Made You Look summary

Imagine you’re at a magic show. The magician waves a wand and utters a few mysterious words. Suddenly, you’re on the edge of your seat, fully alert and ready for the trick. 

What if business communicators could engage their audiences as effectively as this magician captures your attention?

Here, the trick is what psychologists call priming. Just as a magician sets the stage for a mind-blowing trick, priming involves exposing the brain to a stimulus to influence its response to what follows. By strategically leveraging priming techniques, you can make content quicker to understand, easier to remember, and more engaging for your target audience.

To wield priming effectively, be methodical. First, identify the essential points you need your audience to focus on. Then, devise primers to deploy right before those crucial segments. Here are four types of priming you can incorporate.

First, perceptual priming engages the audience’s senses through design elements like images, colors, and textures. These visual cues can make the brain more receptive to important information, even when the content itself might seem dry or complex. By incorporating compelling visuals that are relevant to your message, you can create a more immersive experience that primes your audience to pay attention.

Next up? Semantic priming. This leverages the brain’s natural tendency to form associations between related concepts. By introducing an idea that’s conceptually linked to your main message, you can help your audience grasp new, related information more quickly and easily. This approach essentially greases the wheels of comprehension, allowing your audience to absorb your content with less cognitive strain.

The third type is affective priming, which taps into the power of emotion to make your message more impactful and memorable. By evoking feelings like surprise, curiosity, or positivity, you can put your audience in a receptive and flexible state of mind. Affective priming can be particularly useful when introducing novel or challenging ideas, as it opens the door to new perspectives and possibilities.

Finally, there’s repetition priming. This involves strategically repeating key information to help your audience process and retain your message more efficiently. The old adage says, Tell them what you’ll tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. But this may be misguided. According to the author’s research, simply repeating a core message four times is more effective than bookending content with agenda and summary slides. While it might feel redundant to the presenter, repeating crucial points reduces the cognitive load for the audience. Indeed, it often takes multiple exposures for complex ideas to fully sink in.

So the next time you’re preparing an important piece of content, think like a magician setting the stage. Take the time to storyboard your key ideas, devise imaginative primers, and build in strategic repetition. Your audience may not levitate out of their chairs, but they’ll be far more likely to focus on, remember, and act on your crucial information.