Don't talk "marketing" when talking marketing to non-marketers
Aditi, my 3-year-old, stared at me intently. Confused. Curious.
Those beautiful "stare right into your soul" eyes.
I was trying to explain the consequences of being needlessly noisy when her baby sister, Aadhya, was in deep sleep.
Without realising it, I addressed her like she was an adult.
She repeated some words she was vaguely familiar with.
No real acknowledgement of what I said.
My bad.
I forgot my "target audience".
So many lessons in there.
What immediately hit me was how we speak to non-marketers.
Chew on this...
"The Lagrangian of the system couples the scalar field to the gauge bosons via a covariant derivative, which, when you apply the Euler-Lagrange equations, spits out a conserved Noether current tied to the global U(1) symmetry."
For someone versed in particle physics, this makes sense.
To the average person, our ears would perk up for words we understand.
Like "system", field", "apply" and "symmetry".
Without any context of what's being discussed, we'd have no clue what's being said.
I realised why when I speak marketing to non-marketers, they understand what I say at a base level. But without any context, they lose most of it.
Same thing when operations or finance people speak to marketers. Most of it goes over our heads.
For someone to comprehend what you say, they must have context.
Simply talking about "content strategy" and specific stages of the "marketing funnel" would only be understood as:
"What are we posting tomorrow?", or
"Are we posting about this product?"
Unlike technical subjects like law, medicine, and finance, marketing consists of a lot of buzzwords and simple English (of course, there are technical terms too!). As a result, non-marketers, just because they recognised most of the words being said come away thinking they understand marketing.
The truth is far from this.
Back to Aditi...
I retraced my steps and started explaining things in the simplest way possible.
And she got it!