351. The Key to Effective Communication: Simplify and Connect with Ben Guttmann

Welcome to episode 351 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Ben Gutman, author of the book Simply Put. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I am joined by Ben Gutman. Ben is a marketing and communications expert and author of Simply why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them. He's an experienced marketing executive and educator on a mission to get leaders to more effectively connect with by simplifying their message. Ben is former co founder and managing partner at Digital Natives Group, an award winning agency that worked with the NFL, I love New York, Comcast, NBCUniversal, Hatchet Book Group, the Nature Conservancy and other major clients. Currently, Ben teaches digital marketing at Baruch College in New York City and consults with a range of thought leaders, venture backed startups and other brands. Really quickly, before we get into our simple conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for everything including related past episodes, links to articles and books, including simply put, a timestamp summary of the episode and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com351 now let's jump right in. Ben Gutman, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Thanks for having Melina, excited to be here.

Oh yay. I'm so excited and you know to the world here, like I know I often say like oh man, we were chatting for a long time. Like I definitely, I already told Ben we are going to be for real best friends. There are a few people I talk to on this. It's like we're best friends now. It's happened like and I know we could just talk for all of time and so I'm so excited for everyone to get to know you and thank you of course to our mutual friend Michael Schein for making for you know, talking enough about us both that it made this kind of introduction happen. But for everyone who doesn't yet know you, can you share a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?

Absolutely. Again, Michael is great and it just so happens that we're recording this about two hours After I just had coffee of him. So it's a, it's double treatment, but yeah. My name is Ben Gutman. I ran a marketing agency for 10 years called Digital Natives Group. We had, we were based here in New York City. We worked with a lot of fun clients over the years from the NFL to I love New York to the Nature Conservancy, the Swiss Re. We worked with publishers and authors from Nobel Prize winners to Fortune 500 CEOs. And it was a lot of fun. Sold the business about a year ago. A year and a half ago. Right now I I doing some independent consulting. I teach at Baruch College here in New York and I am excited to have my first book come out. And actually just as we're talking today, it's about a week from now, but I know when we're going to be published, it'll be after that. But simply put is my new book and I'm really excited to share it.

Yeah, I know it's always a kind of a funny meta world where it's like, okay, so like now it's coming out then, but we're talking about this, that it was then, then that this happened of like how the, how time works weird when you record shows like this and you know, someone could be listening to this five years from now. So hello in the future, wherever you are and wherever we are. But yeah, super excited to talk about the book and your work and do you have any examples I, you know, where you're talking about some cool projects you worked on any that you know, help to kind of shape that opinions on things or that we can kind of learn from, you know, your style and stuff.

Yeah. So running an agency is a lot of fun, you know, with the. Good clients make a good agency, bad clients make a bad agency. I'm lucky. We over the course of 10 years had a lot of really great clients. One of them that I really enjoyed working with, that is an example of messaging and simple messaging, that was something that was strictly an internal rallying cry was this power plant here in New York. They were shuffled around for years and years between this big holding company, that big holding company and eventually this new owner, their newest owner comes in and they take control of this power plant that's this iconic symbol in the New York City skyline. It's a bunch of smokestacks, but it still makes up an iconic part of the skyline. When you see it from the river here is they come to us and they say, look, we have these employees that have worked here sometimes for Generations. And they have whiplash. They don't know who they work for. Do we work for this company or for that company? When people on the outside are being like, they're telling them where they're working, they're having a hard time doing it. So we need to have an identity, a rally and cry internally. And so we sit down, we work with all their team, we take the tour, we have all these, you know, we're a bunch of marketing guys, but then we have these, you know, power plant guys that have been there for decades. They're sitting down, they're talking about how proud they are about the work that they do. And so, you know, when they're talking about how they, when they come to work, it's not about the power plan, it's not about the, the what goes on in there, but it's about what goes on outside of it. That stuck with us. And we started, we wrote that in our notebook and we circled that over and over and eventually we got to this internal slogan, this internal rallying cry for them that was making New York happen. It's about what they do is not about keeping the power plant on. What they do is not about generating so many kilowatts or megawatts or whatever. What they do is that every single day they get up and they allow the rest of New York City to get up and do what they do. And that was something that they put on banners and they put on letterhead and they put on their website and they put on slogan and it ended up becoming this big, this big calling card for them is that they're making New York happen. And so that, that one, even though it's, it's an internal project, was something that always stands out to me as a, as, as a really great, really great result that that's what we look for in everything.

