WHAT can three small children teach you about matching messages to audiences? Cox Inall’s Michael Thomson finds out the hard way.
When my brothers and sisters and I were young we regularly complained about the dire injustice of our parents daring to treat one child differently from another … especially when it came to punishments!
As a parent to three little girls I now hear the complaints of “it’s not fair” but my perspective on the argument has now changed.
As many parents would appreciate, sometimes there is an element of doing whatever it takes to find some peace in a chaotic household, but there is also a method amidst the madness.
Firstly, and despite our best attempts to be fair, life is full of trivial injustices, a fact we all need to accept at some point in our lives.
Secondly, and more importantly, an approach to a problem which works with one child, does not necessarily work with the others.
For example, our five-year-old responds well to positions of authority – that is, if she’s out of line she’ll generally do as she’s told. The challenge is squeezing a word in between her non-stop stream of consciousness, which sometimes means a raised voice is often required to cut through the chaos and get the message across.
But the same method with our three-year-old will deliver a very different result – if she’s not laughing in the face of authority, she’s screaming, bottom lip jutted out, foot stamping, determined. She can even do this while asleep, taking out her frustrations on some poor creature in her dreams – I’d admire it as a talent if it didn’t deprive us of so much sleep.
After many a long and frustrating stand-off, I’ve now discovered that talking quietly and gently, and having the conversation in another room away from her sisters, will deliver a much better result than some enforced time on the naughty chair. Turn the volume down, soften the tone and make her feel like her problems are important and then she’ll willingly work with us.
And then there’s our little 18-month-old, who has just discovered the joys of saying “no” to everything, while looking so delightfully cute that it seems impossible not to agree to her every objection.
Negotiating with intransigents is something I’m yet to master.
As every parent knows, this is all easier said than done on a day-to-day basis – the point being that they are all very different characters, with different wants and needs.
The standards we try to impose on each of them are consistent; it’s just the method of delivery that changes in order to obtain the behavioural response we’re seeking.
In PR-land we often talk about strategies with objectives, key messages and target audiences – put simply, if an organisation is seeking a behavioural response from a group of people, then it needs to deliver its messages in a range of ways to ensure different personality types both receive and engage with a campaign.
It’s why, for example, a typical communications campaign might feature a mixture of traditional media (both print and broadcast as they stimulate different senses), fact sheets, case studies, advertisements, e-newsletters, public presentations, and social media (again of all different types – video, photos, tweets, and links to longer articles).
It’s also why close observers will notice small tweaks in the wording or presentation of campaign messages to more closely match them with the needs of the target audience.
It goes without saying that pre-planning is the key to successfully aligning these messages, methods and audiences because when it comes to communications strategies, one size doesn’t fit all – just ask your kids.
Michael Thomson is a senior consultant at Cox Inall based in Rockhampton, Queensland.