‘When did you hear that?’ – the relatinship between sound and our basic needs

I need to start with another apology – for another unscheduled gap. This will be the last post for 2015. Normal service will be resumed in the new year!

 

I chose the title for this part of the programme to emphasize the relationship between sound and time. That’s highlighted on the show by Michael Proulx and Julian Treasure. Here, though, I want to pick up on another relationship – between hearing and our basic needs, as set out in Abraham Maslow’s five-level hierarchy.

• Level: 1 Biological/physiological
• 2 Safety/security
• 3 Belongingness/love
• 4 Esteem (including self-esteem) and
• 5 Self-actualisation (fulfilment of potential).

 

In terms of biology/physiology, I mention on the show that evidence is growing of a strong link between hearing and health. When it comes to safety/security, our ears are the first line of defence against invisible threats. I ran across a powerful illustration of that a couple of weeks ago.

 

I was listening to the radio when I suddenly noticed an odd noise in the background – odd because it was out of place. Within a couple of seconds, I realised it must be a fire alarm. One of the presenters didn’t spot it, because she has significant hearing loss. Under normal circumstances, thanks to hearing aids and impressive lip-reading skills, you’d never know; but in this situation, it was just as well she was working with a fully hearing person.

 

Ok, so as far as I know, it was nothing serious – and if it had been, and she’d been working by herself, someone would have told her; but it’s not hard to imagine a situation where a deaf or hearing impaired person could be left behind in an emergency.

 

On Friday (4th December), in another studio, I was reminded of the part hearing plays in our higher level needs – from inclusion to fulfilment. This time, I was the presenter – interviewing Brendan Magill for The Wireless from Age UK.

 

This year, Brendan turned seventy – and celebrated fifty years of unbroken employment. His career has taken him from trainee computer programmer (in the early days of the technological revolution), to a ‘Business, Employment and Disability Consultant’ (since the mid-nineties); but the reason for talking about him here pre-dates all that. It goes back to something he said about his primary school education.

 

As a partially sighted five-year-old, he started at the ‘school for the deaf, dumb and blind’ in Belfast. (The word ‘dumb’ was dropped in 1956 – not a moment too soon!). He said the education ‘wasn’t bad’ and that overall it was: ‘A good experience, because I learnt to communicate with people who are deaf’.

 

Despite the fact that we live in a culture obsessed with the visual, hearing loss often creates more physical, psychological and social barriers than sight-loss. Why? Well, very simply because it makes it difficult or impossible to access the spoken word – which is a far more powerful communication tool than we tend to realise. It’s the fastest way to express complex ideas and emotions – and to tell the stories which bring us together and bind us together.

 

Yes, it’s descendant (written language) is generally quicker to consume, but it takes much longer to create. The average native English-speaker produces around a hundred and eighty words per minute, while even the most competent typist struggles to reach a hundred.

 

No, I’m not overlooking the vibrant culture developed by deaf people who sign; but that’s a response – a fantastically positive one – to being excluded from hearing society.

 

Since I started studying human communication, I’ve found it interesting that while ‘deaf culture’ is a definable entity, there’s no blind equivalent – for the simple reason that we don’t need one. Everything from music to conversation relies primarily on sound. Even things like cinema and video are accessible, on the whole, through the common language of sound in general – and speech in particular.

 

It’s fairly straightforward to translate vision into sound, but standard gestures etc aren’t up to reversing the process. Signing is a rich language in its own right – which too few of us master. While everyone who is able learns to speak, very few of us learn to sign. In the field of relationships, be they social or professional, it’s worth remembering that just because a person is hearing doesn’t mean they’re listening!

 

That’s one of the issues I’ll be looking at in the next programme, in January.

 

In the meantime, have a great Xmas and New Year. If you have any:

• Questions
• Comments or
• Communication issues you’d like to chat through…

 

…come and talk to me! All the contact details are on the website. I’m around til next Friday (18th December), then back on 4th January.

What happens next? – Stories

Last week, when I was talking about the importance of expressing things like gratitude and apology, I used the example of two versions of a customer’s story, one all about a problem and the other ending with a solution.

When I first started in business, eleven years ago, I remember coming across an article which said that a satisfied customer might tell one or two people; but a dissatisfied one would probably share their experience with ten!

In the social media age, those accounts can spread faster and further than ever before; but they’re still a continuation of an ancient oral tradition.

Storytelling has been part of every human culture for many millennia; but why?

Our brains might represent only around 2% of our body weight, but they consume 20% of our energy. Just following a tale involves more effort than we realise – and telling it takes an even bigger investment. The listener/reader needs ‘fifth order intentionality’ – the ability to keep track of up to five people’s states of mind at any one time – four characters’ and their own. That’s at the top end of the normal adult limit; and the teller/author needs to be able to go one step further, to ‘sixth order intentionality’ – four characters, the listener/reader and themselves. That’s why far more people love a good story than can tell one.