Oh yeah. And with that really, I mean, there's no reason why that couldn't, shouldn't, wouldn't be an external piece of communication and as well. Right. Like, I don't think about my power plant other than like, ugh, this bill I have to pay. Right. You know, as far as as that goes. And so, but something, you know, making New York happen, that's something that I like appreciate in a different way. Right. It's, it's also, you know, like don't mess with Texas being, you know, littering, anti littering campaign and some of these things that you just like that help to get at the core of what you're about. I'm also Gonna connect and link in the show notes Marcus Collins. My interview with him about his book for the culture and talking about how some of the. That like, innate tribalism and what we're about and work he did for the Brooklyn Nets, like, really interesting stuff for everybody. If you like this conversation, you'll really love that one too. But I think that type of. It's not always that internal communication can match something externally. Right. But something that helps the internal team to see that they're part of something bigger. That it's not just the, like pulling the lever and doing that monotonous thing over and over again. But it's about more than that is a way that you can get everybody passionate and excited about their jobs in a way that often I think customers would resonate with as well.

Oh, yeah, and you mentioned kind of that, that rallying flag, that tribalism. Because it reminds me of another campaign that we worked on and never saw the light of day. This is a pro bono project we did during the pandemic in New York City. The parks were packed. Every single park in New York City was dealing with too much garbage. People were littering. There was. People were having picnics and parties and all the social life in the city went to these parks. And so we were working with a local parks group who connected us with their entire, like, New York collection of New York City Parks. Group had the same problem about this and they needed an anti littering slogan. Anti littering campaign for the parks. And so we were doing this as a pro bono thing and we listened to their interviews. We go do site visits and. And we get back to our office and we say, okay, well, how do we connect to what makes New Yorkers tick? And one of the big things is about being a New Yorker. Being a New Yorker is a big identity for a lot of folks that are in New York. And you said, don't mess with Texas. I mean, that's a really hard one to top. But we looked at that as a model and we said, well, what could we do in New York that would have the same type of residency? And we came up with real New Yorkers don't litter. You know, people in New York always want to be a real New Yorker. That's a big like, you know, bar table conversation. How many years is it to be a real New Yorker? And we came up and we said, well, real New Yorker is not about time. It's not about place. It's about mindset. And it's about taking. About caring for the city and taking care of it. And we came up with the slogan, real New Yorkers don't litter. We had a bunch of things drawn up for it. And it played off of this idea of kind of like a, you know, in group of New Yorkers out group versus the people that don't care about it. And we really liked it. It was a great campaign. But this was in 2020. And the, the, the summer of 2020 was when the Black Lives Matter movement had a big resurgence. And it just wasn't the time for us to have a campaign, even if it was unrelated, even if it was something that was, you know, that was meant positively. It wasn't the moment for us to say someone is a real New Yorker, someone's not. It wasn't going to resonate then. And so we ended up tabling that. But that's one of those campaigns that, you know, to, to what you said. Like, it does really resonate. Cause I think it meets people. And we'll talk about the book, we'll talk about messaging. It meets people where they are. And, and that's what we talk about when we talk about empathy in the book is what language are you speaking in the. In the message. That's the, you know, that should match what your audience is, is understanding how they see, how they hear, how they interact in the world. And real New Yorkers don't litter is a. Is a way which. That kind of clicks in there.

Yeah, it's. It's a really interesting mix of. It's kind of overcoming a time discounting problem. Right. So we want to do the thing now that's easy but like helping it to feel like a present self. And it's aspirational to who I want to be of being. Being a real New Yorker and caring about the like, hurting and social proof aspect of being seen as this, as like part of the group. And there's something I can be doing now to reinforce that I'm like a group in a simple way that may or may not be seen. But it's about like my internal thing as well as you. There's so much happening in this one little tiny statement. And I feel like the, like, the best campaigns come together that way, right? Like that you can see like all. You can read into it the way that you want to. And even if you don't consciously register all of that stuff, it's like inherent in the behavior that it's moving. And that was. There were so many of those examples. And going through your book of things you're talking about you know, things you've done and other, you know, global campaigns and things we might be familiar with. And it always takes so much work to get to the thing that feels super obvious.

