Communicating the concept. Don’t miss the nuance!

As entrepreneurs begin working on their venture idea, they must communicate their offering and the underlying value to potential users/customers. How well your potential users/customers/investors understand you and your ideas purely depends on how close your communication is to the language they understand and how they see the world.

By language, we do not mean a spoken lingo like – English, French, etc. It is the vocabulary and its variety to highlight conceptual distinctions, that we are talking about. The vocabulary of a specific group of people would differ from another.

Taking the following example may help clarify the underlying message. Let’s say you are speaking to a physics scholar and then go to speak to a management scholar who studies cognition. Let us assume you use the word ‘inertia’ in the conversation. For the physics scholar, the meaning would be related to physical objects. These objects would not be set into motion due to the resistance they have been in the earlier state. You need to apply a higher force than the inertia to get it moving. When speaking to a management scholar who studies human cognition, the word inertia would mean something totally different. In this particular context, the word ‘inertia’ means that the mind is lazy to think; it does not change its patterns of thinking instantaneously and requires effort by the individual to shift the thinking pattern.

Similarly, when you speak with your potential audience, you are more likely to trigger thinking patterns based on their world view. The vocabulary they use and the meaning associated with these words are reflective of the different categories of ideas they are accustomed to thinking. The closer your understanding, the more likely it is that you can trigger the right mental category and thus have a more fruitful engagement.

It is logical to ask next – how do we know if this vocabulary is different? If you observe and listen to their conversations regularly, you are more likely to spot these. In some cases, you may have several words to reflect very similar concepts. For a commoner, it is hard to understand the differences between the various words. However, if you pay attention, you begin to realize that these words, while referring to similar things, highlight the nuanced differences which are important to refer to for specific details. [Trivia: Did you know that Eskimos have over ten words to refer to different forms of snow! There is no word in Kannada to refer to snow!]

A word of caution here, startups try to use analogies to communicate their ideas. Like if someone calls themselves ‘Uber of Photography’, this could trigger a very different expectation in the audience’s mind. Know clearly how your audience would begin thinking of the analogy. Watch out what you trigger in your audience, do not ignore the nuance.

Ask yourself:

Do I understand how my audience thinks?

Have I gotten to understand what is important to them and how they communicate it? Have I stitched together the questions they ask to be able to understand how they are looking at what I mean? Can I make it simpler for them to get my pitch right?