Speak to Be Understood: Ways to Communicate So Audiences Actually Listen

Hello. Have you ever wondered whether you struggle to put things easily simply so that other people can understand what you're saying? In fact, I've just done it now. I haven't just said welcome. I haven't just simply put the welcome. So I'm struggling from the problem that my guest today, the author and lecturer Ben Gutman, has written a book on. Ben, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Jim. Great to be here.

Well, you know, I have intentionally made my introduction long winded and complicated, and I have failed miserably because you've written a book, you're an entrepreneur turned author, and your book called Simply Put is going to help people to understand how to communicate. And so on the conversation we're going to have, you're going to take us through the different. The five different elements that we need to include in our conversation and our communications and also tell us a number one mistake, a big mistake that you see most of us making, including me. So, Ben from New York, welcome to the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show.

Awesome. I'm excited to be here and excited to share everything.

Well, you know, I'm excited because I need help, right? And so many of us as entrepreneurs, we get distracted with work messages, social media, staff, customers. How do you help people like me to focus and get our messages so that they can be clearly understood by our audiences?

Well, what you just said was something that is something you hear a lot, which is that we have a really hard time getting simple. And one thing I would see in my experience, I ran a marketing agency for 10 years. I sold it not too long ago. I teach at Baruch College here in New York City. I teach marketing. And I've also just a user of the world, right? I'm a customer, I'm a voter, I'm a donor. And. And so when I would see in all of those different roles, I would see the same problem come up again and again, which is that people who had great things that they wanted to share of the world had a really hard time connecting with their audience in a way that mattered. And so what I. What I saw in the trenches as marketing agencies, people would hire us for that type of problem. But now that I have this kind of remove after, after being out of it for a little bit, I. The problem kind of kept ringing in my brain. And that's what ultimately led me to write this book, which is called, simply put, why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them. And so this book, what I identified in the first half of the book is this core problem, which Is when we are on the receiving end of communication, when we are again the listener, the buyer, the voter, the donor. We want things in a certain way, but then when we're on the sending end of the equation, we really are pulled in the opposite direction. So what do I mean by that? As a receiver, we want things that are fluent. And if you look at our own lives, we know the word fluent, right? You can be fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin, you can be fluent in wine or in your favorite TV show, whatever. Things are easy. They're fluent, right? It comes from the Latin word for flowing, actually, which is kind of what it feels like. So if you ask a cognitive scientist about the word fluency, though, they're going to say it's a little bit different. It's about how easy is it for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in your brain and make sense of it. And the easier it is for you to do that, the less sweat, the less effort. Those kind of mental cycles, well, you're more likely to like it, more likely to trust it, you're more likely to buy it. All the things that you want when you're communicating are positively affected by something being fluent. And on the flip side, if something is not fluent, something is hard to hear, hard to read, hard to understand, takes a lot of work. Well, we don't like it, we don't trust it, and we don't buy it, all the things that we don't want. So we really want to be fluent and simple in how we communicate if we want to get across the thing that's important to us. But the problem is when we are in the sending position, when we're there making an advertisement or just sending an email or proposal, we're really pulled in the opposite direction because inside of our heads, there's some forces that are telling us kind of we have this additive bias we want to add instead of subtract. And then outside of our heads and the environments we're in, all the incentives point to more, right? We want to have more lines in our resume and more stuff in the newspaper, and there's not really evidence of absence, right? So that creates this chasm. And that is really the problem in most of our marketing and most of our communication is that we want things to be simple. We have really hard time doing that when we're in the sending role.

Isn't the challenge, Ben, that we don't know what to leave out? Right. We struggle sometimes with putting in one thing because I've got So many more things to tell the customer about which might be important. Ben, how do you then help or how can we decide what's important and therefore reduce and then know what to leave out or maybe to deliver it later? How do you help us with that then, Ben?

