Speak to Be Understood: Ways to Communicate So Audiences Actually Listen

Struggling to communicate clearly and simply? Ben Guttmann, marketing and communications expert and author of Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win — and How to Design Them, shares the science behind crafting messages that connect.

Learn the 5 principles to bridge the gap between what audiences want - fluent, frictionless messaging - and what senders naturally create. Applying these concepts of beneficial, focused, salient, empathetic and minimal communication helps remove obstacles and emphasise what truly matters.

Discover the common mistakes businesses make by focusing on product features rather than real-life benefits. Ben stresses going straight to the source and asking real people for feedback to ensure your message resonates.

Follow Ben’s guidance on using AI as a supplement to craft more effective communications, not as a crutch. The key is understanding human needs don’t change even as technology evolves.

Book recommendations:
Influence by Robert Cialdini
Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy

Publish your book with Piilot AI
PIILOT combines advanced technology with human editorial teams to publish and promote your book.

LinkedIn Engagement using AI
Engage AI use AI to write insightful and relevant comments on LinkedIn™

Email Signatures Full of Brand Promise
Create Branded Email Signatures for All Employees in Few Minutes.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Jim James (00:00)
Hello, have you ever wondered whether you struggle to put things easily, simply, so that other people can understand what you're saying? In fact, I've just done it now. I haven't just said welcome. I haven't just simply put the welcome. So I'm struggling from the problem that my guest today, the author and lecturer, Ben Guttmann, has written a book on. Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Guttmann (00:27)
Thanks for having me, Jim. Great to be here.

Jim James (00:29)
Well, you know, I have intentionally made my introduction long-winded and complicated, and I have failed miserably because you've written a book, you're an entrepreneur turned author, and your book called Simply Put is gonna help people to understand how to communicate. And so on the conversation we're gonna have, you're gonna take us through the different, the five different elements that we need to include in our conversation and our communications.

And also tell us a number one mistake, a big mistake that you see most of us making, including me. So Ben from New York, welcome to The Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show.

Ben Guttmann (01:08)
Awesome. I'm excited to be here and excited to share everything.

Jim James (01:11)
Well, you know, I'm excited because I need help, right? And so many of us as entrepreneurs, we get distracted with work, messages, social media, staff, customers. How do you help people like me to focus and get our messages so that they can be clearly understood by our audiences?

Ben Guttmann (01:34)
Well, what you just said was something that is something you hear a lot, which is that we, we have a really hard time getting simple. And one thing I would see in my experience, I ran a marketing agency for 10 years. I sold it not too long ago. I teach at Baruch college here in New York city. I teach marketing. And I'm also just a user of the world, right? I'm a customer, I'm a voter, I'm a donor. And, and so when I would see in all of those different roles, I would see the same

problem come up again and again, which is that people who had great things that they wanted to share of the world Had a really hard time connecting with their audience in a way that mattered And so what I what I saw in the trenches as marketing agencies people would hire us for that type of problem But now that I have this kind of remove after being out of it for a little bit I the problem kind of step kept like ringing in my brain. It's that's what ultimately led me to write this book

Which is called 'Simply Put. Why Clear Messages Win -- and How to Design Them' And so this book... What I what I identified in the first half of  the book is this core problem, which is when we are on the receiving end of communication when we are You know again the listener the buyer the voter the donor We want things in a certain way But then when we're on the sending end of the equation, we really are pulled in the opposite direction

So what do I mean by that? The as a receiver, we want things that are fluent. And if you look at the you know, our own lives, we know the word fluent, right? You can be fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin, you can be fluent in wine or in your favorite, you know, TV show, whatever things are easy, they're fluent, right? It comes from the Latin word for flowing actually, which is kind of what it feels like. So if you ask a cognitive scientist about the word fluency, though, they're going to say,

It's a little bit different. It's about how easy is it for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in your brain and make sense of it. And the easier it is for you to do that, the less sweat, the less effort, those kinds of mental cycles. Well, you're more likely to like it, more likely to trust it. You're more likely to buy it. All the things that you want when you're communicating are positively affected by something being fluent. And on the flip side, if something is not fluent, something

you know, it's hard to hear hard to read hard to understand takes a lot of work. Well, we don't like it. We don't trust it and we don't buy it. All the things that we don't want. So we really want to be fluent and simple in how we communicate. If we want to get across the thing that's important to us. But the problem is when we are in the sending position, when we're there making an advertisement or just sending an email or proposal, we're really pulled in the opposite direction because in the inside of our heads, there's some forces that are

telling us kind of we have this additive bias, we want to add that subtract. And then outside of our heads and the environments we're in, all the incentives point to more, right? We want to have more lines in our resume and more, you know, stuff in the newspaper and, and there's not really evidence of absence, right? So that creates this chasm. And that is really the problem in most of our marketing and most of our communication. So we want things to be simple, we really hard time doing that we're in the sending role.

