THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Ben Guttmann: How easy is it for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in your head and make sense of it. The easier that is, the more likely I am to like something, to trust something. All of these positive feelings are associated with when things are easier, they’re better for us. And the inverse of that is the case as well.
Speaker 2: It’s the Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place Podcast, an art world insider podcast for artists by an artist where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Hey there, my friend, this is Miriam Schulman, your curator of inspiration, and you’re listening to episode number 303 of The Inspiration Place podcast. I am so grateful that you’re here. Today’s guest is a marketing and communications expert and author of Simply Put, Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them. He’s an experienced marketing executive and educator on a mission to get leaders to more effectively connect by simplifying their message. Please welcome to The Inspiration Place, Ben Gutmann. Well hey there Ben.
Ben Guttmann: Thanks, Miriam!
Miriam Schulman: Welcome!
Ben Guttmann: It’s great to be here.
Miriam Schulman: So excited to talk about your book. Last time we spoke, it was like, in person that is. It was like, not a thing yet. Now it’s a thing.
Ben Guttmann: Still out in the ether.
Miriam Schulman: Thoughts become things.
Ben Guttmann: It doesn’t get old that it’s a real thing, by the way. And I’m sure that’s the case for you, because I know we talk. See, if I have–
Miriam Schulman: I have mine here, too. Yeah. It’s really cool. Congratulations.
Ben Guttmann: Thank you.
Miriam Schulman: So the reason I invited you on is because I think that there is a lot here that artists can learn from, the core of your message. So we’re just going to dive into some of the important lessons in the book. But I’d like to hear from you first. What do you think is the most important thing artists should know about your message?
Ben Guttmann: You know, it’s funny because so my background is in design. That’s kind of how I came to this. The message of this book, too, was, “This is a book about how to design your message.” Uh, and I actually try to draw a pretty clear line between design and art, because I think that when you’re doing one of them and you think you’re doing the other one, it can be a very hard place to be. It can be—It causes a lot of stress and it causes, um, you know, people to be angry at their work or to not produce their best stuff or to be angry at their client, whatever it is. And so I think that when we look at the artist component, I say, you know, when you’re doing the act of your art, this is not a book for you. But if you’re doing the selling of your art and if you’re doing the selling of yourself and of your business and the stuff you have to do to be a successful artist in 2024 and beyond, this is something that is going to be applicable in that domain. And if we confuse the two, then someone’s going to say, “Oh, you know, this is a bunch of hogwash here.” But it’s something that is important in the business context, not as much in the actual creative.
Miriam Schulman: Well, yes, and I will share this with you, because one of the many conversations I’m always having with my artists, especially those who are just starting out, they’re very creative. They’re experimenting with a lot of different mediums. And what I try to explain to them is that if you can’t focus on one thing, I’m not saying you can’t experiment. So anyone listening to me for the first time, don’t misunderstand. Absolutely experiment. But if you have, if you were Picasso and you had one Cubist and one rose painting and one blue period, and here’s a sculpture back here, and you went to a dealer, the dealer would not be able to represent you because, like, even if, let’s just go to the world where nobody knows who Picasso is, but he comes with these five things because nobody can explain what it is that you do. So this is where there actually is an intersection between the marketing and what you do. Because if you can’t explain what it is you do in one sentence, then you’re actually doing something wrong. It’s not just the message.
Ben Guttmann: Oh yeah. That’s a very good point, right. One of the things I talk a lot about in the book is the idea of focus. And we think that everything we do kind of makes sense because it makes sense to us a lot of times, right in our own head. We spend a lot of time with ourselves, and we understand all the things that go into it, and we see what the kind of through line is for something. But we often overestimate, and this is backed by the science, too, that how much other people spend in terms of attention, in terms of time on our stuff. We’re with us all the time, right? We really care about our art or our new brand of shampoo or anything in between. But most people who are on the receiving end of our communication, we’re one of thousands of things that people are attending to on a daily basis. And the window that we have in terms of breaking through and being heard and being remembered is very, very small. And it requires that degree of focus and succinctness often that you just talked about.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah. Okay. So let’s focus mostly since we’re going to focus, let’s focus mostly on the messaging because that’s really what the crux of your book is. But I just wanted to make sure I made that point. You can’t make a simple message if what you do is too complicated. So I just wanted to make sure we were clear on that. Okay, so I know we’re not going to kind of jump all the way. Maybe it’s totally, totally near the end. But you talk about, the way I always like to put it is, um, creativity loves constraints. And the way you put it is, constraints breeds creativity. So can we jump in at that section and talk about that since this is the inspiration place?
