Brain bombs for your strategy comms

In a pitch, the planning slides are the appetizers to the main creative meal. The explosive tasty treat that signals the restaurant is going to be a ‘nothing-left-on-the-plate’ type of affair.

A planner’s aim should be to reduce their thinking to the one soundbyte that the client will remember and talk about later on. We spend a lot of time getting to the insight, we should spend the same amount of time packaging up that thought to be memorable.

I am currently reading a great book Moonwalking with Einstein which follows the World Memory Championships. It actually gives some great tips about how to make a statement memorable.

‘ Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory.’

These are great tips to package up a planner’s soundbyte.

Concrete Nouns

Using concrete nouns is key to the whole book, humans are better at remembering imagery than abstract concepts. Knowing this we should look to paint a picture with our strategy in the client’s mind. Concrete nouns are things that we can sense (taste, hearing, sight, touch, smell).

For instance let’s take the title of this blog post, ‘How to make insights memorable for pitch presentations’. Insights and memory are abstract noun so it doesn’t feel very memorable at the moment.

To get to concrete nouns and thoughts, I first like to think about what embodies that statement in the world? Are there animals like that are insightful? Something in nature? A famous person? Or a behavior people do?

‘Memorable insights’ dramatically change the way a client thinks about something they are familiar with. The first two things that came to my mind when thinking about this dramatic change to a known environment were; lightning bolts and bombs.

The great thing about these two words is that they have movement in them. So they are not just static images but something that plays out.

Alliteration Aids Memory

Alliteration being the idea of having words that start with the same letter come after each other. With bombs and lightning bolts, they both are ‘b’ which work nicely with the other half of what we are trying to communicate with something being memorable. We often associate memory with the brain, so the word ‘brain bombs’ or ‘brain bolts’ helps to start to tell the story of the statement.

Words the rhyme

Rhyming is definitely my weak spot, thankfully there is Rhymezone. Adding the word bolt, I got back ‘colt, jolt, vault, revolt’. Adding ‘bombs’ I got back ‘palms, qualms, coms, roms, hommes’.

I ended up just playing around with the words and got the following;

Lightning bolts in your deck vaults

Strategy comms as brain bombs

A brain bolt, to make your deck jolt

Brain bombs for your strategy comms.

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