Using Rhyme to Make Messages Stick

Key Takeaways

• Rhyme and alliteration can make messages easier to grasp, remember and act on.
• Internal communicators can learn from marketing techniques such as taglines, calls to action and campaign framing.
• AI and creative colleagues can help generate memorable phrases that give workplace messages more impact.

Topics

• Communications
• Marketing
• AI & Machine Learning
• Cognition

Transcript

Well, we'll just jump into the next, and the next hint here around improving processing fluency, and that's rhyming. Who doesn't love a good rhyme or alliteration, just to make something more memorable? In fact, we should have had one for Chuck's success today. We should have created a rhyme, and then you all would have remembered. But in this example, just making a date to donate improves the processing fluency. Then a sentence that would say something like, Sign up or register to give blood at, you know, the actual alliteration or rhyme and a little bit of fun makes it easier for people to grasp and grapple with. Yeah, I actually see this as one area where the communicators can learn a lot from their friends in marketing, of coming up with what are those great calls to action, what are those great taglines that motivate people. I think that's where our colleagues in marketing can become a great resource and honestly also a great use of AI to help you come up with some of these little quips or reminders or taglines or jingles, whatever it is, to get employees to pay attention. Yeah, that's a really good point. You don't need to be, you know, a big advertising agency creative to come up with these campaigns now. If you know broadly what you want to do, and also I find that actually there's a lot of very creative people internally. Like there's some hilarious people, I'm not going to include myself, at ScreenCloud, who would definitely be my go-to people for inspiration on taglines and things like that. But it makes a lot of sense. And I think also something like a date to donate, it feels more of a campaign and less of like, Oh, just here's a message, you know, look at this message. It feels like actually they put some care and craft into this, and it's a kind of another social signal, which is, well, someone's made this thing a thing. Therefore, that's giving me a social signal that maybe I should engage with this more too. Whereas if it just feels like a message prompt on a screen and not really, you know, thought about too much, then it feels like something that I can just let pass by. And I think there is power in that, and that's obviously the marketers understand this, but yeah, this is definitely, that was a really good point, Chuck.