Oh, yeah, I mean, so what you're talking about is something that's often, it's one of the biggest problems, which is people are unfocused a lot of times in their message. We have to understand that when we are communicating, we think what we're talking about is very important and is a big deal to us, but for our user, for our receiver, it's not that important. Right. We woke up today of a lot of things we care about and your ad for a new brand of shampoo was probably not one of them. Right. So we need to kind of be humbled a little bit in how important it is that everything that we think is going into our communication, we also have to understand that everything we put in is a zero sum attention game. Right. We only have 100% of the pie to give in terms of how much we care. And that's a pretty small pie when we look at how distracted most of us are in the modern kind of media ecosystem. And every item we try to put in there, every time we add an additional point to it, what we're doing is we're just, we're distracting, we're taking away emphasis from the thing that is really important. And so, you know, this, this kind of leads me a little bit to the five solutions that we have for this problem. And I kind of hinted at one of them there a second ago. But when I looked around at the science, when I looked at the, you know, kind of the case studies and the history, I was able to identify five design principles that help us bridge that gap. And this, this isn't like a step by step plan, it's not like a rubric. But the better we can activate on each one of these things, the more effectively we're going to start to kind of inch towards the, the receiver.

Okay, Ben. Ben Gutman. So as the author of Simply Put why Clear Messages Win, I have to ask if you can help us to understand those five in the time that we've got. Because obviously you've got a book and at the end, in fact you've got a link to download a chapter. So we'll be putting that obviously in the show notes and Ben will also tell us about the link to get the free chapter of the book. But tell us Ben. So if we've got five different aspects of what we're thinking or saying we're about to implement in terms of communication, can you take us through? I guess that's one for each, each digit on the hand, isn't it?

Oh yeah. And you know, it's funny, I joke about on the first page of the book, I say, you know, it's a 208 page book about how to say things. Simply, it seems like I didn't take my own advice. Right. And so there's a surprisingly deep, you know, well of science and kind of know how behind each one of these things. And so, so yeah, you know, there's certainly, you know, there's a whole chapter, a whole bunch of tools for each one of these things. But quickly, I'll, I'll kind of outline what are these principles here. So the first one is beneficial. What does it matter to the receiver? You know, kind of features versus benefits. Right. The thing you learn like 101 in sales is, is often the thing that's really forgotten the most. But you know, people don't want the thing. They want what the thing does for them. The second one is focused. Are you trying to say one thing or multiple things at once? We talked about kind of the zero sum attention game a second ago. The third one is salient. Does your message stand out from the noise? Does it rise to your attention? Does it have contrast? Does it zig one another zag? We only notice what we notice. Everything else kind of flies by and that's obviously not what we want. The fourth one is empathetic. Are you speaking in a language that the audience understands? Are you meeting them where they are both in terms of the little words, but also their motivations, their emotions? That's what we're looking for of empathy. And then finally it's minimal. Have you cut out everything that isn't important and left only what is? And when we talk about minimal, by the way, we're not talking about the fewest number of words or the fewest number of sentences or paragraphs or pages or slides. We are talking about the least amount of friction. And that's a really important distinction there. Sometimes that means more words or more or more pages, but we want to optimize for the ease, not necessarily just the length. When we talk about minimal.

Okay, just interesting topic there about friction because I know Apple's been considered perhaps the past master of producing the frictionless technology. Right? You know, you buy one phone, it transfers all the data to the new phone by scanning the hologram, for example. Right. So it's frictionless from a communications point of view. Ben, just help us to understand what you mean by frictionless.

Yeah. And so you mentioned a really good example there, which is, what's the user experience? If you ask a user experience designer how to make something easy, they're going to talk about friction. That's what we, you know, my background is in design, excuse me. And that's, that's what we work in. We put friction between, you know, us and things we don't want people to do. We remove friction between the things we want people to do. And you can see this clear as day when you go into kind of an E commerce situation, a lot of times where the money's there, Amazon has the one click checkout. Have you ever had to log back into your Amazon account? Right. Like it always works, like you've never had to do. And it's very easy to click that button. Your stuff is already saved there, and bam, bam, you're able to check out and be parted with your $20 to go buy that book. And so we remove the friction from that. But on the other side of the coin, if you go out and you say, I want to go cancel my gym membership, well, there's a lot of friction that those companies put in the process. Right? Because they don't want you to get there. They want you to be stopped along the way. So you have to prove that you're moving. You have to go into a, into the facility. You have to send them a letter. All these different things that are much harder than the process of giving them the money is what's required to stop paying them the money. And so when you translate that to messaging, we say, well, every time we add more kind of words or sentences that start to become these bumps in the road, they're a reason for us to pull off. It's a reason for us to say, well, I don't really understand what that word is. I'm getting bored here. I can't read that whole sentence. There's too many bullets on this. Every one of those things can be a reason for us to say, hey, you know what? I have thousands of other things that want my attention right now. If it's in my inbox, if it's, if it's the bird chirping out the window. I have so many things that matter that, that are, that are going to be more enjoyable for me to place my limited attention. And I'm going to do that instead of kind of reading the Thing that's, you know, a big slog here that's in your business proposal. So if you want somebody to get where you want to go, you have to remove the obstacles that are on the way to that journey.

And so keeping, as you say, keeping everything simple, then reduces the friction because the recipient has less things to consider, maybe less options to review, less places to do research. Then can you give us maybe an example of a person or a brand that does manage to simply put their message? There are a myriad of people and companies that don't do it well, including myself. But what about some examples of good practice?

Yeah, I mean, so you mentioned Apple, and Apple's a little bit of a cop out, right? Because they're just so good at what they do. But if you look back about 20 years ago, before they had this kind of reputation for being this juggernaut that, you know, can, can do no wrong in the consumer marketplace, they were struggling and they introduced a new product that was an MP3 player called the ipod. And they, they were not the first company to introduce an ipod, sorry, an MP3 player, but they were the first company to kind of get a lot of the pieces right together in a singular ecosystem. And they didn't go around Talking about their MP3 player in the way that everybody else talked about it. Everybody else said, we have this many gigabytes, we have this, you know, we have this many, you know, pixels on our screen. It comes, it weighs this much, the battery lasts this long. That's what everybody else was talking about. But Apple goes ahead and they understand this important piece about benefits versus features. And they say, it's a thousand songs in your pocket. It's a thousand songs. I don't want, as the consumer, I don't want a certain number of megabytes or gigabytes or whatever it is. I want a thousand songs that is tied. That's the benefit. The feature is the hard drive space. The benefit is that I get to listen to all of my music wherever I am. And so that based off of that one initial positioning for that product, the whole category change, the whole company changed and that's the whole economy changed because of how successful they are.

So wonderful. So in your context, as simply put, is it perhaps fair to say, simply put, in terms of the benefit that the recipient will receive from buying your goods or services? Ben, is that one way that we could view the. Simply put, that for all the features of, as you say, storage and technical specifications, in that case, we have to think about what, in your terms, the beneficial argument, the salience, than the empathy is for the recipient of the, of the message. Is that fair?

Yeah, I would say. I mean, so that's, that's really the first principle. And I lied a little bit about it being not kind of, you know, a step by step thing. Beneficial is in the first spot for a reason. It's because it is probably the most important one and it's probably the one that most people are going to forget about or they're, or not so much to forget about the one they're going to get wrong the most. You know, this is something I tell my students every semester. And I say if you only remember one thing from this entire class, from this entire degree that you're getting, if you remember this sentence, you'll be ahead of most people in the marketing world or in the business world in general. And it's not mine. It's from Theodore Levitt, who's a 20th century marketing professor at Harvard. He said, people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. People don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. They don't want the thing. They want what the thing does for them. They want how their life is better because of that product. And so many advertisements, so many product descriptions. They all talk about the drill, but they don't talk about the hole. The best advertisements, like that apple one, they talk about the hole. And actually they go a little a step further. They don't really want the hole. They want the picture on the wall, right? Or I want the family memories on the wall. And those are the kind of things you're going to want to talk about. I'm not buying the drill. I'm not buying the mint flavor of my toothpaste. I want fresh breath or I want to have a better date tonight or I want that, that's what I want. I don't necessarily want the thing. But so much marketing, so many kind of product descriptions or websites or proposals, they talk about the thing instead of what it means because the thing is always visible. You know, the thing is always there. You can experience it with your five senses, right? I can experience the mint flavor of my, you know, my taste. I can see the drill and it's, you know, and its color and its battery and feel the weight of its battery. All these things are very tangible, but the benefits are often removed and intangible. And unless you're in a position where you're, you're, you're talking to customers and you're you're thinking about it in terms of what things mean and how to get to a deeper level. It's very easy to kind of forget about the benefits and just focus on the features and then you're just really selling yourself short.

Ben I love that idea that, you know, people just want the whole, you know, or they just, as you say, they want. Actually they don't want the fresh breath. They want other people not to think they've got halitosis. Right. So social acceptance. Can we just touch on AI? You know, I know it's sort of topical and I know you're not writing about AI in your book, but how can people use AI to complement the lessons in your book, especially if they're working, you know, internally? You know, it can be quite difficult to have an objective opinion, can't it, of your own messaging. Can you give us any guidance on how you're using AI or how we can use AI to. Simply put.

Yeah. So the AI stuff is fascinating. ChatGPT came out right as I was finishing my first draft of the book. And so I put a couple references to kind of the dawning era of generative AI in the book. But it's not, this is not a book about AI. It's something a lot more kind of fundamental. It's about humans. Right? It's not about. I have a relatively kind of not simple, like nuanced take on AI. Number one is that cat's out of the bag. It exists. We can't, we're not going back. There's no way for us to live in a world where this type of tool doesn't exist anymore. And to that end, I tell my students, by all means, go ahead and use it and see how you can use it for good. And if you use it for bad, it's going to hurt you. But there are professors out there and my position is different. I'm teaching college seniors that are in a marketing class. If I was teaching high school or middle school English teach class, I would be absolutely much more worried and much more saying, hey, don't go out and use this for your means. For my means. It's about how do we use this for business and how do we make the world better through it. That's one piece of it. Second piece is I think that AI as it is now is really good at two parts of the brain of the communications puzzle. It's not good at doing everything for you because actually you get stuff that's really not quote unquote, like simple. You get things that are a lot of fluff. If you just ask it to say, give me 500 words about topic X, it's going to be like the 8th grader that wrote the book report that has to pad it out saying, in my report I'm going to talk about and it's that type of copy that you're going to get out of it, which really isn't great. It is really good. If you're saying, hey, give me 100 possible names for my blog and it will give you a bunch of things that might kick start something else in your brain. Say, hey, that's actually a pretty good name for my blog or for my newsletter or whatever it's going to be. So that's useful. On the other end of the experience, going in and saying, I'm going to, you know, this is my text, I want it to be, you know, 20% shorter. That's really, that's where it really kind of excels right now is to say I gave it the original material and I want it to help me optimize. I want to use it as a partner, not as the replacement. That's currently a really effective tool. And to that end, I had a friend who I was on his podcast recently and he took the lessons from my book. He built a little custom GPT with it and he used that to test his, you know, his newsletter to say, okay, well I'm going to write this newsletter and by myself and then I'm going to use the AI to use, you know, simply put lessons on the B version of the newsletter. Turns out the B version of the newsletter had about 40% more click Rate on it, which was, I was very encouraged by and I've been, you know, very happy to see that. So that's an example of how you can use this as a tool and, but not a replacement for what you're doing.

I think that's really, really good advice and thanks for sharing. Maybe you'll, you'll even let us see this extra custom chat GPT for newsletter. Sounds very, very useful. Then if there is a, if you like a mistake that you've seen people make, sort of a common mistake that you can help correct us on. You've got your five elements, I understand that. But is there something that you see kind of people doing, entrepreneurs doing when it comes to communication that you can help us to kind of stop today?

