Err on the side of vagueness

In the book “Alchemy,” Rory Sutherland notes that the most dependable way to depress the prices of a restaurant’s food is to put pictures of the dishes on the menu.

You might think that showing pictures of food to a hungry person is going to make them more willing to spend money, but apparently it’s the opposite.

Here’s what this has to do with your communications and presentations: Remember that the picture your audience members paint in their heads is going to be way better than any picture you could paint for them.

So when you are trying to decide whether to get specific or to be vague in describing the future that you will be taking your audience members into, err on the side of being vague. Your job in describing the future for them is to give them a taste, it’s not to describe every last detail.

Related Posts

Your customers deserve better than AI

No doubt about it, AI has rocked the presentation world. You can use it to crank out slides, and entire scripts, in seconds. But AI gives you the average of the internet. And in a sales situation, the average is rejection. Which means that if you go into that meeting...

Embrace your accent

Since I live in Turkey, very few of my clients are native speakers of English. Often, they work abroad, whether it's in the US, UK, or Canada, and they ask me about accent reduction. They say their foreign accent is getting in the way of acceptance in their...

Spelling Ali

When I was walking across Turkey, one of the most common things I would do when I met someone was spell their name. As in, I would spell it loud, even if their name was Ali. "A-L-I." Sure, "Ali" is extremely simple. In fact, it's one of the most common men's names in...