Sunday, 8 July 2012

The difficulty of complex messages

What on earth is this Higgs Boson thing about? I've watched a video, I've looked it up on Wikipedia, I've read a news article...and I still don't really know. But then again, I'm not a scientist - perhaps I'm not the target market and don't really need to know?

And it made me think about marketing messages - what can you do, as a marketer, if the message you have for your target market, or the product/service you are selling, is really rather complex? Can you sell something if you don't understand it? And if you do understand it, can you develop key messages in a simple way that won't be seen as 'dumbing down'? It can be so difficult to avoid jargon - the language you use internally to talk about what you do and what you sell might not be appropriate or clear externally.

All of this came together for me in a great blog post I saw in The Telegraph, calling for people to attempt to explain Higgs Boson in a tweet. Never before has the 140 character restriction been such a challenge! (Or is this my take on it, because - essentially - I still don't get it?!)

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