At Evolve Marketing we were delighted to be selected to refresh Acorn EHS’s brand so it better reflected their positioning as one of the South East’s leading Health , Safety and Environmental specialists.

Andrew Speedie, the Managing Director of Acorn EHS was delighted with the results and said Sharon, at Evolve Marketing has provided us with excellent work at a reasonable cost. The work was completed on time at each step of the process. The team at Evolve Marketing are trustworthy, consistent, and reliable offering creative, inventive, out-of-the-box ideas and implementation.

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I have always known that ignorance is bliss but it was only when I had the pleasure of reading Made to Stick that I really understand the ‘curse of  knowledge’.

It is a simple idea that once you know something it is difficult to ‘unknow’ it – the book explains that in 1990 PhD researcher, Elizabeth Newton at Stanford studied a simple game in which a group of people were assigned one of two roles: a ‘tapper’ or a ‘listener’. Tappers received a list of well known songs like ‘Happy Birthday’ and was asked to tap out the rhythm to a listener who had to guess the song based on the rhythm being tapped. I guess something like they do in the TV music show ‘Never Mind the Buzzcocks’ but without any vocal elements just tapping – yes very tricky.

A great read... Made to Stick

Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted 50%, i.e. they thought that they were getting their message across half the time (1 in 2) but in reality listeners only guessed 1 in 40 times. Why would they put the odds so high? Well when a tapper taps they are hearing the song in their head (naturally the listener can’t hear the tune just a bunch of disconnected taps). In the experiment tappers were flabbergasted at how hard it was for the listeners. For them it is SOOO obvious!

The problem is the tappers had been given the knowledge of the song title that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it is like to lack that knowledge. So they can’t imagine what it is like for the listener to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the ‘curse of knowledge’.

As a marketeer I often come up against this mismatch of knowledge. Business owners who know everything about their product or service, and can’t imagine what it is like for potential customers ‘not to know’. This also makes it difficult for them to share their knowledge effectively with prospective clients because they can’t re-create their customers ‘state of mind’.

I remember a decade ago showing my Dad, who had not used the internet much at that stage, Twickenham’s website. He was going to watch a rugby match and he wanted directions. I opened the website, gave him a few pointers about page links and left him to it, but 5 minutes later he called me back in frustration. He knew that there was more information ‘down there’, pointing to the bottom of the screen, but he didn’t know how to access it. I was incredulous, it was so obvious to me – side scroll bar / mouse etc. I could simply not imagine not knowing how to navigate a web page – the curse of knowledge!

This was a valuable lesson for me in highlighting how easy it is to assume knowledge and how frustrating it can be for those that don’t share that knowledge. So from a marketing communication point of view it is worth taking the time to reflect on ‘your curse of knowledge’ and what it could mean for potential customers discovering your product or service for the first time. You need to think about acronymns or jargon you may use and also how you could try to recreate the ‘not knowing’ state of mind.

As the objective marketing expert that isn’t burdened with the curse of the technical, specialist knowledge of a particular service or product, it is easier for me to bridge the gap between ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’. Call me on 01327 81003 if you would like to find out how I can help you communicate more effectively with your potential customers.