Ben Guttmann: Absolutely. That’s one of the kind of five principles, focus dimensions, one of them too. And we can dive into other ones a little bit later. But constraints are an incredibly powerful tool in art as well as business in terms of being able to get us to do stuff that others can’t do. If we play by different rules, then others are, well, we’re going to end up with different results than they’re going to end up with. And that often is something that’s going to be salient and different and noticeable.
Miriam Schulman: And you give some really good examples in your book. Do you want to share that with our listeners so they understand what it is we’re talking about? It was the Dick and Jane book, which my sister, was, like, learning to read with Dick and Jane. And I remember how much she hated those books.
Ben Guttmann: So when you look at the Dick and Jane books, you know, there’s, like, “Run with Dick and Jane,” “Play with Dick and Jane.” These books were the kind of standard issue, mid-century, early reader books. And if you go to any classroom in America, you’d be able to find them.
Miriam Schulman: Which, by the way. Just so we’re clear. Um, so my sister was born in 1970, but like, our school system apparently hadn’t refreshed their books for a long time. So that’s why she’s still. Yeah. So just so I don’t over age myself.
Ben Guttmann: Oh, yeah.
Miriam Schulman: Well, “Why was she reading from books from the 50s?”
Ben Guttmann: Well, I mean, at one point, 85% of schools were using it, so I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if it stuck around for a very long time. Oh, yeah. I mean, the commonality for these books is that pretty much everybody hated them, right? They weren’t very good at getting people to read. They weren’t very good at engaging students and keeping parents and teachers interested in teaching the material. Life magazine called them insipid at the time. And so there’s this challenge where these books were so ineffective, and along with the other ones that were also popular at the time, that we had this literacy problem. And Dr. Seuss’ editor reads about this in Life magazine, and he goes to him and issues a challenge saying, “Here’s a list of 250 words that are important for early readers. Can you write a book with just a small list like this?” And he bets him, and he says, “Okay, well, let me go do it.” And Dr. Seuss goes away for nine months. He toils away, and he says, “Okay, how can I create a book under these constraints of just 250 different words in it?” And he comes back, and the book he produces becomes The Cat in the Hat, which is the most popular book to date for him and sold, you know, 20 million copies or something like that.
Some crazy number, and obviously his most iconic character. But then the interesting thing about this is there’s the one version of constraints, but the real pressure is when his publisher came back to him and gave him another challenge and said, “Okay, I bet you can’t do it with just 50 words. You did 236 different words in The Cat in the Hat. Can you write a book that is a coherent story with only 50 different words?” And he bet him, I think $50? It was a bad bet. The book Dr. Seuss comes back with is Green Eggs and Ham. It is the single best-selling book that Dr. Seuss ever writes, and it’s become kind of canon in the early childhood literary circles. And it’s just one of the examples of, okay, well, he’s playing by a different set of rules. And in this case, the constraint is a word count or a word list. So he’s forced to do something a little bit different than what everybody else is when they have kind of that whole blank canvas in front of them.
Miriam Schulman: I love that. And we did have Dr. Seuss books when I was growing up. It’s just my sister who… This is what they were pushing on her with the Dick and Jane. And so I’m trying to gain some literacy in Hebrew because my son moved there and he doesn’t plan on moving back. And God willing, someday I will have grandchildren. And I don’t want to be the grandma from New York who can’t speak to her grandchildren, you know? So I actually went to a store in the Upper West Side and asked them for the Dr. Seuss books in Hebrew.
Ben Guttmann: I love that.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah. So Fox and Sox, but Fox and Sox don’t rhyme in Hebrew, so it’s like [Hebrew] It’s like.
Ben Guttmann: Well, you have like, I know, like four words in Hebrew. So you have me beat. Uh, maybe I should do that, too. That’s a good idea.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah. No, it’s cute, but it’s not the same exact translation. And I don’t know what the Green Eggs and Ham is. I’m assuming it’s brisket or something else since Ham isn’t kosher. Okay, so you mentioned before, I want to back up a little bit that you have I think you mentioned there were like five principles of or is it seven?
