conversation is an engine

In the coming age where conversation fuels our business, we’ll need to sharpen the usual tools in a different way. As a copywriter, I help my clients hone their messages, kill jargon, simplify, and answer “Who cares?” But helping my clients engage in conversation with their customers demands something more. Good conversation is about sharing useful information, information that goes beyond primary and secondary marketing messages. Conversation is markedly different from the old formulas that required key selling points to be repeated over and overin the presence of an audience that is assumed stupid or hard of hearing or both. Of course, officially we say we’re just trying to “break through the clutter.” But unofficially, do we think less of our audiences when we dumb things down? The dialogical world assumes clutter breaking up like spring ice as customers locate their real interest.

But conversation may well be a lost art, given all the years we’ve spent crafting our one-way messages. I was reminded of this when reading about the healing power of conversation in Edward Wimberly’s “African American Pastoral Care and Counseling: The Politics of Oppression and Empowerment.” Wimberly writes about how oppressed peoples (in particular) get recruited into stories that powerfully shape their world—leaving them powerless. In fact, we all get recruited into stories that shape our world, for good or ill. But the power of conversation is in reshaping how we engage with the world. The best conversations have, among other things, elements of truth-telling and deep listening.

How does this relate to marketing conversations in the dialogical world? It means we’ll need to grow in our ability to listen. We’ll need to grow beyond techniques for active listening (the “Uh-huh” and “I see” we mutter from behind the newspaper when our spouse talks). It means listening because the person across from me has value, because as whole people they are truly interesting, and because their life experience—not just their experience with my product—has a bearing on your route through this world.

That’s why growing in our ability to converse may actually help us grow more human.

###