Recently, during a day-long Marketing Rangefinder workshop with a client, I ended the session by writing a sentence on the board.
It summed up everything we’d talked about during the day, in one simple line.
But I knew it wasn’t ready, I knew it wasn’t quite right, and I wanted the people in the room to provide feedback that would improve it.
What I didn’t do, though, was ask them how to make it better.
Instead, I asked, “What’s missing from this?” and “What does this not include?” and “Why is this not right?”
A lot of people make the mistake of asking a group of people how to make something better, which leads to “disimprovement,” which Howard Gossage described as, “making things worse by trying to make them better.”
But when you phrase something negatively, you focus not on what might be made better, but on what is definitely wrong.
That allows me, the person who’ll be doing the copywriting, to focus on what needs to change rather than on what everyone in the room would simply like to see.
So if you’re working with a group or committee on your marketing, and you’re struggling to get buy-in or consensus, I suspect the problem is that you’re looking for additions, which will never stop once invited.
Instead, you want to look for negatives, real problems that need to be resolved.
And then one person resolves them and returns to the committee to ask again: “What’s wrong with this?”
Once most agree that there’s nothing missing any longer, then the polish, the finesse, the style can be finalized.
Remember: The goal of the work is to improve it by identifying what needs to be fixed.
Not to disimprove it by asking what could be better.
Kelford Inc. shows you the way to always knowing what to say.