The incredible message that sticks
The human being always wanted to talk more than to listen. A very smart guy that internet insists in calling Einstein or Gandhi said that “the biggest problem of communication is that we don’t listen to understand, we listen to answer”. Now, imagine it in this scenario of unlimited sharing and consumption of informations? How brands are acting in this scenario?
Everyone knows that brands are talking more and more, with the proliferation of channels and formats. It might be that they’re hearing more as well, with listening tools and constant researches, but still seems that the proportion listen vs. speak is not in a good balance.
Mantras brought by the evolution of internet, like “join the conversation”, “real time marketing” and “amplify”, are really important and make sense nowadays, but they have been taken too serious. And when you spend way more time speaking than listening or thinking, what happens? Lots of things. One of them is that messages can leave the head of who listens in a second and nobody remember anything that you said one minute after it. A person as bright as Einstein or Gandhi once said: the less you speak, more listened you are.
Thinking about this last sentence, plus the quote of the first paragraph and mixing with the possibility of brands going further in this scenario as I wrote in the second paragraph (you can take a little breath that the sentence was long), I came with a thought that seems to make good sense: you know those moments when someone speaks something in the middle of a conversation between other twelve thousand sentences and that only sentence sticks to your head? It can be for a few hours, days, months, sometimes for the rest of your life? The person doesn’t need to necessarily know you. Sometimes he or she does and knows exactly what to say. But you might just have met in the same day. A lot of times that person doesn’t even know that has created any impact in your life with what just said. Do you remember any message like that? You should have a few of them.
Let’s do an exercise: think about a sentence that has stuck to your mind like that? It could be told by a relative, friend, colleague, someone you barely knew, celebrity that you follow on social networks or even a brand that you admire.
[time to think]
No brand will say outstanding things like that on a daily basis. I say that because no brand is going to be a mother, husband or best friend (I can imagine that lots of sentences came from there). I’m also not saying that I necessarily have a solution, just a needful thought to be in the mind of everyone who works in brand building nowadays: listen more, speak less and better. And when you do, seek whit all your strengths that it has meaning, sticks in the head of consumers and doesn’t leave for a while. A month, a week, a day. Just like the sentence that you just remembered and I hope that i was able to do that with some message of this article.
*Image: Grandmaster Flash tells something that is never going to leave Shao's head, in "The Get Down".
