Are your marketing reports mute like grainy silent mime?
Quick extract of Marcel Marceau..
You see charts / spreadsheets aren’t anywhere near as good as Marcel Marceau was at conveying meaning through mime.
Any accompanying commentary won’t be in a repeatable form. Chances are it’s verbal via phone conference, meetings, Q&A. And you know how easily messages get lost as these get sidetracked.
I’m not advocating writing it all out longhand. For many purposes tables and charts are much better. They make it much easier to communicate. But where do you put the soundtrack (the expansive explanations that are really needed)?
Many important corporate stakeholders won’t get to the meeting or hear you. All they have is the report without the sound track..
Worse – people who heard the sound track and thought they understood – will try and explain, putting their spin onto it.. Your clarity, pearls of wisdom get lost… misrepresented even..
And what happens when your contacts are off sick or leave? Evidence of your insights, understanding & hard work are lost to your client.
It’s broken. Ridiculous. It shouldn’t be like this. Not in this day and age?