Show, don’t tell

Are you familiar with the book Six Word Memoirs?  In it, famous and not-so-famous people capture the meaning of their lives in six words.  For example, Aimee Mann wrote, “Couldn’t cope, so I wrote songs.”  A young person recovering from a breakup wrote, “I still make coffee for two.”  These short lines stay with you and make you think in a way that a more elaborate description might not.

Behavioral scientist Richard Shotton is a great person for marketers and researchers to follow on Twitter. He posted this weekend about a bias called the generation effect.

The premise is that ideas are more powerful and memorable if you come up with them yourself.  It’s the very idea of co-creation – meaning is always a collaboration between the sender of the message and the receiver.  And, ideally, the receiver plays a large role in that partnership.

Shotton’s post, linked above, shows a Sainsbury’s billboard in the UK that replaces certain words with a bunch of bananas and makes you interpret the message yourself.  Also, for the last decade, The Economist has run a series of minimalist ads that really get you thinking (see above, for example.)

The best movies and most memorable TV shows do this, too – they leave a little to the imagination.  As do the best video ads. They don’t always tell you or show how you will feel as a result of using the product or service – but they invite you to tell that story to yourself. 

When assessing communication, this is something to keep in mind.  The message shouldn’t be so ambiguous that it is confusing, but it shouldn’t be so heavy-handed that it tells consumers what to think or how to feel.