Shh. Speak quietly and your audience will hear you better

Parenting experts often tell parents to talk quieter to their children to be heard. This guidance has always intrigued me.

Speak softly and be heard.

What does this have to do with small business marketing?

A lot.

So much advertising is brash, colorful, outrageous and dare I say, “noisy.” As my teen children might say, “so much yapping.”

You know the ads. They’re noisy commercials during which the announcer talks too fast to understand. It’s repetitive commercials that beat a message into your short-term memory. It’s print advertising that is jumbly and stuffed with too much text, image, poor layouts and saccharine stock photos. It’s the seemingly endless drip of “sponsored content” being dropped by the algorithm into your social media feeds. It’s the poorly designed direct mail that you take from your mailbox and throw directly into your trash can.

It’s all noise and it is symbolically loud! As recipients we are repelled by most of it and as humans we use our senses to block it out from our daily experience. We throw it away. We delete it. We change the channel. We put the TV on mute. We turn the page quickly when reading it in a newspaper or magazine or we abandon looking at it altogether.

None of these behaviors are what marketers want their prospective customers to do in reaction to their promotional messages. These are all marketing failures.

What if we tried to metaphorically speak more quietly? What if we designed our marketing campaigns to be delightful, slightly elegant, unexpected and visually quiet? Would we be heard better?

I think so.

This summer I was fortunate to spend some time in Switzerland. It had been years since I’d been there. When I first experienced Swiss culture it had been life-changing for me. I was introduced to the culture and to Swiss design and it literally changed my life. This time, so many years later, I wondered how I would experience this country.

The impact of Switzerland was even greater to me this time. Aside from the natural beauty and very pleasant people and places, what struck me most was just how quiet Switzerland was.

I guess in the United States we’ve grown accustomed to everything being loud, over-seasoned, overproduced, extra colorful, and upfront and in our faces.

In Switzerland there is a concept of “Swiss quiet.” The country has a casually understood cultural practice that between about 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. each day the country gets quiet.

The silence takes on a personality of its own. People don’t make too much small talk, they walk quietly, the trains do not blow their horns every time they leave the station like the Metra trains near my house do. And everywhere we went I felt heard, appreciated and acknowledged by the people I interacted with.

What if we, as marketers, tested quieter marketing? What if our designs were lighter in style? What if we offered less sales copy? What if we advertised our businesses in ways that are gentler and less aggressive? Would our marketing messages be heard better by our stakeholders?

I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer is yes.

As we turn our gaze and focus toward fall and winter communications and marketing strategies, let’s test some “quiet” approaches, however you define them for your business. Let’s see how your audience reacts.

Like parents who just want to be heard clearly, perhaps we should all collectively talk a little quieter and enjoy the prospect of our customers leaning in to hear what we have to say. It may well be that the quieter and more intentional we become, the better we will be heard.

• Rebecca Hoffman is the founder and principal of Good Egg Concepts, a strategic communication and brand marketing consulting practice serving clients across the Chicago area and nationally.