Category Archives: Communication

Learning to communicate with focus, clarity, and power

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What if you treated your boss like a customer?

Composite photos courtesy of marmaladepip and kirilee and deviantart.comLast week we looked at what it meant to be ready for creating “more than satisfied” customers a.k.a. Disciples.  I suggested that the three essentials that had to exist in order to be ready to make Disciples were:

(You can find them here in the original post)

  1. You need to be prepared to serve.
  2. You need to be prepared to give
  3. You need to be prepared to nurture

It struck me a couple days later. What if I treated my boss like that?

If you think of a customer as someone who pays you money in exchange for goods or services doesn’t your boss fit into that category rather nicely? But somehow we treat the boss like he or she owes us. We did the work so they owe us the money. Because, after all, we get paid AFTER the work is done.

But what if we flipped all that on its head and started thinking of the boss as a customer. Someone we were prepared to serve above and beyond, all the time. Someone we were prepared to give recognition  and appreciate. Someone with whom we were ready to nurture a relationship. Rather than expecting to BE served, BE recognized, and BE nurtured?

I freely confess I am terrible at managing upward. I have even scoffed at the notion in the past when confounded by managers who could manage up well enough but couldn’t manage downward worth a lick. I always figured it had more to do with the color of their nose rather than any particular skill. But all of that aside I wonder what would happen if I started treating my boos like a customer. Same expectation on delivery, same anticipation of need, same attention to service. What might happen?

What do you think would happen if you started to treat your boss like your most valued customer?

 

 

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Commercial Perfection

Have you seen the new Perrier commercial?

This is really brilliant stuff, especially when held up next to much of what is being aired these days. If you’ve seen it in context, meaning on TV, it really stands out from the commercials on either side of it. Why? you may ask, what makes it so appealing? Let me suggest three simple elements:

1) It Understands the Medium:

Television is a visual medium. The visuals of all the melting landscape and props are artistic candy. Watch the actors as they interact with their melting surroundings…great stuff. There is a trend in commercials today to be more reliant on audio, the thought being that people are headed to the fridge with their back turned to the tube so we better give them an audio message. This piece is purely visual communication. Walk to the fridge with your back turned and you won’t know what the commercial is about but watch it, and you’re captivated.

2) It Tells a Story:

We’re drawn in early on to the mystery of why stuff is melting. We shown the main character with a look of confusion approaching panic. She moves toward resolution and then the story arc peaks as the bottle falls off the ledge, a moment of high tension. We get it, we know where this is headed because we’ve seen it before but the piece is so artistically done, the story so visually well told, that we follow it anyway.

3) It Resolves on the Product:

The moment we see the “heroine” drink deeply in the pool we think, or at least I thought, “refreshment”. No slogan is spoken, no print on the screen, but the idea is clear, and more importantly, it is centered on the product. Not the funny person in the video, not the comedic climax, not the tag line, the product. We’re given one word “Perrier” and we provide our own tag line, highly personalized, subconsciously.

What are the places in life where you are trying, or have to try, to convince people to do something, or try something, or decide something? Do your “commercials” understand the medium in which you’re presenting your idea? Do you have a story to tell? DO you focus on “the product”? The thing you want them to choose?

It may be trying to get your kids out of bed in the morning. It may be trying to convince a friend to start exercising with you. It may be trying to sell your boss on a new idea. How can you leverage these three elements to convince your audience in a more compelling way?