I say that in the first page of the book there, which I said, look, it's a 208 page book about how to say things simply. It seems like I didn't take my own advice. Right. And it's because simple, if you just get the headline, which is that simple communication is the most effective form of communication, that's great. If that's enough for you, don't buy the book, don't read the book, you can turn off the podcast, it's not important. But if you want to know the why and the how, then that's the more complicated part of it. Even though we talk about how complicated is the enemy, it's more, it's harder to do those things. And that's why we ended up with again, those 208 pages of it instead of a one page book. It, it's hard, it's hard work. And it's because everything in our nature and everything in our society pushes back in the other direction. Everything pushes us towards complication. I know we talked about Lydie Klotz before the call and I mentioned his studies in my book about the additive bias where everywhere you look, if it's, you know, with Legos or mini golf sets or patterns or whatever, we bias towards adding options. Instead of subtracting, we add. We bias towards adding things to our schedule, adding things to our website, adding things to our paragraph. And that sometimes works. But in messaging, what we find is that the things that are easier, the things that are more pared down are often the things that our brains prefer and then therefore are more effective either as a marketing message or any other form of communication.

Yeah, I definitely want to let you introduce the, the book and, and how you came to it and the different segments, the, you know, the five kind of areas to focus on to have those that simple communication. And I have to say something first, which is like I, okay, in this additive problem. Right. Taking that bias into account. And so often like, so when I work with a client on say a website, I'll always tell them we can't have. You can't be looking at the current website when we're talking about your new website. Right. We can't. And you can't have a list of all your products and services if we're going to be talking about what it is that you do because you're going to be biased by the things that you have and it feels like we have to find a way to cram them all into this new thing. But often if we talk about, you know, what we have or like what we need or what we do and what's important, it kind of like self sifts out things that aren't all that important that you don't need and then you don't necessarily realize it. But in my own case, you know, being a small business owner and you end up where it's like, well, we gotta add this page and we gotta do this. And when I was. And it's time for another website redesign. As we're talking now, I'm working on my website and some of this communication, but I semi lovingly, mostly hatingly referred to my website as Frankenstein. I was saying like I need to get rid of Frankensite because some so many stupid like things that got added over time to kind of make it work and it's better than a lot of sites and I hate it. And so when you're talking about this kind of Frankenstein problem in your book, like, oh, Frankenstein, you know. But so if that can be an intro into all of what's in the book or if you want to kind of start with that approach however you want to take it. But I think we all have that kind of problem of having. It's the, the concept with too much stuff in it. You want to say all the things and so you end up saying nothing. It's kind of the underlying problem of all of what we're talking about.

Absolutely. I'm going to steal your tactic of not allowing a client to look at their current website whenever I am talking to one about it because it's, it's using something that probably wasn't well thought out to inform the future state, which is probably, you know, not if you take it in the abstract, it's not what you want to do. But yeah, going back to the Frankenstein idea, the Frankenstein message, how I describe it in the, in the book when I talk about focus in my experience teaching at Baruch College where I teach digital marketing to undergraduates, every semester I have them break up in different groups and they call them agencies and I give them a brand. I say, here's a brief, go and give me a pitch for this, for this client, write up a proposal, go give a presentation and then I'll bring in some folks to go judge it. Every semester I see the same problem and I give them fair warning on this. I give them documentation to Avoid it. I try as much as I can, but every semester I see the same problem with their presentations that not all of them, some of them take the message that I see with seasoned professionals, I see with other agencies, I see with people who, you know, are great authors or speakers. It's what I call the Frankenstein idea, is that you take something like everything is written up on a whiteboard. You have NFTs and you have drones and you have influencers and you have this hashtag and that hashtag and this hashtag, and. And all of a sudden, you know, there's nobody really in charge. And they kind of put it all together. They, you know, wrap some string around it and they say, here's the idea. And it's all these things together. We're saying this and this and this and this. And I call it Frankenstein because every single one of those things can be great, but when you put them together is not great. And that's the same way that Mary Shelley describes the monster in Frankenstein's Monster in Frankenstein, the book where she talks about, like, the big muscles and the silky hair and the. And the beautiful eyes and all these other individual components that are selected to be beautiful, but when you put them together, end up being this horrid contrast that doesn't. That doesn't work, that doesn't fly. And that is a sin that a lot of us fall to because we think that more is more. But often it ends up fragmenting our attention in a way that makes everything not work. We never reach critical mass on the focus that we need to get our point across.

