Ep15 – The Get Your Message Across Edition with Jackie Barrie

James Nathan: 00:00 Hello and welcome to the only one business show with me, your host, James Nathan. Today in the studio I’ve got a fantastic guest and again to hopefully have a completely different slant on things. This person is a professional copywriter and she has been her entire working life. She started in the corporate world where she was a senior manager reporting directly to the board of a multimillion pound company. She was flying all over the world on expenses and driving a very flash two-seater convertible as her company car. These days she spends a third of her time writing copy for her clients directly on a freelance basis and the other two thirds traveling up and down the UK, sometimes overseas, training people how to write better and speaking about how to get their message across more clearly. She hates tea, alarm clocks and shoes, but she loves dancing, scuba diving and making people laugh. Please welcome Jackie Berry. Jackie. Hi, how are you?

 

Jackie Barrie: 01:46 Hello. I’m very well, thank you. How are you?

 

James Nathan: 01:49 I’m fantastic, thank you. Now I’ve got a problem with my British stereotype because you don’t like tea?

 

Jackie Barrie: 01:55 No, I don’t like tea and there is a story behind that. When I was 16 I used to work in a local department store on Saturdays and I was in the staff canteen. I had to make tea for 450 employees using a giant tea bag and a massive urn and the smell of it got in my hair and in my clothes and I haven’t been able to stand it ever since.

 

James Nathan: 02:16 Do you know what, now that makes sense, I’ll let you off the hook there. Where are you today? Cause I know you travel a lot. Are you at home or you away?

 

Jackie Barrie: 02:25 I’m actually at my home base, which is back in in Kent, but last week I was in Birmingham, tomorrow I’ll be in Bristol, next week I’ve got Manchester. So every week I am somewhere usually running a training course or talking to people about how to communicate more clearly.

 

James Nathan: 02:44 Okay, fantastic. So you talk about copy, obviously that’s your big thing. What do people do wrong? What are the kind of main things that people just don’t get right when they’re trying to talk about themselves and get their message across?

 

Jackie Barrie: 02:56 Well I think it’s the…. Exactly how you phrased it in the question is that they talk about themselves, they do what I call takedown copywriting. It’s all right them where the secret of copywriting success is putting yourself in the reader’s shoes and writing from their point of view. And I call that bottom up copywriting and top down copywriting is therefore starting with I, us, we, our using the company name telling the company’s story. No one really cares about that. They only care about what’s in it for me. So all you need to do is cross out all those words and replace them with the words you and your, which are the most powerful words in the English language apart from a person’s own name. That is really the job of a copywriter. It’s translating what the business writes from their perspective into the words that their reader is going to respond to.

 

James Nathan: 03:54 But that’s much harder than you make it sound, I think because I talk about this a lot as well. I talk about the most important person in the world. Who is the person you’re, well… We all are to ourselves we’re the most important person in the world. And we don’t care what people do. We care what they can do for us. And so when you read this stuff about, you know, it’s all about me, me, me, it doesn’t resonate. But then when you ask people to write from the other person’s perspective, they find it really hard. Why? Why do they, do you think?

 

Jackie Barrie: 04:24 It’s their own self interest? It’s also what they’ve seen a million times in everybody else’s writing. So they think that’s the way it’s done. I think to give an example, I’ve seen a lot of business leaflets that start with the logo at the top and then we were founded in 1905 and then we bought this machine and moved to this new building and appointed this CEO. And if you’re lucky at the end it will say, and now or today we do this, that and the other. And if you’re lucky to be an address and a phone number at the end and all they need to do to translate that into from normal writing into copywriting is turning it upside down and start with where they are today and end up with how they got there. And that applies to LinkedIn profiles. That applies to about me pages on a website about relates to any kind of company history. Yes, there are lots of tips, tricks, techniques I’ve learned over the many, many years I’ve been in copywriting. But as you say, it’s all about putting the reader at the centre of the communication.

 

James Nathan: 05:21 It’s you make it sound so simple. And I guess, you know, when you know it is, but I also find that people, I think for all the reasons you’ve mentioned, just find this much more difficult than it needs to be. And actually it’s just sitting back and taking a fresh approach, isn’t it sometimes saying, hang on a second, this doesn’t read right? Because when you were talking then in saying, you know, we were established and what have you, by the time you got to the third sentence, I was ready to flick over to the next page, not interested anymore. And I think that’s the, that’s the problem, isn’t it?

 

Jackie Barrie: 05:50 I think that my training in all this started years ago when I qualified as a journalist because when you read a new story, it will always start with the who, what, when, where, why, how at the top of page. And back in the days of print journalism, the person that wrote the article and the person that laid out the page were two different people, and if the article didn’t fit, it gets cut from the bottom up, which means you cannot hide your punchline at the end because there’s a risk it will be lost.

 

Jackie Barrie: 06:19 Now the other reason news is written that way is because people consume news really quickly. As soon as they’ve read enough of the article to get the point, they click away or they turn the page. So again, that means you can’t bury your best bet at the end. And the best bit is all the what’s in it for me from the reader’s point of view. So this applies to copywriting in that you have to put your most important information at the top and your least important information at the bottom. And the least important information is probably when the company was founded, unless that is of direct relevance to your audience.

 

James Nathan: 06:56 Right. And has that changed now with…. Because you mentioned all the, you know, websites and LinkedIn and things like that, how is this as it changed in the digital world or is it just the same? It’s just, just more important?

