned before kind of a few of the the idioms around this.

Ben Guttmann [00:20:14]:
The question that I use a lot for this is, so what? I was like, this toothpaste has mint flavor. Well, so what? I don't care. What does that mean? Well, that means you're gonna have fresh breath. That can be your first level, like, functional benefit. But I also argue that you can do that 2 more times. So you can say, well, fresh breath. So what? Well, that means I'm gonna have a more successful date tonight. And that's the emotional benefit.

Ben Guttmann [00:20:40]:
Right? It's starting to get a little bit deeper now. But you gave me a stat. I don't even want that. What do I want? You can say so what to that successful date, and you can tie it all the way back to those Maslow's needs that you see in every psychology textbook of love and belonging. Right? And so by using just the simple little question, you can interrogate your message. You can interrogate a feature as kind of bland as mint flavoring in a toothpaste and get to the thing that people actually are making their decisions on.

Susan Friedmann [00:21:09]:
Yes. That so what test is a brilliant 1. I love that. Because as you say, it's once to test out what you've written. And when you ask yourself, Does it answer that question? So what? What's that mean to the other person? Then you're really going to get down to it. Yes. And going back to, you said, the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I mean, there's only so many things that we really want, you know, we want to be admired, we want to obviously have safety, be healthy, be safe. Yeah.

Susan Friedmann [00:21:45]:
I mean, they're all going through to, memorized them all, but yes. That's brilliant. Ben, how can our listeners get hold of you? How can they get hold of the book? Because it sounds like something that we all need to have on our bookshelf.

Ben Guttmann [00:22:03]:
I appreciate that, Susan. And thanks so much for having me on. This has been a ton of fun. If you're interested in learning more about this, you can grab my book,
"Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win—and How to Design Them," wherever books are sold: Amazon, Barnes and Noble. If you go to my website, bengutmann.com, there are two t's and two n's in Gutman. It's not a very radio-friendly name, but if you go there, you'll find a free chapter to download. So just go grab that. There's an email I send out every week.

There's some other tools and stuff. Or shoot me an email, reach out on LinkedIn. Would love to hear from you and see how this has been helpful. And anything I can do to help, of course, let me know.

Susan Friedmann [00:22:39]:
That's lovely. And I'll put the website in the show notes, Ben. And if you were to leave our listeners with a golden nugget, what would that be?

Ben Guttmann [00:22:50]:
The thing I always like to implore people to understand is that just as if you were sending a letter, you have to pay for the postage. If you are sending a message, it is your literal and metaphorical responsibility to pay that post its as well. Nobody woke up today saying, I want to click on an ad. I want to open your spam email. We all have so many things we care about, our family, our friends, our work, our sports teams, but your ad for a new brand of shampoo isn't 1 of them. Every ad you've ever seen has been against your will. It's important for us to understand where we are and our responsibility as senders to kind of come with that level of humility to the equation if we wanna be successful.

Susan Friedmann [00:23:39]:
Yeah. So true. Yeah. I didn't wake up this morning thinking about ads or spam or anything like that. I had better things to think about. Ben, this has been brilliant. I know that we probably only touched the tip of the iceberg with your brilliance in this subject. Listeners, go buy a copy of Ben's book, and I'll put all the links in the show notes so that you have them.

And learn more about how to keep everything that you say and write, and however you communicate, keep it simple. Thank you, Ben.

And listeners, if your book isn't selling the way you wanted or expect it to, lets you and I jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got the return you were hoping for. So go to BookMarketingBrainstorm.com
to schedule your free call. And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparks some ideas you can use to sell more books. Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.