We enjoy telling our clients, “Show, don’t tell,” when we suggest more effective ways of communicating their value. Now, how about, “Show while you’re telling?”
Creating pictures with words—what our grade-school language teachers called “imagery”—is one of the most powerful ways of making an impression. Just as with the picture or image you see only once, great verbal imagery is memorable, targeted, emphatic, and credible.
Look no further than those song lyrics that play in the background but stick in your head. John Legend croons about love, “My head’s under water but I’m breathing fine.” Bastille likens apathy and ignorance to an imaginary conversation in “Pompeii,” where “the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love.”
So how do you go about building word pictures into your leadership communications? Here are some pointers.
1. Change your viewpoint.
Identifying with your most important audience is not only essential for deepening connections and loyalty, it’s also bound to pay off in more effective, sticky messages. Nike doesn’t say a thing about the shoe when the company’s most effective slogan urges us “Just do it.” Taking the audience viewpoint is also pretty helpful in avoiding costly blunders that may inadvertently turn off or even offend your audience.
2. Switch up the nouns and verbs.
Play with your word choice, and use idioms when appropriate. Would you remember that a local tutoring service is “helping students do better in school,” or that they’re trying to “end class warfare?” Of course, discretion helps when you’re being clever. (See number one on this list about checking in with your audience first). Cautionary tale: the recent Diet Coke campaign “You’re On” that was yanked after social media mocked it as a reference to being on cocaine.
3. Use all your senses.
Here’s another instance where our colloquialisms are so loaded with sensual imagery (sure, the workday “stinks”); we just need to find a way to extend it into our business communications. We might have said that M&Ms are candy-coated chocolate, but they told us they “melt in your mouth, not in your hands.” And Verizon didn’t say much at all about the hardware when it asked, “Can you hear me now?”
4. Think in analogies.
We do it all the time anyway, and we do it so frequently that many become clichés. “out of the box,” “jump starts,” and “pitch perfect” are great examples of phrases that paint a lasting image so well, it’s hard to get through a business week without hearing them. So how about breaking free of those clichés and inventing some new turns of phrase? Think of successes like Dodge making it “Ram tough” and Chevy being “like a rock.”
5. Keep it simple and short.
Enough said.
6. Be subtle in your setup.
Paint the picture without telling us that’s what you’re doing. Nothing kills the dynamic pace of your speech or writing faster than the words, “Imagine if you will…”
Writing a speech? Go ahead and “put words in her mouth.” Creating a marketing blurb for your website? Try to “mine gold” from the blank page. The more we think in images, the more they’ll come naturally to us in conversation and in every method of communications that is so essential to growing our enterprises and their value.
