Climate Memo 6 – Tangibility: Bring the Problem Home
TL;DR: Learning how to use an audience’s experiences to your advantage can be extremely useful. Connecting your message to something your audience is already familiar with and can use their own experience and intuition to interpret makes the message much more personal and credible.
The biggest hurdle often faced in communication is making a message memorable and establishing trust with the audience. A message must be made concrete – that is, tangible and accessible – and be perceived as credible and accurate (Heath and Heath, 2007). These challenges can be quite easily addressed with one tactic: wielding your audience’s experiences to your advantage.
Media messages are interpreted through the lens of the experiences, culture, and values of your audience. In other words, we determine if information is plausible based on what we know of the world, and if it’s relevant enough to us to be remembered. Attaching your message to some shared attribute of your audience will therefore help your message stick. Attaching your message, which is potentially novel, to something familiar will make it more digestible and more memorable.
When you allow your audience to verify whether a message aligns with their experience and values, they’re more likely to deem it believable. Doing this also makes the message seem more realistic and relevant. We’re more likely to trust and remember things that we can interpret based on our own experiences and knowledge than things that someone simply told us are true. The message suddenly becomes our own, it lives in our backyard. It is personal. But to do this well, your audience must be highly targeted.
In the context of climate change, bringing the issue into everyday citizens’ backyards is a crucial and difficult challenge. Potentially the most interdisciplinary and existential crisis of our lifetime needs to be made personal and accessible. So, we must draw on our audience’s personal experiences. We’re not going to spend enormous amounts of time trying to explain the infinite complexities of the carbon cycle, an absurdly abstract and seemingly irrelevant topic. Instead, ask people about their flowers.
Flowers are often a source of pride and enjoyment in the spring. We look forward to our neighborhood daffodils or to the iconic Washington, D.C. cherry blossoms. But have you noticed that each year they bloom earlier? The cherry blossoms now bloom two weeks earlier. That is tangible. Everyone knows and hopefully loves the culturally and historically significant cherry blossoms. And when prompted, most people can remember that the average bloom is in fact happening earlier. The message is consistent with individual experience. These are not large abstract concepts.
People can add credibility to your message based on what they themselves have seen. They’re doing the work for you. A conclusion that your audience can identify with and come to on their own is much more powerful than simply relaying facts.
Edited by Madeline Fisher
Featured Image by Marina Endzhirgli : https://www.pexels.com/photo/31449895/