Ben Guttmann: Uh, five.
Miriam Schulman: Five. Okay. So tell us what those five principles are.
Ben Guttmann: I’ll tell you what. I’ll back up even a step before that to kind of just diagnose what those are trying to solve, which is this idea of if you strip away all these different roles that we have, if you’re a marketer or an advertiser, that’s one thing. But if you’re anybody who has to communicate, if you’re an artist, obviously, but if you’re an advocate or a faith leader or a leader of any stripe, you have to at some point communicate. And on the other end of it, there are receivers, and those could be buyers, voters, donors, whatever. So I strip away all the different pieces in the communication equation. There’s senders and there’s receivers. The problem is that we are not really well-equipped when we’re wearing that sender hat to communicate in a way which makes sense for receivers, what receivers want to hear. So when we are on that side, when we’re the consumers of information, we want something often that’s known as fluent. And so we’ve known the word fluent, right? We can be fluent in English or Spanish or Hebrew, and where we’re fluent, things are easy. Where we’re fluent, things are flowing. You must be fluent in wine or cheese or anything else. But if you ask a behavioral scientist, a cognitive scientist rather, about fluency, they’re going to say, “Well, it describes how easy it is for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in your head, and make sense of it.”
And the easier that is, the less kind of mental work that takes, well, the more likely I am to buy something, and more likely I am to like something, to trust something
All of these positive feelings are associated with fluency. When things are easier, they’re better for us. And the inverse of that is the case, as well. Which is when one is not fluent, when it takes a lot of kind of mental cycles for us to understand something. Well, we don’t like it, we don’t trust it, we don’t buy it, all the stuff that we don’t want. So that’s where we want to be as receivers. And there’s a whole boatload of science that kind of backs that up. On the other hand, when we’re being senders, we’re actually pulled in the other direction because internally we have these biases towards additions. We have biases towards complexity. And then externally we have structures that incentivize us to add more and to complexify and do all these other things, more lines in your resume, more press releases to go out, your name in the—
Miriam Schulman: Fancy fonts, which I’m trying to train my clients now. It’s like, yeah, that script font, I know you love it, and I know it’s so pretty and you can use it in your logo, but get rid of it everywhere else. Like purple script font. And it’s not just one client who thinks I’m talking about her. There’s like five of you who all do that. So more than five, but like five of my clients and hundreds more who are listening right now, and you know, I’m talking to you with your fancy script fonts that are hard to read, and it makes your customers less likely to buy.
Ben Guttmann: Oh, absolutely. That’s a great example. So there are actual studies of this, which is that if a typeface is harder to read, if your text is blurry or if it is low contrast, if it is too small, if it is the tracking or the lighting, if anything makes that text harder to read, does it matter really what the content is? We are less likely, again, to buy, to like, and to trust, all the things that we’re often trying to get people to do when we communicate. And so that’s a great example of that. That’s been studied a number of different times, actually, is, you know, make sure that your text is readable because it actually influences how people feel about the contents of those words. So that’s the gap, right? So we have this part here where we as receivers, we want something fluent, but as senders, we’re often pulled in the opposite direction. So we have this gulf between the two of them. And then so you mentioned the five principles. That is, you know, putting that design background on, I looked and said, well, what are what are the design principles about how we can arrange things to close that gap? Well, that’s what we end up as you look at the science and you look at the history and the tools and you say, okay, well, this is what we can, this is how we get there. And so the five principles, I’ve mentioned a couple of them already, but the first one is beneficial.
What does it matter to the receiver? What’s in it for them? We care. This is kind of sales 101 stuff, right? We buy benefits. We don’t buy features. Number two is focused. Are you trying to say one thing or multiple things at once? And we’ve talked about this at the top of our conversation, right? Is it one idea or is it three ideas in a trench coat? The third is salient. Does your message stand out from the noise? Constraints are a great way for us to be able to make things that are salient. We only notice things that are in contrast. We only notice the figure from the ground. The fourth one is empathetic. Are you speaking in a language that the audience understands? Are you meeting them where they are in terms of the words themselves, but also their emotions, their motivations? And then finally, the last one, and this is kind of on purpose at the end, is minimal, which is, have you cut out everything that isn’t important and left only what is? A lot of folks, maybe before they dig into this topic a little bit, think, “Oh, that’s actually what everything is about, right? It’s make it as short as possible.” But really what we’re looking to do is to say, “Well, sometimes that doesn’t mean the shortest. We just want to minimize the friction.” That’s what we’re looking for. And less that’s often correlated with fewer words or pages or paragraphs, but it’s not necessarily the same thing.
