Knowledge can be a real curse! Many businesses may never realise this.
In fact, it is a major reason why so many businesses fail. Why, you may ask?
The answer – people lose perspective.
We need to recognise this communication barrier and use strategic copywriting to refine our brand communication.
I’ll break it down for you.
Customers are your students, and you should never confuse them
Think back to the school days. You are sitting in the classroom and you NEED to pass these exams (or so you’ve been told).
You know the score. If you don’t pass, mum and dad won’t be happy.
The last thing you need right now is a teacher who can’t teach. Someone who can’t see things at your level and can’t communicate with that in mind. It is a surprisingly common thing. This lack of perspective only confuses students.
Some teachers may take this the wrong way. Some may combat it with more knowledge, adding more fuel to the fire, a never-ending cycle of distance from their students.
Let’s look at what could be causing this problem…
Knowledge is necessity
Naturally, as you get older, there is the pressure to become a competent voice in the world. People are forever striving to achieve this for themselves.
In order to progress on this journey to competency, we rely on knowledge to get us there.
Unfortunately, once we know something, we find it hard to think what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has cursed us!
We can’t recreate our previous state of mind and so we create a communication barrier between ourselves and the ignorant.
So what do we do? Do we unlearn it to then teach it? But we won’t know anything!
The cure to the curse
There are only two ways that you can fight off this curse of knowledge.
One way is just to never learn anything (not the ideal option but it could be nice for a couple days). The second option, and far better, would be to take your knowledge and transform it.
Transforming what you know so it is palatable to the people who don’t know.
By doing this, you become that rare teacher who can read the room, regardless of who you are speaking to!
Let’s have a look at how we do this at Editing Edge for our clients …
We can:
- Strip sentences down to their essence, leaving nothing superfluous, relentlessly prioritising each word – everything will become profound and clear.
- Tone down vocabulary – using simple words and phrases.
- Appeal to the senses. By making people feel something, they will care about what you’re saying.
- Keep people alert by surprising them. By breaking their pattern, you open knowledge gaps for them to want to fill.
- Use visuals and other examples to help spoon feed your ideas.
- Forget the abstract – be specific and concrete. This is comforting to people.
- Use stories to express ideas. All stories have a beginning, middle and end, providing the idea with a structure. This will make it harder for the curse to creep its way in! Plus we all love a story.
This blog is a starting point towards improving your brand communication strategy. If you would like more guidance on how to frame your message, we are just a phone call away.
We wish you a Happy New Year!