Jim James (04:54)
Isn't the challenge, Ben, that we don't know what to leave out, right? We struggle sometimes with putting in one thing because I've got so many more things to tell the customer about which might be important. Ben, how do you then help or how can we decide what's important and therefore reduce

and then know what to leave out or maybe to deliver it later. How do you help us with that then, Ben?

Ben Guttmann (05:28)
Oh yeah. I mean, so what you're talking about is something that's often, it's one of the biggest problems, which is people are unfocused a lot of times in their message. We have to understand that when we are communicating, we are opera, we, we think what we're talking about is very important and is a big deal to us. But for our user, for our receiver, it's not that important, right? We woke up today of a lot of things we care about and your ad for a new brand of shampoo was probably not one of them. Right? So we, we need to kind of

be humbled a little bit in how important it is that everything that we think is going into our communication. We also have to understand that everything we put in is a zero sum attention game. We only have 100% of the pie to give in terms of how much we care. And that's a pretty small pie when we look at how distracted most of us are in the modern media ecosystem. And every item we try to put in there, every time we add an additional point to it.

What we're doing is we're just we're distracting. We're taking away emphasis from the thing that is really important. And so, you know, this, this kind of leads me a little bit to the five, like solutions that we have for this problem. And I kind of hinted at one of them there a second ago. But when I looked around at the science, where I looked at the, you know, kind of the case studies and the history, I was able to identify five design principles that help us bridge that gap.

Jim James (06:53)
Okay.

Ben Guttmann (06:54)
And this isn't like a step-by-step plan. It's not like a rubric. But the better we can activate on each one of these things, the more effectively we're gonna start to kind of inch towards the receiver.

Jim James (07:07)
Okay, Ben, Ben Guttmann. So as the author of 'Simply Put, Why Clear Messages Win,' I have to ask you if you can help us to understand those five in the time that we've got, because obviously you've got a book and at the end of fact, you've got a link to download a chapter. So we'll be putting that obviously in the show notes and Ben will also tell us about the link to get the free chapter of the book. But tell us, Ben, so if we've got five different aspects of what we're thinking or

saying we're about to implement in terms of communication. Can you take us through, I guess that's one for each digit on the hand, isn't it?

Ben Guttmann (07:43)
Oh, yeah. And you know, it's funny, I joke about on the first page of the book, I say, it's a 208 page book about how to say things simply, it seems like I didn't take my own advice. Right. And so there's a surprisingly deep, you know, well of science and kind of know how behind each one of these things. And so, so yeah, you know, there's certainly, you know, there's a whole chapter, a whole bunch of tools for each one of these things. But quickly, I'll kind of outline what are these principles here.

Jim James (07:51)
Hehe

Ben Guttmann (08:11)
So the first one is beneficial. What does it matter to the receiver? You know, kind of features versus benefits, right? The thing you learn like 101 in sales is often the thing that's really forgotten the most, but you know, people don't want the thing they want what the thing does for them. The second one is focused. Are you trying to say one thing or multiple things at once? We talked about the kind of the zero sum attention game a second ago. The third one is salient.

Does your message stand out from the noise? Does it rise to your attention? Does it have contrast? Does it zig one of those zag? The only, we only notice what we notice, right? We, everything else kind of flies by and that's obviously not what we want. The fourth one is empathetic. Are you speaking in a language that the audience understands? Are you meeting them where they are? Both in terms of the little words, but also their motivations, their emotions.

That's what we're looking for with empathy. And then finally, it's minimal. Have you cut out everything that isn't important and left only what is? And when we talk about minimal, by the way, we're not talking about the fewest number of words or the fewest number of sentences or paragraphs or pages or slides. We are talking about the least amount of friction. And that's a really important distinction there. Sometimes that means more words or more pages, but we want to optimize for the ease,

not necessarily just the length when we talk about them.

Jim James (09:40)
Okay, just interesting topic there about friction because I know Apple's been considered perhaps the past master of producing the frictionless technology, right? You buy one phone, it transfers all the data to the new phone by scanning the hologram, for example. Right, so it's frictionless. From a communications point of view, Ben, just help us to understand what do you mean by frictionless?

Ben Guttmann (10:06)
Yeah, and so you mentioned a really good example there, which is what's the user experience? If you ask a user experience designer how to make something easy, they're gonna talk about friction. That's what we, you know, my background is in design. Excuse me. And that's what we work in. We put friction between us and things we don't want people to do. We remove friction between the things we want people to do. And you can see this.

