Whether you’re a teacher, parent, or entrepreneur, you want to be able to persuade your students, children, and customers with your messages. That’s a tall task in the modern age, when people are bombarded with 13 hours of media a day. How do you cut through all that noise to make sure you’re heard? My guest would say it’s all about keeping things simple.
Ben Guttmann is a marketing educator and consultant who’s helped promote everything from the NFL to New York Times-bestselling authors. He is himself the author of Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win—and How to Design Them. Today on the show, Ben explains the gap between how people like to receive messages and the self-sabotaging, complication-introducing ways people tend to send them. We then talk about the five factors of effective marketing that anyone can use to close this gap and craft simple, effective, influential messages. We discuss why you should highlight something’s benefits rather than its features, the question to ask to figure out what those benefits are, how to replace “and” with “so” to create more focused messages, how the fad of using the F-word in book titles shows the transience of salience, how to make your message minimal by imagining it as a Jenga tower and how minimal isn’t the same thing as short, and much more, including Ben’s most immediately actionable tip for crafting better, simpler messages.
Resources Related to the PodcastOne Man's Impossible Quest — To Make Friends in Adulthood
Why Are We Restless?
The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini
The No-Nonsense Guide to Simplifying Every Aspect of Your Life
The Secrets of Public Speaking From History's Greatest Orators
Social Psychology Won't Save Us
Forging Mental Strength Through Physical Strength
Theodore Roosevelt, The Last Romantic
Sisu, the Finnish Art of Strength
The Fascinating Secrets of Your Voice
Why Is It So Hard to Admit You Were Wrong?
The Two Halves of the Warrior's Life
What You Can (Really) Learn About Exercise from Your Human Ancestors
The Life Philosophy of Bruce Lee
Email Is Making Us Miserable — Here's What to Do About It
Protection for and from Humanity
How to Get a Handle on the Voice in Your Head
The Psychology of Boredom
How to Decide
Help for Those Stuck Between Boyhood and Manhood
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Renewing Your Mind with R.C. Sproul