So, I took a rigorous approach while enhancing and leveraging the paradigm. That’s how I maximized the solution.

Why does everybody talk like everybody else?

If everybody talks the same way it looks like everybody’s thinking the same way.

And we’re all flailing around in the same paradigm. Now paradigm is another word for model, but it has one more syllable, so some people think it’s more important and deeper and smarter, and if you use it, you sound more important, deeper and smarter. But, you miss a big opportunity because the most powerful and persuasive language expresses big ideas with small words. It’s original, clear, concrete and memorable.

And it separates you from the people who speak trendy talk.

Another problem with trendy language is that it can weaken your argument. What does “maximize” mean anyway? One dictionary definition is, “to make the most of.” My consulting clients want more than that. Most are in a competitive fight and they want to win, often against giant competitors. So, “making the most of something,” means nothing.

Don’t get lost in the clutter.

Even if you have a product or service that’s different, if you talk like everyone else, you lose your point of difference. While your product or service may be original, your language isn’t. And this messes up your ability to differentiate your brand and get the edge on your competition. Pick any cliché of the day: “unique,” “enhanced,” “paradigm shift,” “solution” – fill in the blank because that’s just a small sample. Buzzwords can render all businesses and products equal in your customers’ minds because you all sound the same.

Plus, the more you use trendy talk to try to sound smart, the more it sounds like you’re using trendy talk to try to sound smart.

Trendy language also gets in the way when you have a tough communications challenge because that’s when you need everything working for you.

See how Aetna used fresh language and shock value to get record-breaking results.

Masters of trendy talk.

Check out private schools, which are masterful at sounding like all other private schools. Your child can enhance her rigorous education and transform her world at the (fill in the blank) School. (Note: Nine out of 10 schools use these words, so now little Amy can get enhanced at just about any school, anywhere.) Or check out the websites of advertising agencies, and you’ll find loads of trendy talk. I don’t understand this. Advertising agencies should be the mother lode of original thinking and fresh language. Advertising agency people often complain that they can’t connect with their clients’ senior management. My partner, Leesa Lawson, tells them that they speak advertising speak, not management speak.

Advertising people say, “We’re full service. We offer total communications. We offer integrated communications. We satisfy all clients’ needs; we’re creative; we’re strategic; we get results, usually without defining what that means. Plus, we say ‘we’ a lot.”

Client management people say, “We want increased sales, improved profits, increased stock value, bigger share of market, competitive edge, customer understanding and to build brand equity.

They don’t speak the same language.

There's an answer.

Notice I didn't say “solution.” I vowed 15 years ago to never use that word again in advertising or in a sales presentation. It was already jargon. I prefer simple descriptive words, mostly one or two syllables. Save the many-syllable words for when nothing else means what you want to say.

Understand the language of your prospects, but filter out their jargon. The senior management language above is not jargon. “Bigger share of market” is concrete. It means in order to grow the business we’ll take it away from our competition.

Study the work of the best marketing people in the business. But, this may sound crazy, don’t stop there; break out and study the best writers in completely different lines of work, like the best fiction writers from the past. Think Hemingway and Steinbeck. They knew how to grab your attention and keep it.

Look at Steinbeck’s opening to Cannery Row:

Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood,

chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks,

restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries,

and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are,

as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody.

 

The language is concrete and visual and memorable. I read it decades ago and I still remember the opening. I also remember what struck me most: everyday words (a lot of them one syllable) combined with unexpected writing.

With trendy talk you get big words, small ideas or no ideas.

Try this simple test.

Subject your writing to this easy to use evaluation tool. It rewards direct, easy-to-understand language. And that’s the foundation for clear, powerful and persuasive writing. You can’t sell something if you confuse your readers or tucker them out with excess verbiage.

Don’t talk trendy talk. You’ll take a big step toward getting people to listen and understand and buy your point of view. That’s because you will be refreshingly clear.

And you won’t sound like a jargon machine.

Don Draper. Good in bed; bad on the job.

 Every time someone finds out I ran an advertising agency they ask the same question.

“Ever watch 'Mad Men'?"

I did watch it. Now, let me ask you a question. Did you ever watch "Mad Men"? If so, what do you think about that creative director, Don Draper?

Ever watch the way he treats his people? Think disdain, abuse and fear. They present their ideas; he trashes them, and then creates the thing himself. I don’t know what he needs them for, except to execute his ideas.

Draper is an interesting character, but a crappy creative director.

Sure, when I work as a creative consultant, my clients expect me to come up with ideas. They also expect me to give their people tools and processes that help them create their own ideas and make them work – ideas that will get attention, differentiate, persuade and move people.

Focus.

One tool writers and art directors need is a message focus, but it better be a focus they believe in, and it better ignite creative ideas. Contrary to what I believed when I started in this business, focus does not restrict people creatively. A focus they believe in frees them to be more creative because they don’t waste creative energy second-guessing what they're doing.

Sometimes my biggest job is to ask the right questions. That can lead to focus, a galvanized creative team, an unheard-of creative approach and exceptional results.

That’s what caused the Catholic Church to do something nobody ever thought they would do.

Here’s what I mean.

So, there you have it. The Catholic Church admitted that if you left them, it was their fault not yours. That’s how confession became a creative strategy.

And that's how our campaign led the country in results.

With all the talk about branding and strategic thinking, hardly anybody ever talks about creative strategy. They don’t now; they never did.

That’s too bad.

Creative strategy is one of the all-time greatest persuasion and focusing tools.

Creative strategies do wondrous things, like get people to believe what they don’t want to believe. The confession strategy did just that. Hey, the Church could have said, “Come on back we’re nice now.” But nobody would have bought it. Some examples of creative strategies are: demonstrate, document, compare, shock, create dissatisfaction. Or combine them. The Catholic Church admitting they were wrong was a demonstration. It also had shock value. And it got fallen-away Catholics to pay attention, open their minds and come back to church.

That’s the power of creative strategy.

Input. Not a data dump.

You must have the right information to create successful marketing communications. And, you must not have loads of irrelevant information. Often creative input looks like a book with everything you need to know except what you need to write the ad. I’ve seen creative people get mentally exhausted searching through pages of useless information.

It goes something like this. Read the 50-page research report. And, don’t forget the brand plan, and the 10 emails, and the conference call, and weren’t there some memos? Oh, yeah they’re in the black binder. Now where’s the black binder?

Focused input and a smart creative strategy are two of the most important and most overlooked tools of our trade.

They work, though. That’s why the Catholic Church campaign achieved what many people thought couldn’t happen: got angry dissolutioned Catholics to come back.

My clients want tools that enable their people to be their best creative selves, not an extension of me. They don’t want a creative consultant who has all the ideas.

They don’t want the creative director from "Mad Men."

How presenters think themselves into trouble.

Presenters usually fall into two groups.

One group doesn’t think enough.

The other thinks too much or, I should say, thinks too much about the wrong things.

And the more they think, the more they screw their heads up and drain energy from what they should think about. Like when the voice in their head says, “You’ve got to be an orator, an extrovert – sophisticated, eloquent, polished, and, oh yes, intellectual."

I know that voice. When I first started presenting it forced its way into my head – before, during and after every presentation.

What presenters should think about

What’s in the prospects’ heads? How can I get in their heads with them? Do they get what I’m saying? Am I addressing their needs? Am I making a human connection? Am I separating myself from my competition, or just making the same mistakes everybody else does?

Old rules and failure

Presentations create pressure. Then outmoded presentation rules take over presenters’ minds just when they need to focus on how to connect with their audiences.

The voice says you better not stammer; you’ll come off like a fool. Better not forget anything and have to go back; you’ll look disorganized.

Two of the best presenters I ever knew stammered.

I saw them doing competitive pitches, and they won. They won because they knew their audiences and what they needed to hear. That separated them from their competition. And, funny thing, the stammer worked for them. It felt like they were excited about what they were trying to say, and maybe their minds were running ahead of their ability to speak. It kept the audiences’ attention.

Bob Newhart, one of our best comedians, stammered. Some said he did it on purpose to build up to his punch line. Whatever the reason, it worked.

And yes, you can go back.

If you forget something important, go back. Just be honest and direct. You could say, “And I don’t want to forget this point because you said earlier … .” This way, you get to make a strong point you would otherwise lose. And it shows that you care and you listen.

Old rules versus winning presentations

Now, this was pure luck: when I ran an advertising agency we were showing samples of our work to a client prospect. They smiled and nodded, yes, at every thing we did. It seemed like a love fest. But, for some crazy reason, I said, “Are we showing you what you need to see to win your account?”

They said, “No.” They also stopped smiling.

They also said, “The work you do for your clients is creative, but it’s too much in your face. We’re a healthcare company; we need an agency that can do something more subtle.”

Who knew?

They never said anything like this in the meetings before the presentation. But we were in our office, so we asked for a short break, scrambled and gathered different creative samples, presented them and won the business. After that, I always stopped presentations to ask how we were doing.

Hardly anybody does that. Too bad because it works.

When people make a presentation to a group, things usually get formal and stiff, and somebody long ago must have made a crazy rule: you must not ask the group how it’s going. You must stay on script. Be confident. You present; they receive.

It’s a good way to lose.

I should know

When I started presenting I listened to that dumb voice in my head and made all the mistakes I’ve described in this blog. And I failed every time. It was so embarrassing I scheduled presentations to clients in northern rural Massachusetts in order to practice. I figured if I bombed, which I did, I’d never have to see them again.

It worked. I never saw them again. 

As a presentation consultant

My partner, Leesa Lawson, and I have now conducted new business workshops for over 120 companies worldwide. From the beginning, we noticed something we never expected. Before we started the workshops we always asked to see what they were currently doing. We were shocked, but the presentations were basically the same all over the world. Pittsburgh or London or Singapore — it was all the same. And what made them the same also made them irrelevant. Presenters talked themselves into things that made no sense, including a rigid obedience to old rules that made it impossible to make a human connection.

I call them old rules, but they were lousy even when they were new rules, and they’re downright dangerous today.

Now our prospects have more information buzzing around in their heads than ever in the history of the world. And, we have electronic presentations that allow us to put more words on the screen than anybody can absorb, and complicated visuals to confuse and bore people. We can even turn the lights down or off and wreck any possible human connection with our audience.

We need a better way to cut through all the stuff that's buzzing around in peoples' heads and make a connection with them.

So dump those old rules. Focus on your prospect and forget about you. You’ll do fine. You can be quiet, maybe even shy. You can be you whoever you are. Focus on your prospect; make a human connection and win.

Think about that.