How to understand your customers, and help them understand you.
As I was doomscrolling through my various social media feeds last night, I came across a quote which said;
“A person hears only what they understand”.
It’s such as simple and obvious quote, and yet it was the only thing that made me stop scrolling. In fact, it was on this quote that I decided to call it quits and go to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, I could still hear these seven words repeating in my head, like a persistent ear worm. And since the only way to get rid of an ear worm it is to listen to the song in its entirety - that’s what I decided to do.
I typed the quote into Google and learned that it came from the late Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; a German polymath, and regarded as one of the country’s most influential writers.
But that was not the reason why I Googled the quote. I wanted to learn more about its meaning, its deeper implications, and to find examples where it could become a useful tool in the world of marketing.
Communication is Key
Our brains are wired to make sense of the world based only on the information which we already know.
This means that whenever we come across something unfamiliar, our instinct is to quickly relate it to something that is as close to what we understand as possible. Meanwhile, if something is entirely outside of our realm of comprehension, it tends to remain abstract, and often ignored and forgotten.
Consider the concept of AI, or Artificial Intelligence. Even though many of us have already been exposed to it in one form or another, very few actually know how to ‘think’ about it correctly.
Most of us will probably imagine the concept of AI as having a conversation with some kind of glossy cyborg from the movies.
Meanwhile, anyone who writes code for a living will most likely have a different mental ‘image’ of it. They may see it as millions of lines of code running on huge server farms, parsing terabytes of queries every second and outputting the results using near-human language.
Although the latter scenario is closer to what AI ‘looks’ like, they both serve as ways for us to make sense of a concept, regardless of our level of understanding.
Understand Your Audience
In the world of marketing you must understand your audience. Knowing your target audience - and indeed knowing what your audience knows - can be the difference between someone taking a few seconds to look at your offering, versus that same person walking past it, never to consider it again.
It is your job as the marketer to know how to speak the language of your potential client.
It is your job to know how to convey your message using words and analogies your potential client will understand.
Most importantly, it is your job to understand that everyone is going to have a vastly different analogy for everything in the world around them, based on their lived experiences and levels of knowledge.
Conversely, this quote also underscores the importance of continuous learning. The more we are able to expand our understanding of the world, the easier it becomes for us to accept and integrate new information. It allows us to hear the world around us and comprehend it on more levels. This in turn makes us better communicators, more capable of reaching and connecting with our target audience.
That’s why, if you want to appeal to a particular demographic, you have to learn how they may perceive the world, and how they communicate with it. Only then will you be able to speak their language, and hopefully help them to better understand yours.
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