Why Should the Audience be Excited by Your Idea or Product?

Image: US Army (Flickr)

There are two ways to persuade an audience:
1. Logic
2. Emotion

For most of us when we want to persuade an audience to adopt our idea or to buy our product we use logic, we talk numbers, we talk facts and most of all we talk features, it’s all about the features.

The problem with logic is that it engages the analytical side of our brains and it can be hard to persuade the analytical side of our brains because it wants everything you say to be backed up with facts, if you can’t cover every little issue then you may be rejected.

It’s actually easier to persuade an audience when you connect to their emotions. After all, no-one makes an impulsive decision based on a logical argument…

For instance if I want you to persuade you to set up a pension, I could use logic and say if you invest €700 each month this will result in a tax free sum of €1m and an annual pension of €50,000…

Or I could connect to your emotions and say:

Imagine being able to realise your dream of spending your golden years in a warm climate where every evening you and your soulmate would fall asleep to the soothing sound of waves as they wash up on your own personal beach….

Which pension would you pick?

And this is exactly how Steve did it. He spoke to our emotions.

He used language that connected to our imagination and got us excited. For example in the iPad launch he used phrases like:
It’s phenomenal
It’s extraordinary
It’s unbelievably great
It’s a dream
It’s wonderful
It’s awesome

Using even one of these phrases will trigger the interest of the audience but by using six of them and repeating them throughout the talk he hammered home how exciting and amazing the product was. If I told you that a product was awesome, phenomenal, extraordinary and a dream to use, would you be interested in knowing more?

What Steve Jobs did was sell us an experience, a dream. When he introduced the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad he was selling a solution to a problem that didn’t exist yet so he needed to paint a picture of the future where our life would be easier and better because of this product, for instance when he talked about the iPod he asks:

“How many times have you gone on the road and realised you didn’t bring the CD you wanted to listen to? But the coolest thing about iPod is your entire music library fits in your pocket. This was never possible before.”

That’s a powerful image.

By using a situation that you would have been familiar with, he established a need in you based on a discomfort or a pain point, and then presented the solution and on top of that he’s using that emotive language again “the coolest thing about iPod”

This works because he understood his audience, he knew how to craft a presentation that would capture their imagination and make them them excited about his products

Think about your last presentation. Who was your audience? How did you connect with them, did you use logic or emotion? If logic then can you think of a way to connect with their emotions?

 

10 STEPS TO SPEAKING LIKE STEVE JOBS

  1. Practice Until You’re a Natural
  2. Be Audience-Centric
  3. Why Should They Listen To You?
  4. Why Should the Audience be Excited by Your Idea or Product?
  5. Why This Is The Best Thing That You’ve Ever Done
  6. Use a Tagline
  7. Show Your Passion
  8. Use Theatre and Magic to Captivate Your Audience
  9. Use Great Visuals
  10. What Would Steve Do? (Coming Soon)