Definitely. And it's so easy that we've all. Anybody who has a background in marketing especially, but we've all been in the. I, like, somewhere in the book, you know, you quoted someone saying you've. They've searched and I've never found any statues of committees, which is great. But, you know, we've all had the, you know, you have to send out the email or the survey survey, or we're asking a question, we're doing the thing, and then someone says, like, oh, well, if we're asking anyway, we should also ask about this and that and this and this and, oh, throw this in and do that and do the. And like, no, no, no, we can't, we can't do that because no one's going to do anything if we ask 55 things on here, right? It's. It's not. Our brains don't work that way. And I think this really also is leading me to one of My. I think, I think what's really. I don't know if it's fair to say it's like the most central item of the book, but one of the things that I haven't seen people talk about in the same way is this idea of the sender and the receiver with the message that you're putting out there. And of course, we talk about like, it's like you're trying to get someone to buy in and you're, you need to communicate in a, in a good way. And this piece where you talk about how, you know, the sender has to pay the postage and in, you know, it really is your burden to get the person, that's the receiver, like, you have to pay because they don't necessarily want the thing that you're sending to them. And I think you do a really good job of explaining that. So I'll let you talk about it now instead of me trying to say what you said.

Tommy, you did a great job in the beginning of the book. I tried to appropriately simplify the equation for any sort of communication, be it marketing, be it internal communications, be it whatever, as having the two components, there's the senders and there's the receivers. Because I could keep going and it would use the full word count of the whole book if I have to keep saying every single time. Well, advertisers and politicians and advocates and parents and all of these people are senders. We're both senders right now, but we're also both receivers. Receivers are on the other end of the equation. It is anybody who is the audience, is the voter, is the donor, is the buyer or the customer. All these things make us the receiver. And then the message. The message is the thing that gets sent from the sender to the receiver. It sounds pretty like no duh in some ways. But I think what's important about that distinction is it strips away all the other things that get in the way of us thinking, oh, well, this is an exception. This is a use case. Well, this is the hat that I'm wearing and this is the way that somebody in this role speaks. And then is that every. Everything boils down to the elemental components for the sender and receiver. And you mentioned the post, its analogy. And I thought that was if there's anything somebody takes away from the book as a mindset, which is that's that humility piece of it, which is it's your responsibility if you are the sender, if you are the marketer, if you are the viewer, the politician, the advocate, whatever. You have to carry the load of making sure that your message is heard because everybody else woke up today perfectly fine without hearing your, your spiel about hearing your stick about looking at your ad. Nobody woke up and said, you know what's on my to do list today I'm going to go click on an Instagram ad, I'm going to go watch this commercial, I'm going to go listen to this, you know, podcast, you know, mid roll ad. Nobody has those on their agenda. They woke up, they care about a lot of things. They care about their sports teams, they care about their families, they care about their favorite TV shows, whatever it is, but they don't care, you have to say, and having that humility and forcing yourself to do the heavy lifting of creating a message that's effective will on its own put you in a better place to be more effective in your communication.

Yeah, I absolutely loved the, you know, sometimes people talk about this, but in true, you know, the true nature of the book, there's so many little points where I was making notes of little like the, the one liners or the explanations in the, in your book that were so simply put that it made it really resonate in a clear way that you haven't necessarily heard other people say it. And I definitely love that that point and reminder that, you know, no one is waking up and saying, oh man, I can't wait to watch a commercial other than maybe for the Super Bowl.

Everyone's been against my will. Right. Yeah.

Right. I can't wait to accidentally click on the ad when I mean to click the X on this like and have to go get this stupid thing like and close out again from the app that I never ever wanted. So yeah, it's when you think about it in that way and it's beyond again that it's beyond just marketing. Right. There are other. It's the easy example and thing to kind of poke fun at because we all get stuck with those every single day. But there are so many things that people are not looking forward to hearing from you about. But it doesn't have to be all sad in that way and say that like nobody ever wants to hear from you. Right. When you do communicate in a good way. There are plenty of ads that we do like and there are things that we go by and we like to talk about and that we think are fun and interesting. And that is because, you know, that sender paid the postage.

Absolutely. There's something towards the end of the book where I talk about instrumentality and you know, that's. I use the old kind of like Betty Crocker cake mix story where the adding the egg makes it worthwhile because that feels like cooking, like I did the work for it, as opposed to just adding water. And that feels like cheating. Instrumentality says that, you know something, if I work hard for something, I value it more. And that. But the thing about it is that can all that can only pull. It can't push. If you're talking about something that is, again, like an advertisement, I'm using that as an example because most of what we're talking about is going to be in that universe if we're talking about, like an advertisement, a marketing message, a warning. These type of things have to be simple because people aren't going to pull for them. They're not going to be searching that out. They're going to have to be respectful of the small sliver of opportunity that you get in our crowded environment, right.

As we go to the kind of broader scope of the book. So people are now bought in like, okay, I know that it needs to be simple, and it's not quite that simple. So what makes a message simple and one that's going to cut through that clutter and resonate with people in a way that makes them excited to take an action? What should people focus on?

So I define simple as a message that is easily perceived, understood, and acted upon. And this all relates to the idea of fluency. And this is a word we all know. We can be fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin. We can be fluent in cooking or chess or wine. And where things are fluent, things are easy. It means that it flows. That's where the word comes from. And there's a whole host of research that looks at when things are easier to take from out in the world and stick into your head and make sense of them. We have a host of positive, positive associations with them. We're more likely to buy them, more likely to trust them, more likely to like them. And that's what we're looking for when we're talking about a simple message is it's more fluent. We want to optimize for fluency. And complication is the opposite. Complication is things that are harder for us to process, that take more sweat for us to make sense of those things. We're less likely to trust, we're less likely to buy, less likely to like. And when we look at the science for this, we look at the background of what makes something easier, what makes something simpler, and what makes something Not. I identify five principles that we go through kind of chapter by chapter, which are associated with these simple messages. And so I've mentioned a couple of them in our conversation already. But the first one is beneficial. What does it matter to the receiver? What's in it for them? What's. What do they get out of it focused? Are they trying to say one thing or multiple things at once? This is the Frankenstein idea. That's number two. Salient is number three. Does your message stand out from the crowd? Does it rise to your attention? Does it have contrast? Does it. Does it stick out? Number four is empathetic. Are you speaking in the language that the audience understands? And we talked a minute ago about the. But the real New Yorkers don't litter. That's a version of empathy there. And then the last one is minimal, which is, have you cut out everything you need that isn't important? It's about having everything you need, but only what you need. And the reason that one's at the end, which is you only know what is the everything you need not and the things you don't. When you get through looking at the.

Rest of the principles, definitely that's. I always try to give the advice of, like, what's the least amount that you need to say to get someone to take the action you want them to take? And then stop. That's it. You can have all of that additional information in context for when there are questions, which is why you did all that other work beforehand. Like you're saying, but if you have too much going on, it's impossible to really take. Take action. And so I think as we look and we could react, really, you know, focus. They're all such important concepts. And I love all of what you talk about throughout the book, but I think for people, what I find is the most difficult for them is kind of building on the, you know, Frankenstein. Frankenstein problem, but also in, like, not so not being focused enough. And that it's. Committing to an idea is better than trying to do too many things. And I will let you expand on it because I'm confident you will explain it better than I will. But I really liked what you said about that aspect in the book. I think that's really important for people.

If you are in the midst of a Frankenstein idea, if you see that monster kind of ambling towards you, it's almost always better for you to pick one piece and focus on that, even if it's not the strongest idea. That's like the dirty secret in marketing. A lot of times is if you go into a pitch and you have three ideas and you. And one of them's not that great, another one's okay, it's much better for you to. Instead of combining them together, to pull one out and say, okay, this is the one thing I'm actually going to go in on. The failure to commit is what leads to kind of the muddy grayness that you see in a lot of other messaging. Because it is that, you know, everybody has that incentive to add something in to, you know, cover their ass, to do whatever else it is that is. That makes up the. Those are the root causes of kind of that Frankenstein idea. And this will also. To add something else to it. This will manifest in your professional life as getting mediocre feedback on something. If you ever present work and somebody goes, well, you know, this one's okay, and this one's not that great, you know, like, we're kind of in between them all. That's actually much worse feedback than somebody saying, I really hate this. Because the distance between love and hate is a lot shorter than the distance between apathy and passion, right? And you can turn something that isn't exactly the perfect thing into the perfect thing with a little bit of nuance, a little bit of, you know, shoving around the edge, a little bit of commitment, and it will ultimately. It will ultimately be a better concept. A lot of times I think I referenced in the book, you know, when the Eiffel Tower was built, people didn't like it, Right. When, you know, the reviews of the time are very mean. And if you look now, it's the most photographed monument on the planet, Right? Same thing. Red Bull. When you. When you look at the taste test, at the time, everybody thought it tasted like some sort of horrible battery acid or something, but when you commit to something, people eventually tend to come around.

Yeah. And I think with that, too, it's like you're saying the ability when there are too many ideas, you get into that paradox of choice. And the problem. I know that I was just recently doing a keynote at a conference, and one of the speakers that was before me was talking about how back in the day, you know, when we went to Blockbuster, you know, it's like Friday night, you get to go to Blockbuster and go pick out a movie, and you want to get there right at the time, like, as early as you can, after school or whatever it is, because the new movie came out and you want to get the one that you want. And then you would get there, and it's always Just gone. It's the whole flat, you know, shelf. It's very sad. And you don't though, then leave and go, well, I guess we're not going to watch a movie this weekend, right? You go scrounge around and find something and you're, you know, you're happy with what you leave with because you. This is the movie you get, right? You get to get one or two, and that's what you're going to get. And you're going to be happy with the choice that you've made, even if the movie kind of meh. Like you still are happier with it, where now you have all the movies possible. When you look at all the different streaming systems and the things. And you could go through Netflix for a lifetime and, and say, oh, there's nothing to watch. There's nothing here because there's so many options for you. And kind of like. And then familiarity bias, right? We pick up the one that. The movie we've seen a million times or you rewatch Seinfeld or Friends or whatever your, your jam is Ted Lasso, you know, that you go watch the thing again that you've seen enough times. And, and so like you said that apathy is. Or just like, I guess I'll read my book or play my game or whatever. Whereas if there's something you're that excited about, you know, or there's. There are less options, you're more likely to rally behind the thing that you.

Have, you know, that's. That's my wife's least favorite activity is the clicking through Netflix and HBO and Amazon and Hulu and then going back to Netflix and going to. Starting at the top. She. She will actively, like, leave the room because she hates doing that as much. That. Yeah, absolutely.

Right. And it's, you know, I know my husband will be like, well, you've already seen that so many times, right? It's like. But I know I, I know I like it enough that I'll enjoy it and I just want something on in the background. It's like a distraction. It's okay if I'm not paying attention or whatever. It is kind of a funny thing that we do that. But like, we know as human actors in our lives that we do those things. And yet when it's time to communicate and put the information out, we just forget all of that, right? Like, you forget how you behave and how you like to be communicated to and the things that are gonna move you to do something and what you look at and instantly say, that is spam. Like, I'm out of here. I don't want anything to do with that. One of the messages that I thought was really interesting from the book was talking about the parking signage and the, I think it. So it's, I forget if it was just like clear and friendly or what the language was that you used with it, but can you share a little bit about this? Because I think this is an important point for people too.

This part was, I mean, so going back to New York, this was a, this is a local reference a little bit here. The simple works for many reasons and one of them is that it is kind. And I use the word kind in particular. There's kind and there's nice. Different people, they're different things. You can be both of them. But nice is the surface level. Nice is politeness. It is decorum. It is using pleasantries and smiling and making sure that everybody is happy and, and you kind of get out of the situation without anybody, you know, making too much of a ruckus. That's nice and that's fine. But what you really want is you want to be kind. Kind is when you care about the outcome, when you care about the well being of the receiver. When it's deeper, it is more substantial. And because it cares about, well, was it received and was it active on and is, did it, did it help you? That's what you are thinking about when you think about kind. And so the example that you referenced there was from a parking sign that was up here in New York City a few decades ago during the, the reign of Ed Koch, who was kind of gregarious mayor that we had. And the sign says, don't even think about parking here. Don't even think about parking here. It wasn't this Byzantine, you know, don't. No parking this day to this day and from this time to that time. Trucks only, yada, yada, yada. All that stuff is nice. But that sign is kind. That sign might not be nice, but it is kind. It gets the point across about, okay, you know what? This is not where I park, I go somewhere else. And there's very few signs that end up getting sequels. I went, got a sequel which was something like no stopping, no standing, no kidding, right? And both of those signs you can still buy souvenir replicas of which again, most parking signs you're not getting souvenirs of either. And they still hold up as an example of what's a kind message versus what's a nice message.