Well, I think the biggest one is that people miss the features and benefits distinction. But I already talked about that, so I'll give you another one. When I talk about empathy. I talk about kind of getting out of our bubbles and being an enlightened idiot. Welcoming the enlightening of somebody who's an outsider who can give you perspective on what. On what it is that you're trying to say. Because we're in our own heads 100% of the time. We're in our own teams and our groups a lot of the time. And so it's important for us to kind of break out of that and to talk to people. And that could be going and doing market research and a focus group and spending a lot of money doing that. And that can be the thing you need to do. Or it could be saying, hey, let me just go, like, ask somebody that I know for their opinion on this. Or does this resonate. Go stop somebody on the street. Right. And do that. I've done that. I've gone and stood on the concourse at Grand Central Terminal and flagged people down, asking them research questions. And you offer them a little tote bag or gift card or something for that. Right. But those are the type of things that you have to do if you want to see something be successful. Or do you want to ensure that what you're saying is effective. But I think that's the number one. It's also. It's kind of a no duh thing. Right. But it's also the thing that most people will ignore. Most people will completely not do that because it's uncomfortable, it's awkward. They don't like doing it. They might get feedback they don't want. Most people won't do it. But it is the kind of, maybe the most effective tool we have in our. In our toolkit here about making sure that we're communicating effectively.

Yeah. So actually going out and asking people what they think of what going to release, as you say, it's a brave thing to do. But ultimately it's A recurring theme on the show is that we've got to engage with our audiences and get out of our homes and our offices and our own heads. Ben, as you say, in order to find out whether what we're saying is simple and simply put or not. Ben, I like to ask learned people like yourself, especially as you're a lecturer at university, is there a podcast or a book that you would recommend?

So I have lots of friends that have written great books. Well, I'll pull some oldies that are actually really good so as to not cause any turbulence. Two of them. I'll give you a recommendation. Number one is Influence by Robert Cialdini. Who is a psychologist and kind of pioneer in the behavioral psychology space. That book is incredibly powerful. It's incredibly, I mean, influential as well as being called influence. And it's something actually I try to model my book after in terms of it being science backed, in terms of being optimistic. And that one I say is an incredibly important read for anybody looking to do marketing. And the other one, going back even further is Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy. I talk about this a lot when, when I talk to students or kind of when I mentor anybody, is that, you know, you can go out and buy a great book today that's going to tell you all about, you know, what TikTok's doing. But human technology changes all the time. Humans don't change that often. You know, we've pretty much been the same human for about, you know, 250,000 years. The things that were applicable in terms of how we made decisions 50, 60 years ago are kind of the same today. And yes, you know, magazines are a different industry than TikTok is. And so some things are going to be a little bit, you know, a little bit silly when looked at through a modern context. But the general foundations in a book like that, if they're still relevant today, are probably still going to be relevant a hundred years from now.

Ben Goodman. Yeah, Ogilvy, obviously founder of Ogilvy and maybe one of the champions of the industry, Ben Gutman, if people want to find out more about you and also to get this download for this book, where can they go?

Yeah, I appreciate that. So you can go find me@bengutman.com there's two T's and two N's. It's not a very radio friendly name so you got to put both of them in there if you want to find me. But if you go to bengutman.com you can grab a free copy of the start of the book, a free PDF download of the first chapter. And I encourage you to go grab and do that if you want to buy the book, it's Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all the different retailers there. And then also I send a newsletter every Tuesday. I welcome you to sign up for that. That's a free thing also. Then finally, if you want to get in touch, send me an email, my contact info's on the website or reach out on LinkedIn.

Simply put, Ben Goodman, thank you for joining me on the show today.

Thanks for having me, Jim. This was a lot of fun.

Well, it's brilliant. And in this day and age where things do get complicated. It's great to have Ben remind us that we have to put things simply. And that's not always easy to do when we've got so many things in our minds. And often the more insecure we are, ironically enough, about what we're doing, the more content we produce. So it takes a little bit of self confidence to step back and think about what you're really doing and how you're really helping that client. Are you helping them to get a quarter inch hole, for example, in their wall? So really good advice. And if you don't know, then go and talk to people and ask them what they think about what you're saying. Actually, Ben's point about advice from people like David Ogilvy is some things are changing, but some things stay the same. And that's human nature. Thank you for joining me, Jim James, your host on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. If you've enjoyed it, please do rate the show and share it with a fellow Unnoticed Entrepreneur. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.