#MiPDV – Sometimes The Audience Needs To Hear Something Familiar

The director walked onto the stage and acknowledged the audience. Then, turning towards the ensemble, the baton drops and the music begins.?

The concert begins with two very familiar pieces. The band has used the same opening for decades.?

Then follows several pieces selected just for that performance. Some pieces are designed to challenge the band to improve, some to expand the exposure of the audience, and yet others are solely to entertain the audience.?

The finale is always the same two pieces. One serves as the “encore” which the audience has come to expect.?

The same beginning and ending for every performance.?

Surely, the audience is tired of the repetition, right??

Hardly! The director tried to replace the opening and closing with other pieces, and the feedback was swift and direct: the audience liked the repetition. They did not want the director to change them.?

Why??

The sameness seems to provide a level of comfort to the audience. They know what to expect: that when they attend a concert there will be selections they know and like that bookend pieces that may be new and different.?

Does this idea translate into the business world??

Indeed it does!?

For example, think about advertising slogans – how many do you remember because they have been repeated for many years? Nike (“Just do it”), Oreos (“Milk’s favorite cookie”), and Wheaties (“The breakfast of champions”) all come to mind.?

Repetition works.?

In her book Made You Look, author Carmen Simon describes a test where she used a 20-minute presentation to see how well the audience remembered a pattern. Here is what she learned:?

• The audience remembered the pattern after hearing the main message 6 times.
• An audience remembered the main message more accurately after hearing it 12 times.
• In one group that heard the main message 24 times in 20 minutes, no one complained about the repetition!?

Indeed, her research provides two important insights:

• The audience only realizes that you are repeating yourself when it’s a simplistic message repeated in less than a minute.
• For complex messages, it takes lots of repetition for people to realize that they are hearing the same message … and when they realize it, they tend to learn the message more quickly.?

She also spoke to one of the “keys” I was taught early in my career: to use the age-old “T3” formula to “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” Her perspective – this approach does not work. Her research shows that repeating the message is the most effective approach, while using the “T3” approach was the least effective.?

Interestingly, these findings are not new. In a 2016 article in Forbes , Bill Conerly wrote “repetition is vital.” He tells the story about a manager that used repetition to redirect a problem employee. The manager used every opportunity to use the same words to deliver the message. Over time, the employee got the message and changed their behavior.?

As Conerly wrote, “Repetition made the point important and memorable.”?

You can read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2018/03/11/persuasion-in-business-repetition-images-phrases-and-repetition/ (subscription may be required).??

What an important lesson for each of us to learn and apply: there is benefit to repetition, even though we may feel like we keep “banging on the same drum.”?

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That’s mi punto de vista #MiPDV.

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