Clear as day when you go into kind of an e-commerce situation a lot of times where the money is there Amazon has the one-click checkout. Have you ever had to log back into your Amazon account, right? Like it always works like you've never had to do them and it's very easy to click that button Your stuff has already saved there and bam-bam you're able to check out and be parted with you know You're $20 to go buy that book And so we remove the friction from that but if on the on the other side of the coin

If you go out and you say, I want to go cancel my gym membership. Well, there's a lot of friction that those companies put in the process, right? Because they don't want you to get there. They want you to be stopped along the way. So you have to prove that you're moving. You have to go into it, into the facility. You have to send them a letter, all these different things that are much harder than the process of giving them the money is, is what's required to stop paying them the money. And so when you translate that to messaging, when you say, well, every time we add

more kind of words or sentences that that, you know, start to become these like bumps in the road. There, there are reasons for us to pull off. It's reason for us to say, Well, you know, I don't really understand what that word is. And that was I'm getting bored here. I can't read that whole sentence. So many bullets on this. Every one of those things can be a reason for us to say, Hey, you know what, I have 1000s of other things that won my attention right now, if it's in my inbox, if it's if it's the bird chirping out the window, I have so many things

that mattered that are that are going to be more enjoyable for me to place my limited attention and I'm going to do that instead of kind of reading the thing that's you know a big slog here that's in your business proposal so if you want somebody to get where you want to go uh you have to remove the obstacles that are that are on the way to that journey

Jim James (12:20)
And so keeping, as you say, keeping everything simple, then reduces the friction because the recipient has less things to consider, maybe less options to review, less places to do research. Then can you give us maybe an example of a person or a brand that does manage to simply put their message out? There are a myriad of people and companies that

don't do it well, including myself, but what about some examples of good practice?

Ben Guttmann (12:54)
Yeah, I mean, so you mentioned Apple and Apple is a little bit of a cop out, right, because they're just so good at what they do. But if you look back about 20 years ago, before they had this kind of reputation for being this juggernaut that you know, can do no wrong in the consumer marketplace. They were struggling and they introduced a new product that was an mp3 player called the iPod. And they, they were not the first company to introduce an iPod. Sorry, an mp3 player.

But they were the first company to kind of get a lot of the pieces right together in a singular ecosystem. And they didn't go around talking about their MP3 player in the way that everybody else talked about it. Everybody else said, we have this many gigabytes, we have this, you know, we have this many, you know, pixels on our screen. It comes, it weighs this much. The battery lasts this long. That's what everybody else was talking about. But Apple goes ahead and they understand this important piece about benefits versus features. And they say it's

a thousand songs in your pocket. It's a thousand songs. I don't want, as the consumer, I don't want a certain number of megabytes or gigabytes or whatever it is. I want a thousand songs. That is tied, that's the benefit. The feature is the hard drive space. The benefit is that I get to listen to all of my music wherever I am. And so, based off of that one initial positioning for that product, the whole...

The whole category changed, the whole company changed, and the whole economy changed because of how successful they are.

Jim James (14:22)
So wonderful. So in your context of Simply Put, is it perhaps fair to say it's Simply Put in terms of the benefit that the recipient will receive from buying your goods or services, Ben? Is that one way that we could view the Simply Put that for all the features of, as you say, storage and technical specifications in that case, we have to think about what, in your terms,

you know, the beneficial argument, the salience, and the empathy is for the recipient of the message. Is that fair?

Ben Guttmann (14:59)
Yeah, I would say so that's really the first principle and I lied a little bit about it being not kind of You know a step-by-step thing Beneficials in the first spot for a reason it's because it is probably the most important one And it's probably the one that most people are going to freak out about or they're not supposed to forget about the one They're going to get wrong the most um You know, this is this is something I tell my students every semester and I say if you

only remember one thing from this entire class from this entire degree that you're getting if you remember this sentence It will it will you'll be ahead of most people in the in the marketing world or in the business world in general And it's not mine. It's from theater Levitt who's a 20th century marketing professor at Harvard He said People don't want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole People don't want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole. They don't want the thing,

they want what the thing does for them. They want how their life is better because of that product. And so many advertisements, so many product descriptions, they all talk about the drill, but they don't talk about the hole. The best advertisements like that Apple one, they talk about the hole. And actually, they go a little step further. They don't really want the hole. They want the picture on the wall, right? Or I want the family memories in the wall. And those are the kinds of things you're going to want to talk about. I'm not buying the drill.