As I’ve said before, Mother Nature is generally portrayed as either a soft, Mumsey figure, or a slightly unstable parent with a taste for cruel and unusual punishment; but I see her as the FD of Earth PLC – a very shrewd accountant. She won’t buy new if it’s cheaper to adapt existing equipment – and she doesn’t make big investments unless she’s absolutely convinced of even bigger returns.

Stories are sizable investments in terms of the ‘cognitive load’ they put on everyone involved. They force us to operate in a virtual world, dealing with people and events outside our own immediate physical experience; and that, so the science says, is much more costly than straightforward face-to-face interaction.

So what’s in it for us?

We probably all know from personal experience that a good story is a powerful thing. It can encourage, inspire, scare or control; but more important than any of that is the reason I’m talking about it in a series on professional relationships:

Storytelling binds people together.

It all starts with something very simple and basic – good, old-fashioned curiosity. Once we get involved in a narative, we really want to know:

‘What happens next?‘

It’s disappointing and frustrating to be left hanging in mid-air, without a resolution, isn’t it?

That has a lot of potential for smart marketers.

Traditional radio and TV advertising just hits the consumer with repetitions of snapshots and soundbites showing the benefits of a product – cleaner dishes, whiter teeth, higher status – whatever it happens to be.

Repetition works well, up to a point. The more our attention is drawn to something, the more importance we attach to it – so the more attention we give it. At least, that’s the theory. The trouble is, if we decide a message isn’t relevant to us, the constant repetition just becomes a pattern which our brains filter out as background noise.

If, on the other hand, the message is woven into a story which captures our imagination, we’ll stick with it just to see how things turn out. In the process, we build up an emotional attachment to the characters which, over time, is likely to translate into an emotional attachment to the brand.

Just look at a brand like ‘Coronation Street’. Not convinced that’s a product? Well, indirectly, it is – because it’s what the Americans might call ‘prime real estate’ in the television advertising landscape.

Every now and then, adverts themselves have told a story in serial form.
The example that immediately springs to mind featured the ‘Gold Blend couple’.

We saw them meet as neighbours in 1987, because one of them was out of coffee. Then we watched them get together, through twelve episodes, across the next six years.

As a marketing investment, it was a roaring success. Sales went up 20% in the first eighteen months and 70% over the campaign as a whole.

With figures like that, why don’t we see more soapvertising?

Well, mainly because in tougher economic times, everything becomes more reductive. We don’t look so far ahead – and we’re certainly less willing to commit big budgets to longterm strategies; but – pardon the pun – that isn’t the whole story.

A good tale needs a good teller and the necessary script-writing skills just aren’t as big a part of advertising as they used to be. Then there’s the question of the viewers’ attention span – which is a whole other subject, for another post!

The nearest thing we have in 2015 is something like the meerkats campaign, for Comparethemarket.com; but even there, each ad is a separate, self-contained vignette, part of a loosely linked series using the same characters, rather than an ongoing narative.

Yes, they work. Changing the ad regularly solves the problem of patterning – people mentally switching off because they’ve seen the same thing too many times; and the cute, human-like characters attract the attention of whole families, so making use of motivations not normally associated with these products – such as pester power. Kids don’t care about insurance or energy suppliers – but they do want a Baby Oleg toy – even my elderly Mum wants a Baby Oleg toy!

The campaign is obviously working well, because they’ve been able to afford a good chunk of that prime real estate I mentioned earlier (they currently sponsor ‘Coronation Street’!)

Still, this approach, built around those snapshots and soundbites I’ve mentioned, is all about prompting interaction; a short-term investment with the promise of an immediate physical return.

Stories, on the other hand, are all about relationships – and vice versa. The investment is longer-term; and so are the potential returns.

Every organisation has a story behind it. Hearing it can draw us in – and becoming part of it goes a long way to keeping us engaged. That’s why good PR campaigns are built around storytelling.

Looking back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

Factual and fictional tales have certain rules and structures, feeding our need for safety and security
Having one shared with us helps to meet our need to belong; and
Contributing to it strengthens our sense of being part of something and feeds our need for esteem.

The link between stories and marketing/PR, might be obvious; but even if you want to build better relationships with your:

Existing customers/clients
Staff
Suppliers and
strategic partners

your story is a great place to start. Theirs might be an even better jumping-off point.

I’ll come back to that in a couple of weeks, when I talk about memory; but the immediate answer to the question:

‘What happens next?’

Is another slight change to the original schedule. Next time, I want to look at one of the things stories can help to build – trust.

In the meantime, if you have any:

Questions
Comments
Communication issues to discuss or
Tales to tell (yes, I do mean that)

come and talk to me! All the details are on the website – as is the story of how this company came to be …