Definitely. And it's not all about the simplified messaging. But I know when you were talking about it in the book, what that got replaced with people like, no matter what you do, someone's going to read into what you say in a really malicious way and think that you're out to get them or to trick them, whether it's signage, right? And that's where you're able to make the claim. It's like, well, you made this confusing because you're trying to give me a ticket. That's the. The thing, right? So that got replaced, you know, some weirdly ambiguous language that had sort of a joke with it. I don't know if you remember exactly what the signs said since you wrote about it, but in a way that's like, yeah, that's really confusing, and I may park there and end up getting a ticket, and I would be upset about it. And so, like you said, that's the. The nice in trying to be, like, funny or. Or whatnot versus just like, hey, don't do this. Like, you can't do it. Don't do it. Don't even think about it is such a clean message. I. I was reading this section of the book while I was on a plane, and I always. I think it's so funny on my chosen airline that I fly all the time, who I love, but they have a message when you go to use the bathroom on the plane, and there's a sign, and it says, as a courtesy to the next passenger, may we suggest that you use your towel to wipe off the water basin? Thank you.

What does that even mean? What does that even mean? Right?

It's so someone was getting paid by.

The letter for that one. Right?

It's so unnecessarily verbose that it makes me laugh every time that I. I fly with them. But I actually took a picture of it this time because, like, I'm gonna mention this to Ben because it's such a ridiculous sign that shows why that clutter is just not helping. Because I'm, like, spending too much time reading it to actually do the thing.

Your eyes glaze over and you say, whatever. This isn't important. Right? It doesn't matter. I can move on with my day.

Yeah, not for me.

That's what we all want to do. We all want to just move on of our day for a lot of these things. And if we don't have a sign on the bathroom or a parking sign or a commercial that respects that, then we're setting ourselves up for failure.

Absolutely. Well, as I know, again, we could go forever. And talk about all of the things. Do you have one more example or story or point that you would love to share with the audience that's listening?

So on, on that same veins about, you know, something that is a bad example, which once you hear the right one, you go, oh my God, that's the right. Like this, this one totally worked. Yesterday I was at my dentist and this reminds me of a, of a piece that I have in the book there A few months ago or a couple of years ago at this point, I was at the dentist and my gums hurt and they were bleeding and you know, all sorts of bad stuff that happens to my teeth. And the, the dentist says, well, you only have to floss the teeth you want to keep. And I said, oh man, that's good. That's good. As opposed to somebody saying, you know, you used to floss to prevent plaque buildup below the gum line. That never works. That didn't. Okay, I cool. I get it. You know, I logically understand what those words mean, but that's not what I want to hear. That's not the language that I want to hear it in. But if you told me directly you only have to floss the teeth you want to keep. Well, you know what? I have flossed every single day since you told me that. And that, that's, that's the, one of the, one of the many powers of having a simple message.

Oh yeah, I know. When you said dentists, I knew exactly. Because I remembered this example from in the book because you do have that one in there. And it is just, it, it cuts through the clutter in a way that is so powerful. That's one other thing. Knowing I said that was the last thing. But one last point I think is really important as you talk about. You have to get through what is normal past the place where you feel comfortable to be able to break through and have the message be something that stands out and is then salient. I don't use the word. I think I mentioned this to you in our pre call chat a few weeks ago that like, I don't talk about saliency much on the podcast because I don't think it's a very salient term for most people, but I, I appreciate why it is a good word. And so with this, for it to stand out, for you to get it, for it to resonate, for it to stick with you, it has to be precise enough. It has to be, you know, going against the grain. It has to have the contrast. It has to be A different color. It has to be a different vibe. It has to be a different approach. It uses swear words on the COVID of a book instead of everything else that's more benign. And if everyone has podcast art with their headshot on it, yours shouldn't be be that. And if you know all these very clear, you have to understand what everyone else is doing in the ads and how that is different from what people are doing in their everyday life. And how do you kind of cut through that and really resonate with people? Such an important point. I feel like I've done all the talking, but I would love, if you have thoughts, to elaborate.

