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We're Avapond. We're like business detectives. Challenge your assumptions. Figure out the culprit. And build whatever you need to get there.

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Blog 5 min read

Your customers can’t hear the tune in your head

Lewis Dowling Managing Director and Consultant

Tap a song on a table and almost nobody can name it. Your readers have the same problem with your content. Here’s why it happens and how to fix it.

Contents

Let’s play a game. Play the video below, and try to guess what tune it is.

Did you get it? Probably not. (If you did, well done. Everyone here at Avapond couldn’t, so give yourself a pat on the back.) 

Here’s another one. Go on, give it another go.

No? Don’t worry, it’s not just you. There’s a reason for it. (Also if you want to know the answers, they’re both at the end of this blog. Once you know, re-listen to the videos above. It’ll be annoyingly obvious.)

This game has a 2.5% success rate 

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton did exactly this, just with tappers and listeners. The tappers predicted that the listeners would guess the songs correctly about half the time.

The result was 2.5%. The listeners could only name three of the 120 songs they heard.

Try it yourself. When you tap out a song on the table, it seems so obvious. You can hear the melody in your head. But the listener is just hearing a few taps, like in the audio above. It could be anything. In fact, if you tapped out Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and The Alphabet Song, you’d hear completely different songs, while the listener would hear the exact same taps.

This is the Curse of Knowledge

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias where the more you know about a topic, the more you assume others know. Your bar for ‘what everyone knows’ gets raised.

So if you’re an electrician, you’ll assume the average person knows the colour of the ground cable. But the truth is, most people probably only have a vague sense of what the ground cable even does (let alone its colour). A mortgage advisor expects everyone knows what a compound interest rate means. And a graphic designer will talk about the difference between padding and margin without batting an eye.

Congratulations if you’re sitting there thinking: “I know all of those.” You’ve just proven you’re educated and smart. You’ve also proven you’re exactly the sort of person who’ll succumb to the curse of knowledge.

Good strategy, bad execution

Many businesses have the right approach and are regularly creating insightful content. But unfortunately the meaning is buried, because the reader isn’t ‘hearing the melody’.

A good way to spot this is to look at your analytics. If your pages are getting visits, but people are only spending a few seconds on the page, it’s likely because they’re not understanding it. Likewise, you could be creating a lot of social posts but people aren’t clicking through to the article itself.

In either case, it’s probably because the reader isn’t understanding your point. You’re reaching the right people, but they’re not hearing your message.

This can easily turn into a larger problem, where companies keep changing their positioning or their strategy. They assume they’re not releasing enough, not creating the right kinds of content, or targeting the wrong people. And they end up in a rabbit hole of experimentation.

Now, it’s good to check these assumptions. We generally encourage people to challenge their approach and dig into the real reason.

But sometimes the reason is simple. You’re just confusing your reader.

Your content needs context

Before you start fiddling with your strategy, make sure you’re not falling victim to the curse of knowledge. There are three ways you can avoid it:

  1. Keep your language simple. Use everyday, simple language when you’re communicating. This makes it easier for people to understand newer terms and ideas in context. If there’s a single word your reader doesn’t understand, they’ll either figure it out from how you used it or they’ll look it up. But if it’s in a sea of confusing sentences and long words, they’ll just get confused and leave.

  2. Avoid jargon and acronyms. Some readers know them, sure. But most don’t. Write for the person with the least knowledge, not the most. And if you absolutely must use a term, make sure you explain it the first time you mention it. You don’t need to go into huge detail, just enough so that it ‘clicks’.

  3. Explain why your point matters. You know what causes the problem and what pain point you’re trying to solve. But your reader doesn’t. They need that context. Even if they’ve experienced the problem, they might not have realised it. There’s a difference between knowing nobody likes your cooking and knowing it’s because you put too much salt in.

So, what were the songs? 

Did you scroll all the way to the bottom to find out? Fair. (Although please read this blog, too. We like writing and there is some super cool advice in there.) 

The first one is “Happy Birthday to you”. And the second one is “We wish you a merry Christmas.” Go back and listen again. You won’t be able to unhear it. 

Want a second pair of ears?

It’s almost impossible to spot the curse of knowledge in your own writing. You’ll always hear the tune. We come to it fresh, which means we hear what your customers hear (taps, mostly). Then we help you put the tune back in.

Come along to one of our events, if you’d rather figure it out by yourself. We run talks and workshops on the blind spots that hold businesses back (and free webinars, if you’d rather stay at your desk). Nobody will make you tap anything. Probably.