Miriam Schulman: Okay. There are so many lessons here for our artists. Okay, so I recently just came off a batch of website reviews. That’s why that’s on top of mine, the fancy fonts. The other thing is, what’s in it for them? Here’s where artists get it wrong. Are you listening, artists? Pay attention and write this down. Okay, so first of all, when they’re talking about themselves, like on their about page and their bio page and whatever, nobody cares that you’ve always been an artist and you’ve been doing it since you were five. And you love it so much. That’s the same thing as if somebody came to me as a business coach and I said to them, you know what? My whole life I’ve been telling people what to do, and I love telling people what to do. And it just makes me so happy to tell you what to do. So nobody cares how it makes us feel. They care about how it makes them feel. That’s what’s in it for them. And there was something else that you said that I wanted to get back to. So we have focus. What’s in it for them? It’s good that we’re recapping it anyway.
Ben Guttmann: So beneficial, focused, salient, empathetic and minimal.
Miriam Schulman: Oh, minimal. Yeah. That’s the other one. It’s like, you know, when you’re 19 and you went to this country, and then you were 23 and you went to another country, and then you had this job. Nobody cares. Like, what are you doing now? And it’s not, what are you going to do? But what are you doing? So is there something that you want to put like a mental hook and expand on from what I said?
Ben Guttmann: Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad you mentioned the benefits one at the top there. So this is not a step-by-step. It’s not a rubric. But that’s a little bit of a lie. Beneficial is the most important piece of this because we don’t really ever want the thing. We want what the thing does for us. We want how we’re better off because of that thing. You mentioned in the intro there, I teach marketing at Baruch College here in New York. And I tell my students this, and they’re seniors, and I say, if you forget everything else that you’ve learned in this degree, in this class, if you remember this one sentence, you’re going to be better off than most people in marketing. And it’s not even mine, so I can’t take credit for it. But it’s from Theodore Levitt, who is a 20th-century marketing professor from Harvard. He said, “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” Right? They don’t want the thing. They want what the thing does for them. They don’t want the feature. They want the benefit.
Miriam Schulman: It’s like when I tell my clients, “Stop describing the plane.” It’s like if you wanted to take a trip to Hawaii, and the travel agent said, “You know, there’s 45 rows on this plane.” And yet that is exactly what so many artists do. Like they’re so caught up in the… And it was this process and these materials and this is what you were talking about actually salience about removing some of this jargon. A lot of artists forget they’re not talking to other artists. Collectors don’t really care if it’s epoxy and it’s this and it’s that, and they just don’t care. They just like, “I want it or I don’t want it.”
Ben Guttmann: That’s a great example, right? I think in art, this is a very pertinent piece, which is I’m not trying to buy a canvas and some oil paint in a frame. I am trying to buy a piece of art. And I’m trying to buy something that’s going to make my living room look beautiful. Or, you know, maybe selfishly, I want it to appreciate, right, in value. And pulling this back into kind of the marketing space, I also like to argue that it’s actually not even about the hole. It’s about getting the pictures on the wall. And it’s not even about that. It’s about getting the emotional fulfillment.
Miriam Schulman: That’s right. If you go to the hierarchy of needs. It’s like also, what does this say about you?
