Resonance builder 1: Simplicity
Imagine you’re trying to pitch a film to someone. Do you start by reading the story or do you start with the biggest facts? Consider these two approaches to pitching the 1997 film Air Force One.
| Explain the story | Simplify the facts |
|---|---|
| It’s the mid 1990s. American and Russian special forces capture a soviet Dictator. Three weeks later the President is visiting Moscow. He insists in a speech that the US will not negotiate with terrorists. He boards Air Force One with his family and press corps. Some of the press corps are terrorists and take over the plane. The President escapes but his family are trapped on the plane. Plot twist: the President is actually still hiding on the plane. He takes on the terrorists to free his family. | It’s like Die Hard on a Plane. Air Force One gets hijacked by terrorists. Harrison Ford is the President. Gary Oldman is the Hans Gruber baddy. |
Putting aside that the first option only covers about 20 minutes of the plot where the second option is broadly applicable to the entire film, if you just read the first bullet of each description you could be forgiven for thinking that they’re different films. While it may not present a full picture of the story, ‘Die Hard on a plane’ paints an image that is easy for anyone that’s seen a Die Hard movie to understand. Because Die Hard is regarded as established pop culture that’s not an unsafe assumption. Everyone knows Die Hard, right? But if your audience hasn’t seen Die Hard then you’re alienating them by assuming context where there’s a gap. Simplicity, just like everything else, cannot forget the context gap, but it can make reasoned assumptions. If your audience hasn’t seen Die Hard, though, could that be because they’re not interested in action movies? In which case, would Die Hard on a plane interest them anyway?
Resonant ideas need first to be boiled down to their fundamentals. There is never time for too much detail. The context gap means that detail applied on top of poor foundations is more likely to take the recipient away from the intended outcome than fill in missing knowledge. For an idea to capture attention and resonate, it needs to land the basics before it layers on detail. Clarity of message is quality of understanding.
Simplicity is central to building resonance not just because it is a better way to communicate but because it is how we remember. We don’t remember all the detail, all the lines they say, all nuances, winks and ticks; we remember a general perception of them being wily and cunning or slippery or bold in the face of danger. You don’t recall the effort the actor put into every scene, you recall the feeling they created from the sum of the scenes. You recall a simplified version of reality. Why would you spend time trying to overcomplicate and confuse that memory and leave it open to subjectivity and interpretation when you could focus on a simple message and land it consistently. In Star Wars Darth Vader is the ultimate bad guy because he wears all black, he’s unflinching in his actions and he makes you fear him – until his redemption ark and then you really care. Kylo Ren is more nuanced, more ambiguous and more filled with doubt. You don’t really ever get to fear him so you never feel invested in his story or the stakes behind it. Effective brands are built by repeatedly communicating the same simple messages until they become associated with them. Darth Vader knew how to build his brand.
The difficulty with distilling an idea down to its simplest form is separating the detail can be stripped away from the ideas fundamental to the concept. Lee Atwater, American political consultant and strategist for the Republican Party during US president Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush’s campaigns and Chairman of the Republican National Committee famously aroused controversy with his aggressive campaign tactics. Atwater would often attack his opponents with messages to drive fear, uncertainty and doubt. These ideas were pitched to appeal to the party’s base sense of fear and masculinity, and their morals being eroded by Democratic rivals. This approach took complex socio-economic data, historical context, demographic trends and decades of policy and boiled them down into the simplest strap lines that everyone could remember.
In 2016 Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ was a similar slogan that condensed all of the concepts of fear and wounded pride at the changes from the Clinton and Obama administrations. The Democratic party had weakened America, and Donald Trump would reverse the decline, with all of the social, cultural, legal and institutional changes that went along with that. Trump’s famously empty policy planning didn’t matter, because the simple idea of America once again becoming great – with all the different personal interpretations of what that mean – was good enough. No one could consistently articulate when America was great or why in a way that others agreed with, and that was the point: the simple idea bridged the Context gap by allowing everyone to interpret it to their own expectations. Simple ideas negate the context gap because they land the fundamental concept and embrace the interpretation of the audience. Remember, a goal of an inception device is to drive the desired next action. We are not on a crusade to indoctrinate an audience with a single, fully-realised world view.
Years before Trump planned his bid to run for President US alt-Rock band Drive-By Truckers wrote a song about Lee Atwater and his policies. In it they summed up the power of the simple poster ad: “Cause only simple men can see the logic in whatever smarter men can whittle down till you can fit it on a sticker. And get it stuck like mud and bugs to names that set the standard; they'll live it like it's gospel, and they'll quote it like it's scripture.”