Resonance builder 3: Tangibility
What does it feel like to pick something heavy up? Try to describe to someone what the act of picking up a weight feels like without comparing it to another object and you’ll find it very difficult. Now, try to describe what you think it feels like for someone else to pick up a heavy object, again, without comparing to another object. What does it feel like for a body builder to pick up a weight that you struggle with? Does it feel lighter to them; or is it the same weight but somehow just easier to pick up? It is nearly impossible to describe the feeling of picking up a heavy object because it so intertwined with your personal physiology.
It is very difficult for anyone to comprehend an experience like picking up a heavy item without some kind of reference. Even if you’re able to explain it in a way that another person can understand, without an anchor to base their understanding on the interpretation will be fleeting at best. Ideas that resonate need to fit with an experience that the audience understands. They need to be grounded in something. That could be a shared life event, an established fact base, a proven methodology or other similar examples. The more tangible an idea is, the more it can be understood and related too.
When Microsoft released Cortana – it’s voice chat tool to compete with Google Assistant and Siri – in 2014, it was launching into an already crowded voice-search environment. Beyond being able to access search in a new way, and control some device functionality, unless you’ve used a voice assistant it’s hard to explain the benefits, and even harder to explain why one solution is better than another. Microsoft’s approach was to brand Cortana as ‘your digital personal assistant’. A Personal Assistant is a concrete concept – one much easier to grasp than ‘digital device voice control protocol’. Personal assistants can help you manage calls, book meetings and send messages – all things that Cortana was able to do. Making abstract ideas concrete by relating them to known entities is a long established method of communicating a resonant idea.
The brontosaurus – whose name is derived from ‘thunder lizard’ in Greek – was a giant Jurassic sauropod. Growing to lengths of 22 metres long, it was a colossus of a beast. But how do you comprehend a creature that size? Imagine two and a half double decker buses next to each other, and you would have roughly the right length of a brontosaurus. We have an in-built idea of both roughly how big a bus is. Now you have an idea how big a brontosaurus was.
During the UK’s Brexit referendum to decide on its continued membership of the European Union significant debate was made on the value that the UK received from EU membership. The Vote Leave campaign commissioned a large bus with a simple message written on the side: “We send the EU £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead”. The claim attracted criticism for a number of reasons; mostly because it lacked ‘clarity’ on the fact that $350m was the UK's gross contribution and it did not take into account Britain's rebate and other payments back from the EU. For members of the Leave campaign and for people on the fence about the debate, though, it made concrete the idea that the UK was paying an extortionate amount of money for a membership that it did not see value from. Had the bus instead read “Lets reclaim our EU contributions and spend them on our policies” it would have taken the same amount of space but had far less tangibility to latch onto. In this instance £350 million is a number so huge as to be intangible itself, but that is also the point. $350,000,000 per week is easy to recognise as ‘a very big number.’ Whether it is big compared to the economic cost of leaving the EU was never established or clearly articulated by the Remain party and so this concrete and highly visible figure became a centrepiece of debate.
As you may have realised already, the context gap is ever present when trying to make an idea tangible. Describing a voice command system as a digital personal assistant will only resonate if the idea of a personal assistant is understood. Two and half double decker buses would not make sense in a country where transportation is solely by bicycle. Understanding of the audience is critical to craft inception devices that resonate, because without this an idea may either not be as tangible as intended – it is aligned to an concept that does not resonate with the audience’s experience – or it may diminish a concept by making it irrelevant. Consider the difference in experiences of a judge and a jury. A jury, with potentially only one court case’s worth of experience sees all of the information shared with them as concrete and factual; a judge, however, sees the information in the context of legal precedent and lessons of the past. Novices perceive concrete detail as concrete detail whereas an expert sees concrete details as symbols of a pattern.