I'm not buying the mint flavor of my toothpaste. I want fresh breath or I want to have a better date tonight or I want that. Yeah, that's what I want. I don't necessarily want the thing, but so much marketing, so many kind of product descriptions or websites or proposals, they talk about the thing instead of what it means because the thing is always visible. You know, the thing is always there. You can experience it. We were five senses, right? I can experience the

the mint flavor of my, you know, my taste, I can see the drill and it's, you know, and it's color and it's battery and feel the weight of its battery. All these things are very tangible, but the benefits are often removed and intangible. And unless you're in a position where you're, you're talking to customers and you're, you're thinking about it in terms of what things mean and how to get to a deeper level, it's very easy to kind of forget about the benefits and just focus on the features. And then you're just really selling yourself short.

Jim James (17:18)
Ben, I love that idea that, you know, people just want the whole, you know, or they just say they want the, actually, they don't want the fresh breath, they want other people not to think they've got halitosis, right? So, social acceptance. Can we just touch on AI? You know, I know it's sort of topical, and I know you're not right about AI in your book, but how can people use AI to complement the lessons in your book,

Ben Guttmann (17:27)
Yeah.

Jim James (17:46)
especially if they're working internally, it can be quite difficult to have an objective opinion, can't it, of your own messaging. Can you give us any guidance on how you're using AI or how we can use AI to be simply put?

Ben Guttmann (18:03)
Yeah, so the AI stuff is fascinating. ChatGPT came out right as I was finishing my first draft of the book. And so I put a couple references to kind of the, the dawning era of generative AI in the book, but it's not, this is not a book about AI. It's something a lot more kind of, you know, fundamental it's about humans, right? It's not like machines. The, uh, I have a relatively kind of not simple, like nuance taken on AI. Uh, number one is that,

Catch out of the bag. It exists. We can't we're not going back. There's no way for us to To live in a world where this type of tool doesn't exist anymore And to that end I tell my students by all means go ahead and use it and see how you can use it for good And if you use it for bad, it's gonna hurt you, you know, but I there are professors out there And I listen my business different teaching college seniors that are in a marketing class if I was teaching high school or middle school English teach a class

Jim James (18:50)
Yeah.

Ben Guttmann (19:02)
I would be absolutely much more worried and much more saying, hey, don't, don't go out and use this for your, your  means. For my means, it's about how do we use this for business and how do we make the world better through it? So that's one piece of it. Second piece is, uh, I think that AI as it is now is really good at kind of two parts of the, of the communications puzzle. It's not good at doing everything for you because actually you get stuff that's really not quote unquote, like simple. You get things that are a lot of fluff.

If you just ask it to say, give me 500 words about, you know, topic X, it's going to be like the eighth grader that wrote the book report that has to like, pad it out saying in my report, I'm going to talk about, you know, in, in it's, it's that type of copy that you're going to get out of it, which is really isn't great. It is really good if you're saying, Hey, give me a hundred possible like names for, you know, my blog, right? And it will give you a bunch of things that might kind of start kickstart something else in your brain.

Jim James (19:45)
I'm sorry.

Ben Guttmann (20:01)
Say, hey, you know, that's actually a pretty good name for my blog or for my newsletter or whatever it's going to be. Um, so that's, that's useful. On the other end of the, of the experience, going in and saying, I'm going to, you know, this is my text. I want it to be, you know, 20% shorter. That's really, that's where it really kind of excels right now is to say, I gave it the original material and I want it to help me optimize. I want to use it as a partner, not as the replacement.

That's currently a really effective tool. And to that end, I had a friend who, I was on his podcast recently, and he took the lessons from my book, he built a little custom GPT with it, and he used that to test his newsletter, to say, okay, well, I'm gonna write this newsletter and then by myself, and then I'm gonna use the AI to use simply puts lessons on the B version of the newsletter.

Turns out the B version of the newsletter had about 40% more click rate on it, which I was very encouraged by and I've been very happy to see that. So that's an example of how you can use this as a tool, but not a replacement for what you're doing.

Jim James (21:12)
I think that's really, really good advice. And thanks for sharing. Maybe you'll even let us see this extra custom ChatGPT for newsletter, sounds very, very useful. Ben, if there is a, if you like a mistake that you've seen people make sort of a common mistake that you can help correct us on, you've got your five elements. I understand that, but is there something that you see kind of people doing,

Ben Guttmann (21:21)
I'm sorry.

Jim James (21:41)
entrepreneurs doing when it comes to communication that you can help us to kind of stop today.

