Researchers in experiential marketing have found that, the more audiences enjoy their experience of communications about a product or service, the more positive is their regard for that product or service. I have figured out many of the characteristics and components of communications that people enjoy.

People enjoy messages that convey a sense of action. A sense of action propels people through a story. They stay engaged all the way to the end.

People enjoy hearing about cause-and-effect relationships. They enjoy gaining understandings in which identifiable players are associated with and responsible for identifiable actions. Making it easy for people to understand cause-and-effect relationships and showing them who’s responsible for what wins their trust and confidence.

People enjoy learning. Learning is pleasurable. People especially enjoy the experience when they quickly and easily come to understand new concepts and ways of thinking.

People enjoy insights. They enjoy humor that offers insight into their predicaments. They enjoy hearing insights couched in the language of gossip.

People enjoy slight simplifications and exaggerations. The writing mantra of The Economist is: “Simplify. Then exaggerate.”

To see an example of an exaggeration couched in the language of gossip, open the communiqué to investors that I wrote for a hedge-fund fund of funds in the fall of 2008. It sought to reorient hedge-fund investors from their losses in 2008 to the potential opportunities of 2009.

The communiqué recounts the carnage in the financial markets. It then turns the emotional tide with an exaggeration couched in the language of gossip, “Surgeons have a saying: ‘All bleeding stops eventually.’” As I imagined one of my client’s investors reading this sentence, I saw a smile come to his face. I saw his breathing change. If he reacted in these ways, then we were well on our way to reorienting him from his losses in 2008 to the opportunities of 2009.

People enjoy powerful communications. The most powerful communications grow out of relationships. You and your colleagues have different relationships with current and potential investors, clients and customers, intermediaries, regulators, voters and members of Congress.

To shape communications to these constituencies, I would draw upon the special insights, expertise and perspective that your relationships with them give you. I would ask you and your colleagues to think about the behavior or change in behavior you would like to see in the context of each relationship. I would use my writing and design skills to make those changes happen.

For communications to move people, we have to get the tone exactly right. We have to get right the three attitudes that determine tone:
your attitude toward the subject matter,
your attitude toward your audience and
your attitude toward yourself.

For presentations to investors, toward the subject matter, I like an attitude of intellectual rigor tinged with a mild indifference because an excess of hope or optimism toward investment strategies can lead to disaster. Toward audiences, I like an attitude of shared humanity mixed with a slight playfulness— an attitude of, “We’re all in this together.”

We can use changes in tone to orchestrate audiences’ changes in mood. In the writing-sample communiqué to investors, at the end of the first section, to change the tone from one of near panic to one of manageability, we used three words, “And so on.”

To write for you in tones that you would enjoy, I would need to learn, capture and convey your attitudes toward the ideas, strategies, players and regulators in the world of hedge-fund investing; your attitudes toward your audiences and the attitude toward yourself that you wish to convey. Through a few conversations, I can come to understand your attitudes.

For audiences to enjoy presentations, web communications and messages in other media, the pieces need to harmonize with audience physiology and even neurology. “Why,” you might ask, “is this web page in one long, narrow column?”

As a matter of physiology, readers’ eyes can read more quickly and efficiently text that is in narrow columns than they can text in wide columns. Eyes grab words in chunks. With wide columns, eyes have trouble segregating words into chunks. At the end of one wide line of text, eyes have trouble finding the beginning of the next line.

Almost all newspapers and many magazines format text into columns that are thirty-nine characters wide. That width gives readers pleasure. They feel smarter. They rate the material they are reading more highly than they would if the same text were formatted in wider columns. If your PowerPoint presentations, web site, white papers or other documents format text into columns wider than fifty-five characters, then your readers’ eyes have to work harder than is necessary.

When people attend presentations that you give, they bring along both halves of their brains. Left halves are perfectly content to listen to the facts, logic and reasoning of your presentation. Right halves fidget. They want a stream of rich visuals that they can investigate and interpret. If your presentation fails to feed them, right halves keep telling left halves that the presentation is boring and taking too long. If you charm right halves, they whisper to left halves that you are a genius and a wonderful human being.