Ben Guttmann: Well, you know, it’s funny. I’m so glad you mentioned the hierarchy of needs, because actually, I bring that in here. When you look at how do we connect a feature all the way down to what actually motivates people, we have to go through a couple steps here. And it is a very appropriately simple question that you have to ask to get down deep into turning your message around. And that question, that question is “So what?” So, let’s look at an example from my universe. Let’s say I’m trying to sell a tube of mint toothpaste. Mint flavoring is a feature, right? It’s something I can access with my five senses. I can taste it, I can smell it, or I can see it like that flavoring exists in the tangible world. But I don’t really want mint toothpaste. What do I actually want? So you say, “Okay, mint toothpaste. So what?” Well, okay, actually, I want fresh breath. Okay, we’re getting somewhere a little bit. Okay, we’re saying, “Okay, well, I don’t want the mint flavor. I want the fresh breath.” That’s what we’ll call the functional benefit. We’ll call that the first level of this. But you have to ask it again and so you go turn around and say, “Well, fresh breath. So what?” Well, I want the fresh breath because I’m going to have a more successful date tonight, right? I’m going to give a better first impression.
And that starts to be a little bit closer to what I actually want, right? That’s the emotional benefit. That’s the second level down. But the real magic comes in asking it a third time. If you turn around, you say, “Well, I don’t really want the mint flavor. I don’t really want the fresh breath. I don’t actually even want to have a more successful date.” So what, you say, “Well, that’s going to get you to those Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and say, well, I want the love and belonging, right? Or I want the physiological needs.” And those are the things that we’ve seen in million management presentations and psychology textbooks. But they still hold true, those five fundamental needs. The more we can ladder up into those and then turn around from there and start communicating, the more we’re going to be in harmony with how we actually make decisions and how we actually want to, you know, pay attention to process a message. And so, you know, again, we don’t want the drill. We don’t want the hole. We want the pictures on the wall because that reminds us of our family, right? And because that’s the love and belonging need. Those are the types of things that it’s harder to see those because they don’t exist in the tangible world, but they’re actually why we end up making the decisions we do.
Miriam Schulman: Brilliant. I love the way you broke that down for us, Ben. All right, so if you want Simply Put. With a beautiful yellow and black cover with a squiggly line, which you designed the cover, right? I seem to remember this conversation. You kept the back and forth with your publisher.
Ben Guttmann: So I didn’t do the final design of the cover, but I art directed the cover. I’ll put it that way.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah, that’s what I did with mine too. And it kept coming back to me, and I was like, “Okay, these are the Pantone colors I want you to use,” you know, finally came down to that. All right, Ben, do you have any last words for our listeners before we call this podcast complete?
Ben Guttmann: I’ll give you one little takeaway also for this, which is an easy tool to kind of put in your back pocket when you’re trying to communicate. If it’s in an email proposal, your website, wherever. It’s this idea of speaking to one person, right? Oftentimes, we’re going to get up in front of a stage and talk about our work, or we’re going to do a big advertisement for our stuff. And we think that it’s one to many. We think that, you know, the Super Bowl just happened here, the 100 million people watching, it’s one to many. But that’s not really ever the case. Every time you’ve ever heard a message, it’s been just in your own head, just from the one sender to the one receiver. So it’s kind of 1 to 1 at scale when we’re actually doing broadcast messaging. And this has different flavors to it. But this is something that is fundamentally true. A crowd doesn’t really exist in many ways. It’s a collection of individuals.
Miriam Schulman: I love that you said that. That’s why I start every podcast with “hello, my friend,” not “hey, friends.”
Ben Guttmann: Right. Because that feels much more intimate. It’s one person listening. They’re on their commute, they’re in their car, whatever it is. And it’s not the whole crowd at once together taking in this information collectively. So if you could imagine your ideal customer, client, patron, whoever it is, that’s who you’re speaking to. Ideally, if you have a hard time with that, take out a post-it note, draw a little stick figure on it, slap it on the side of your monitor, and write all your emails to that little character. That will be so much more effective than just getting out there and standing on the mountaintop and screaming and hopefully hoping that somebody picks it up.
Miriam Schulman: I love that, Ben. Yeah. I tell my clients that the worst emails are the ones that say, “hey, guys!”
Ben Guttmann: Oh yeah. All you have to do is look at how the best influencers talk on TikTok, right? They’ve understood that the best TikToks feel like a FaceTime call. The best tweets before that platform kind of went haywire felt like somebody sending you a text message. It’s creating that sense of intimacy that is going to be rewarded in attention and whatever other goals kind of follow from that.
Miriam Schulman: Beautiful. All right. All right, my friend. Uh, I’ll see you the same place, same time next week. Until then, stay inspired.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to The Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/schulmanart, on Instagram @schulmanart and of course, on SchulmanArt.com.
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