I mean, you nailed it, right? Like you, we only notice contrast. That is the only thing we see is the difference between one thing and another thing. Difference between figure and ground and. And salience is noticing that is the act of that contrast coming to our attention. And there are lots of examples in there. And you mentioned the one about the curse words on the book cover. Another one, this is a little bit less about messaging, but more about the form of messaging was, if we all remember the Super bowl in 2022, where we had the one ad that broke the Internet, that was the bouncing QR code for coinbase. And in a spectacle that's full of celebrities and loud music and color and humor and animals, all these different things, the screen in everybody's household went black for a few seconds and showed this bouncing QR code. And everybody pulls out their phone, they say, oh, my God, this is the one we talk about the next year. Everybody comes, you know, to their marketing agency and says, well, we gotta go do that. And there were like half a dozen ads that all featured QR codes of some. Of some sort, and nobody cared. And you mentioned the books, right? Like, at this point, I saw a study, looked into this. The swear words increased about 50% over the book titles over the short period of time. Now, when you look at a Barnes and Noble or Hudson Booksellers or your local independent bookstore, and you go to that self help section or that business section, they all say that. And so therefore, none of them matter. If there is no quiet, there can be no loud. You have to have the contrast to be able to notice something. And so you have to bring that tool to your messages to get something that people actually connect with.

Definitely, yeah. And I just talk about context constantly with my students and on the show and clients and everything is like, you have to know what exists to be able to see how you can stand out. Right. It's just so important and what resonates with your audience and everything. So I could keep asking you questions all day and I won't, except for this last one, which is for everyone who is now so excited to learn more about you and to connect and to get their copy of your book. You know, what's the best place for them to go do those things?

Best place to go is BenGutman.com Ben and that's Gutman. Two T's and two N's, which I know is not minimal. It has an extra N and an extra T as part of it. But BenGutman.gov you go there, you'll find a bunch of stuff, including a blog. You'll find a newsletter I send out every Tuesday, find links to the book, of course, and then you can go download the first chapter of the book on me. And so I invite you to do that and then connect with me on LinkedIn or find me somewhere else.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. We will of course link to your website and ways to connect with you and all that good stuff in the show notes. So thanks again, Ben, for chatting with me today. I look forward to many more in the future.

Likewise. Thanks, Melina.

Thank you again to Ben Gutman for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I had so much fun reading this book and I've really enjoyed the conversations I've had with Ben. He has so many great quotes and sound bites in the book, which you would expect from someone who wrote a book called Simply Put. So it really does live up to that name. Because of that, there were so many things in my notes that I didn't get to discuss with Ben today. One of the many other tips I wish we would have had time to talk about was an idea to help you get away from Frankenstein or the other Frankenstein ideas, which we did talk about a bit today. And that is to replace and with so so instead of saying we will do this and that, if you have to say so, it becomes very different and can point out where something is weird or off or not actually related. And going down that path toward a Frankenstein idea, Ben has an example in the book where he says we're going to create a loyalty program for our cafes and release a line of collectible coffee mugs because it's a complete and grammatically correct sentence. You don't have any big alarm bells go off. But as he continues, when you replace and with so you can see that something is wrong here. If you now say we're going to create a loyalty program for our cafes, so we'll release a line of collectible coffee mugs. It's weird. This very simple reframe can help you to see that you need to workshop that a bit to refine the idea and ensure it isn't a Frankenstein in disguise. The coffee mugs may be a good idea on their own, but they aren't exactly related to or enhancing the more important idea of the loyalty program. Replacing and with so made this more apparent. And this is just one example of the many gems of very actionable little pieces of advice throughout the book that can make a really big difference. Simply put, is a quick, easy read, but it is full of lots of little interesting tips and stories and studies and examples that keep you engaged and reading all the way through. It gives you lots of tips and insights you can begin to apply right away to make your communication easier for others to take action on and engage with. Hopefully you heard something in this conversation that you're already excited to go test or try or implement. Please do come share it with Ben and I on social media. You'll find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. And of course, you'll find those handles for me as well as for Ben within the show notes, along with links to related past episodes and books like Simply Put, Ways to Further connect with Ben, and a full timestamp summary of the episode. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com351 and thank you again to Ben Gutman for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.