Ben Guttmann, a marketing educator and author of "Simply Put," shares insights on crafting clear and effective messages amidst our media-saturated world. He discusses the importance of simplicity, highlighting benefits over features to better connect with audiences. Guttmann offers actionable strategies like replacing "and" with "so" to enhance clarity and the Jenga tower analogy to illustrate minimal messaging. His tips aim to help anyone—from parents to entrepreneurs—craft influential communications without falling into the trap of complexity.
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insights INSIGHT
Simple Messages
Simple messages are easily perceived, understood, and acted upon.
Senders complicate messages, while receivers prefer simplicity, creating a communication gap.
insights INSIGHT
Fluency
Fluency describes how easily we process information.
Fluent messages are preferred, trusted, and liked more, as they require less mental effort.
insights INSIGHT
Information Overload
People are constantly bombarded with information, leading to shorter attention spans.
This "fight or flight" mode can cause us to filter out potentially valuable information.
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The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Mark Manson
In this book, Mark Manson argues against the typical self-help advice of constant positivity, instead suggesting that life's struggles give it meaning. He emphasizes the need to focus on what truly matters and to accept and confront painful truths. The book is divided into nine chapters and uses blunt honesty and profanity to illustrate its ideas, encouraging readers to find meaning through values they can control and to replace uncontrollable values with more meaningful ones.
Simply Put
Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them
Ben Guttmann
Whether you’re a teacher, parent, or entrepreneur, you want to be able to persuade your students, children, and customers with your messages. That’s a tall task in the modern age, when people are bombarded with 13 hours of media a day. How do you cut through all that noise to make sure you’re heard? My guest would say it’s all about keeping things simple.
Ben Guttmann is a marketing educator and consultant who’s helped promote everything from the NFL to New York Times-bestselling authors. He is himself the author of Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win—and How to Design Them. Today on the show, Ben explains the gap between how people like to receive messages and the self-sabotaging, complication-introducing ways people tend to send them. We then talk about the five factors of effective marketing that anyone can use to close this gap and craft simple, effective, influential messages. We discuss why you should highlight something’s benefits rather than its features, the question to ask to figure out what those benefits are, how to replace “and” with “so” to create more focused messages, how the fad of using the F-word in book titles shows the transience of salience, how to make your message minimal by imagining it as a Jenga tower and how minimal isn’t the same thing as short, and much more, including Ben’s most immediately actionable tip for crafting better, simpler messages.
The Art of Manliness 
