10 Rules of Successful Communication

I’m reading Frank Luntz’s 2007 bestseller, Words That Work,  and felt compelled to share his list of rules for successful communication.  They underscore the book’s subtitle:  “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear” and they are useful reminders for all of us who try to communicate in the business world.

1.  Simplicity: Use Small Words. Avoid words that might cause your readers to reach for the dictionary.  They likely won’t bother to look up unfamiliar words.  Instead, they’ll either let your real meaning sail over their heads or, worse, they’ll misunderstand you.

2.  Brevity: Use Short Sentences. “Be as brief as possible.  Never use a sentence when a phrase will do, and never use four words when three can say just as much.”

3.  Credibility Is As Important As Philosophy. “People have to believe it to buy it.  As Lincoln once said, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.  If your words lack sincerity, if they contradict accepted facts, circumstances, or perceptions, they will lack impact.”

4.  Consistency Matters. “Repetition.  Repetition. Repetition.  Good language is like the Energizer Bunny.  It keeps going . . . and going . . . and going.”  Find a good message and stick to it.  Coke created “It’s the real thing” in 1943.  Wheaties created the “Breakfast of Champions” tagline in 1935, the same year Campbell’s Soup came up with “M’m! M’m! Good!”

5.  Novelty: Offer Something New. Businesses should try to tell customers something that gives them a brand-new take on an old idea.  If successful, the new message will bring a “sense of discovery”.  If your message generates an “I didn’t know that” response, you have succeeded.

6.  Sound and Texture Matter. “The sound and texture of language should be just as memorable as the words themselves.”  For example: Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is” and M&M’s “Melts in your mouth . . .”

7.  Speak aspirationally. “Messages need to say what people want to hear.  This is the one area where politicians often have the edge over the corporate community.  It’s very difficult to craft advertising language that touches people at the most fundamental, primal level, by speaking to their deepest hopes, dreams, and fears.”  The key to success is to “personalize and humanize the message to trigger an emotional remembrance”.

8.  Visualize. “The slogans we remember for a lifetime almost always have a strong visual component, something we can see and almost feel.  Allstate’s ‘You’re in good hands’, first created in 1956, went so far as to include the cupped hands visual in its logo to remind people of its peace-of-mind guarantee.

9.  Ask a Question. “‘Got Milk?’ may be the most memorable print ad campaign of the past decade.  The creator realized . . . that it’s sometimes not what you say but what you ask that really matters.”

10.  Provide Context and Explain Relevance. “You have to give people the ‘why’ of a message before you tell them the ‘therefore’ and the ’so that.’”

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