Shooting straight

Over the weekend I was sailing through the sea of sameness, attempting to cut through the clutter, when I realized I need to start avoiding cliches like the plague.

It’s hard though. Because we all love to play our cards right and hate to judge a book by its cover. We know that it’s better to be safe than sorry, especially during an uphill battle.

We use cliches all the time because, like memes, they come with meaning. You don’t need to do a bunch of explaining when you can use share this:

But what we like about cliches, the meaning they bring, also brings baggage. They replace the specific with the generic. Actual instructions with rules of thumb (itself a cliche. Many, many more are here.).

This isn’t a problem is everyday speech, but it is an obstacle to the clear, revealing thinking that a brief requires.

Years ago I was sharing a deck — printed out, as was custom them — with the GSD. She was as notoriously tough as she was smart; I didn’t take my reviews with her lightly. I had a slide that said “When our competitors zig, we should zag.” She took out her pen, and crossing out my line said, “You’re better than this.” (It was not a compliment.)

My cliche was hiding the fact that I didn’t have a POV on the competition.

Mark Pollard says to use what he calls “pineapple words.”

Researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) found that memorable words are monogamous words with few possible meanings and synonyms. For example, the word “pineapple.” Sure, “pineapple” might get used in slang, but, generally, when we see the word, we see the fruit.

The practice of avoiding cliches is that of stringing together pineapple words into a custom formulation — an active resistance to conventional phrasing. Mani Schlisser recently did a recap post of some hits from Salmon Theory. One of them is ABC, always be clarifying. Even if a few overused expressions sneak into a brief, that practice of examination will itself be clarifying.

We can ask things like:

What is the sameness?

What makes up the clutter we’re cutting through?

What do we do in order to have the right message in the right place at the right time?

These questions are silly but also crucial to helping the strategic ideas inside them turn into new ideas. The thing that makes memes and cliches easily understandable is also what makes them hard to use to say exactly what you want to say. And clear briefs are like this path (also, of course, a meme): something usable rather than something cute.

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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben