Response to Jim Connolly’s Blog Post: Stupidity?

Jim Connolly keeps a blog with tips for business owners on all sorts of things from advertising to business development to general marketing and social media marketing to networking. In this post, Jim talks about how business owners complain about how their consumers are too stupid to understand their advertising campaigns. When really owners only claim that so that the responsibility of conveying the message gets moved from them to their consumers.

I agree that it is much easier to place the blame on other people rather than acknowledge the fact that our own communication abilities are faulty. But as we learned in our marketing class, when trying to communicate a message to end consumers, marketers must take off their blinders and try to understand the consumer’s field of experience. In other words, the onus is on the marketer or the business owners to encode their messages in a way that the receivers will decode it in the way that the encoder intended.

In his post, Jim suggests cutting the fluff from the message, which would help to cut down on the noise that may distract the receiver from the intended message, to use terms from the above diagram. He also suggests testing ad campaigns on small test groups to see how they receive the message. Personally I think that is a great idea, because who better to help you then the people who would be potential receivers. The only problem is the business owners would have to open to criticism and suggestions from these test groups. And not dismiss their recommendations as stupid and an inability to understand their genius.Lastly, he suggests explaining things through more media, ie pictures and graphs. I think this is a good idea too, but the encoder must be careful that the media acts to only explain the message because it is very easy for extra pictures, graphs, and medias to act as noise that distract from the real message.