How To Communicate Effective Messages Every Time

Peter Drucker who is considered the father of modern management is famously quoted for “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said”. Drucker is mostly known for recognizing that dedicated employees are key to the success of any corporation, and marketing and innovation should come before worries about finances. Capturing and retaining dedicated employees requires building relationships that are based on effective communication. Music composer John Powell is quoted for “Communication works for those who work at it”. Effective communication in business, in our relations, and in everyday lives comprises both verbal and non-verbal communication. Sometimes verbal communication is sufficient to convey the message and many times non-verbal actions are responsible for conveying the right message.

The same is true with communicating ideas to customers or business partners. Some good Ideas survive and some do not. Most of the time it is due to a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge or the curse of expertise. The curse of knowledge was coined in a 1989 Journal of Political Economy article by economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber. The aim of their research was to counter the “conventional assumptions in such (economic) analyses of asymmetric information in that better-informed agents can accurately anticipate the judgment of less-informed agents”. We often attribute the curse of knowledge to what happens when we know enough about the subject that we think that the person we are trying to communicate the subject to is supposed to know the same. In reality, we often fail to convey the message due to bad communication of what we know.

As eye care professionals we encounter communication challenges when communicating with staff, patients, customers, building effective social media messages, website messages, newsletter headings, capturing store window signs and displays, etc. To build effective communication our ideas and messages need to resonate and the people we are addressing have to retain the message we are sending. Robert Cialdini, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, emphasizes effective communication of ideas needs to make the audience think of what’s going to happen next? how it is going to end? and create a sense of mystery.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of the book “Made to Stick”, identify sticky ideas as being interesting, actionable, and memorable. Advertising and marketing campaigns are driven by campaign messages that include 6 traits, they call “SUCCESs” principles that are:

               Simple: campaign messages consist of simple and profound core messages for example “Try our new daily contact lenses for free”;

               Unexpected: campaign messages that communicate a sense of mystery keep us interested. Unexpected outcome vs boring message. For example “Learn how to get rid of your eyeglasses forever” is a message referring to refractive surgery. Another example is “Learn how to get rid of your reading glasses forever” which refers to Vuity eye drops;

     Concrete: the message should make the idea clear and easy to understand, avoid abstraction, and use concrete language;

               Credible: make people believe your ideas, be able to demonstrate and prove your claims. “Try it before you buy it”, “Money Back Guaranty”, etc;

Emotion: get people to care about your ideas;

Story: get people to act on your ideas by telling them personal stories;

Success in business and personal life relies on effective communication. People who listen to our ideas are not necessarily prompt to all the knowledge we know about the subject. To employ the right communication and build a good relationship we need to be able at every instant to convey an interesting, actionable, and memorable message.