According to academic research, to summarize and remember complex information, people convert it into emotions and metaphor. When we design presentations to please right halves of brains in your audiences, simultaneously we can supply metaphors and engender emotions that summarize information in ways that further your cause.

People enjoy fresh language. To the degree that we can express your ideas, insights, expertise and points of view in fresh language, your audiences will remember and repeat what you say. They will repeat what you say to other investors, clients, customers and voters and to their representatives in Congress.

In creating presentations and other communications, I have applied these principles and sensitivities. I do not merely tell your story. I re-imagine it in a way that will get audiences excited.

The chairman of IBM said that a board-of-directors presentation that I created was “the best presentation he had ever seen.” After watching a presentation that explained how his work fit within the flow of global commerce, a data-entry clerk at a money-center bank said, “I never knew my work was so important! I can’t wait to get back to work.”

Humor and exaggerations in a management-strategy presentation led an auditorium of five hundred financial executives to roar with laughter at the difficulty of their predicament— and then embrace fully management’s strategic plan.

A presentation on derivatives-based investment strategies began with a tale of falling asleep and dreaming in church. Audiences of high-net-worth individuals around the world found delight in how the dream captured the dilemmas of family’s wealth-management planning. The presentation helped my client win scores of new clients and bring under advisement millions of dollars of new assets.

More recently, I have focused on ways to incorporate financial modeling and simulations into presentations. When they watch some of the simulations I have developed, anyone who passed high-school algebra, in a few minutes, can understand conceptually how hedge funds use stochastic calculus to value financial assets. To describe how I explain asset valuation, audiences have said things like “Fantastic!,” “Blown away!” and “I feel I could go for the next Nobel Prize myself.”

Presentation, web and video technology continue to evolve. Today we easily can create a PowerPoint presentation, then videotape you giving the presentation to a live audience, edit the video and— to multiply the reach of your message— post the video on your web site. We can convert PowerPoint presentations to .pdf documents that your constituents can download or view on the web. Not only can we deliver your messages to your constituents, we also can give them tools with which to further communicate your messages to investors, colleagues, friends, regulators, voters and members of Congress.

Today, wherever we look, we see powerful communications playing more and more important roles in the successes of companies, political candidates and even people at war. A year ago, many mouthpieces of conventional wisdom scoffed at Barack Obama’s eloquence. Yet he went on to show the power of eloquent speech to move people and change a nation’s agenda. In Iraq, jihadists attack our convoys not to destroy them, but so that, in the war of perception, they can videotape the attacks and post the videos on their web sites.

In our web- and media-intensive world, perception and reality grow more and more indistinguishable. If you would like to change how clients, customers, investors, intermediaries, regulators, voters and members of Congress perceive your firm, your industry and your strategies, then I would like to write for you. I would like to create presentations that you enjoy giving and your audiences enjoy hearing and seeing.

I do not take the usual approach to creating financial presentations and writing other communications. Initially, most of the CEOs and other senior executives with whom I have worked were skeptical of this high-energy, ambitious approach. Yet, after they had given one or two presentations I had created, they couldn’t imagine going back to the conventional approach— the approach that leaves audiences fidgeting, daydreaming and checking their Blackberries. My clients enjoy giving high-energy presentations because their audiences enjoy them.

Would you enjoy giving presentations that your audiences find intently engaging, memorable and exciting? Would you like to hear people repeating your language, repeating your insights and adopting your points of view even more than they do now?

When you finish giving a presentation, would you rather hear polite applause or a standing ovation? Would you rather see people in the audience surging forward to mob you and shake your hand? Or see them surging in the other direction to mob the refreshment table and stuff their faces with pastries?

When you want to give a speech, give a presentation or create a web site that gets your audience excited and brings them around to your point of view, give me a call or send me an email. Between you know and what I know, we can achieve your communications objectives.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Jerry Marlow, MBA
(917) 817-8659
jerrymarlow@jerrymarlow.com
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