Six Questions Every Communicator Should Base Their Work On

I have been very fortunate in my life in that I have never really had a job. That’s not to say I wasn’t employed. Because I was employed by many companies and individuals.

But it was never a job. It was always helping people move their businesses along, to achieve whatever goal had been set. It was always about taking the ideas I had about their business and putting them to work. It was about the sheer joy of waking up every morning with a new hill to climb.

It was never about the job. It was never about the salary. It was never about fitting into some corporate culture, because the culture wasn’t mine. It was about looking at the communication challenge a company or individual was facing and helping them meet and conquer that challenge.

With every business I ever worked with, I made it clear from the outset that I was not going to become part of their corporate culture. Because most corporate cultures as stagnant, weighed down by their own bullshit and internal politics.

Nope, I was always an outsider. I was the guy with the objective point of view. I was the guy who wasn’t affected by all the give and take and the endless amount of bullshit that give and take generated.

I was the guy who asked six questions of the highest person on the food chain and based whatever I did on that. I didn’t look for compromise. I dealt in absolutes.

Now you might think that sounds pretty arrogant. But in point of fact that attitude put in front of a lot of very decisive and highly focused and motivated people. And they appreciated that I was working to simplify what they saw as a ton of bullshit coming at them every day.

I didn’t get there right away. I had to learn how to do this. But I learned from the best people I could find. I picked their brains clean and added all the stuff they knew to the stuff I had already gathered and then one day I woke up and realized that communication was a very simple thing. It was only made complicated by the fact that everyone involved in the process had to feel they were contributing to it, even of they didn’t have the skills to do that constructively.

That was what I took away from my ad agency years. Those years taught me how to think strategically and act creatively. It taught me how to simplify and clarify and then execute. It taught me how to be wrong and then make things right. It taught me how to convince other people that I could handle whatever challenge they threw at me. And no matter what the business, what the market sector or what the product or service happened to be, the process was always exactly the same.

1. What are we talking about?
2. Who are we trying to reach?
3. What is the best way to reach them?
4. What is the main benefit of our product or service?
5. How do we support that benefit?
6. What is the character of our brand or business?

If you get honest, well-reasoned answers to these questions you will have a crystal clear image of the product or service you are selling. And if you execute your program skillfully and creatively against the answers to these questions you will end up with a right solution.

It took me about a decade to figure this all out and simplify it as I have done here. But what it got me was thirty five years of work that was completely effortless and a joy to get up in the morning and do.

And that was quite simply because I was not taking a stab or even making an educated guess at a communication solution. I was creating the solution out of whole cloth using the information in the six questions above.

The end.