Ben Guttmann (21:48)
I think the biggest one is that people miss the features and benefits distinction, but I already talked about that So I'll give you another one When I talk about empathy I talked about kind of getting out of our bubbles and being an enlightened idiot, right? Welcoming the enlightened if somebody who's an outsider who can give you perspective on what on what it is that you're trying to say cuz we're in our own heads 100% of the time We're in our own teams and our groups a lot of the time

And so it's important for us to kind of break out of that and to talk to people. And that could be going and doing market research and a focus group and spending a lot of money doing that. And that can be the thing you need to do. Or it could be saying, Hey, let me just go like ask somebody that I know for their opinion on this, or does this resonate? You know, go stop somebody on the street, right? And do that. I've done that. I've, I've gone and, you know, stood on the concourse at Grand Central terminal and flagged people down, asking them, you know, research questions.

And you know, you offer them a little tote bag or gift card or something for that, right. But those are those are the type of things that you have to do if you want to, if you want to see something, you know, be successful, or do want to kind of ensure that what you're saying is effective. But I think that's the number one, it's also kind of a no duh thing, right. But it's also the thing that most people will ignore, most people will completely not do that because it's uncomfortable, it's awkward, I don't like doing it.

They might get feedback they don't want. Most people won't do it, but it is the kind of, it's maybe the most effective tool we have in our toolkit here about making sure that we're communicating effectively.

Jim James (23:21)
Yeah, so actually going out and asking people what they think of what we're going to release. As you say, it's a brave thing to do. But ultimately, it's a recurring theme on the show is that we've got to engage with our audiences and get out of our homes and our offices and our own heads, Ben, as you say, in order to find out whether what we're saying is simple and simply put or not. Ben, I'd like to ask learned from

Ben Guttmann (23:35)
Mm-hmm.

Jim James (23:49)
people like yourself, especially as you're a lecturer at university, is there a podcast or a book that you would recommend?

Ben Guttmann (23:57)
So I have lots of friends that have written great books. Well, I'll look, I'll pull some oldies that are actually really good. So as to not cause any turbulence. Two of them, I'll give you a recommendation. Number one is Influence by Robert Cialdini, who is a psychologist and kind of pioneer in the behavioral psychology space. That book is incredibly powerful. It's incredibly, I mean, influential as well as being called Influence.

And something actually I might try to model my book after in terms of it being science backed in terms of being optimistic and And that one I say is an incredibly important read for anybody looking to do marketing and the other one going back even further is Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy. I talk about this a lot when I talk to students or kind of when I mentor anybody is that You know, you can go out and buy a great book today that's gonna tell you all about you know

what TikTok's doing. But technology changes all the time. Humans don't change that often. We've pretty much been the same human for about 250,000 years. The things that were applicable in terms of how we made decisions 50, 60 years ago are kind of the same today. And yes, magazines are a different industry than TikTok is. And so some things are going to be a little bit silly when looked at through a modern context. But the general

foundations in a book like that, if they're still relevant today, you're probably still gonna be relevant 100 years from now.

Jim James (25:29)
Ben Goodman, yeah, Ogilvie, you know, obviously founder of Ogilvie, and maybe one of the champions of the industry. Ben Goodman, if people want to find out more about you, and also to get this download for this book, where can they go?

Ben Guttmann (25:41)
Yeah, I appreciate that. So you can go find me at BenGuttmann.com. There's two T's and two N's. It's not a very radio friendly name. So you got to put both of them in there if you want to find me. But if you go to BenGuttmann.com, you can grab a you can grab a free copy of the start of the book, a free PDF download of the first chapter. And you know, I encourage you to go grab do that. If you want to buy the book, it's Amazon barnsendale ball, different retailers there. And then I also I send a newsletter every Tuesday, I

welcome you to sign up for that. That's a free thing also. Then finally, if you wanna get in touch, send me an email, you know, my contact info's on the website or reach out on LinkedIn.

Jim James (26:21)
Simply put, Ben Goodman. Thank you for joining me on the show today.

Ben Guttmann (26:25)
Thanks for having me, James. This was a lot of fun.

Jim James (26:28)
Well, it's brilliant. And in this day and age where things do get complicated, it's great to have been remind us that we have to put things simply. And that's not always easy to do when we've got so many things in our minds. And often the more insecure we are, ironically enough about what we're doing, the more content we produce. So it takes a little bit of self-confidence to step back and think about what you're really doing and how you're really helping that client or you're helping them to get a

quarter inch hole, for example, in their wall. So really good advice. And if you don't know, then go and talk to people and ask them what they think about what you're saying. Actually, Ben's point about advice from people like David Ogilvy is some things are changing, but some things stay the same and that's human nature. Thank you for joining me, Jim James, your host on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. If you've enjoyed it, please do rate the show and share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur.

And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.