Break the guessing machine
- Thu, April 19 2012
- Filed under: Marketing essentials
In their wonderful book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Dan and Chip Heath talk about communicating in a way that breaks your audience members’ “guessing machines” by being counterintuitive.
I think that in so much of our communication, we make it easy for people to predict what we will say and how we will say it. We send people’s brains into autopilot. When we surprise people, we make them curious. We stop them in their tracks.
How can you offer extraordinary donor service or rewrite a tired old success story into something remarkable? Break your patterns. End your routines. Try something weird.
Seek to amaze, not daze, your supporters by breaking their guessing machines. They are weary of knowing your next move.
Comments
Made to Stick was such a great book. One of the big thing I took from it was the importance of breaking through the curse of the expert, or the curse of having so much info on a topic in your head that you lose the ability to connect with people outside your topic area. Highly recommended book!