 

Jackie Barrie: 07:07 I think the psychology of human beings hasn’t changed with the digital world and the lessons and the research about marketing and what works in copywriting point of view is all the same as it was 50 or 60 years ago. The digital world just means you’ve got more information going into more places and I think more of it is being self-generated and therefore the quality generally has dropped because so many people haven’t got the common sense to work out the things that I’m explaining in this conversation or the experience or the knowledge or the training and therefore they’re getting bad advice and picking up bad ideas from other people’s bad writing.

 

James Nathan: 07:50 There’s a real issue with that. I heard someone speaking recently and they said the beauty of the Internet is it gives everyone a voice. The problem with the Internet is it gives everyone a voice. You know, we almost get to the stage now where we don’t believe what we read until it’s proven to us. And I think there’s some good in that, but also that that makes cutting through the nonsense very difficult. Especially if you want some quick information, you want to be able to just find it. And I guess then you need to make sure that your sources to start with a very good, and it’s not, you know, Tom, Dick or Harry sat in the back room just knocking out whatever they believe and taking it as Gospel.

 

Jackie Barrie: 08:30 No, right? There is a good thing about social media in that it’s given the power to the people. And that is just emphasizing what I’ve said about a business owner or a brand that has a responsibility to communicate clearly about what it is they do. And yet recognizing that the power, the decision making is with their audience. And it, again, that’s even more important to use the words you and your as much as possibly can.

 

James Nathan: 08:57 There’s an old McKinsey trick I’ve talked about some times, you know, the big management consultancy when they talk to their clients and they always talk about us in way they never talk about you and I and I think that’s it’s a kind of similar thing isn’t it? It’s bringing it to….. Using the psychology of human beings to make the point more sensible, make it fit better for the other people, make them feel a part, well a part of things rather than apart of things.

 

Jackie Barrie: 09:22 Sorry, I’m stepping on your question. The trend is about openness, transparency personality, even if that’s other company rather than an individual. All that too has changed in the last decade since social media hit the mainstream. But it all reinforces what has always been the case in proper marketing and advertising.

 

James Nathan: 09:44 Which has got to be a great thing. I think you mentioned personality there. You know, bringing people to life, bringing the businesses to life is something that copywriting really can do. How do you make your copywriting customer friendly? How do you make it client friendly?

 

Jackie Barrie: 10:02 The main things are, as I’ve already said, turning upside down so that it starts with what’s in it for the reader and ends with the least important information to them. Making it bottom up, not top down in its perspective so that it’s all user focused.

 

James Nathan: 10:17 What way does service fit in your world Jackie? How do you see service and how does it, how can you see how you help improve it?

 

Jackie Barrie: 10:26 Well, when you first asked me this question about service, I went straight to the definition and I looked it up and as a noun, the word service is the action of helping or doing work for someone. It’s also a system of supplying a public need such as transport, communications or utilities. Now in that context I’m in the service delivery world because I help people by helping them to communicate more clearly for their customers. It’s also a verb to service means to perform routine maintenance or repairs, and of a male animal it means to mate with a female animal.

 

James Nathan: 11:10 [laughs] So there are two things there. Firstly, I was expecting you to talk about mating animals, but that’s why I love podcasting because it brings out some fun stuff, but I was waiting for definition. I thought if a copywriter doesn’t look up the definition of service then something is very wrong. Jackie, thank you. I can tick that off.

 

Jackie Barrie: 11:29 Well there is something else on that that I thought about culturally, the word service around the world has a different level of meaning because here in the UK you’ve got this hangover from a hundred years ago of the idea of being in service where you’re a maid servant, for example, to the landed gentry. And I think there’s a bit of a value judgment around service here, which probably why in this country we’re not quite as good at it as some other parts of the world. And I know that in places like the U S and Singapore where I’ve been lucky enough to visit a waiter or a waitress, it has an honour to serve people. And it just intrigued me how this kind of cultural legacy has impacted the behaviours of some companies and individuals in this country compared with others because somehow here I think some people still find it a bit demeaning. The idea of serving somebody else.

 

James Nathan: 12:31 Yes, it’s something that I’ve talked about a lot recently and you know, cultural differences impact everything. But there is very much a master servant upstairs downstairs kind of attitude to things. And I guess it’s only natural that it impacts the world around us, but in other countries excluding Australia where I’m from, cause it’s basically, you know, just a different version of Britain. While we don’t have the class system and the structure, there is still a kind of, you know, ‘oh you’re only a waiter’ kind of mentality which annoys me. But if you go to France or you go to Italy or even in America, you know, it’s seen as a legitimate career, it is a career choice and one of which you learn to be better. And there’s levels and you know, so I think that is a problem in Britain and it impacts everything. Cause when we think of service, we think of waitresses or waiters or whatever it might be, but actually I don’t understand why serving someone and serving them at the best of your ability is anything but a fantastic thing to do.

 

Jackie Barrie: 13:42 And in the world that I’m in, it’s more about…. I’m at the point where it’s all about sharing my expertise and I’ll spend a long time learning about copy and getting good at it. And now I’m just telling everybody everything I know all, these junior and aspiring and upcoming copywriters or all these businesses that want to write their own text. I’m just sharing it all because I guess looking ahead, there’ll be a time when I’m not here. So they need to know all this stuff that I’ve learned and that’s how I’m serving the world in a way.

 

James Nathan: 14:15 But that, that’s a really great thing to do and it makes the world a better place. And we all, we all do it in different ways. Even if it’s in your professional life, you’ve obviously got a huge amount of experience, which is, which is extremely valuable but also very shareable. But we value when people share any experience, don’t we? I look at my wife’s Grandad’s not alive anymore, but he was a fantastic gardener. You know, I need love to share how he got his tomatoes so good. You know, it’s the same thing. It’s taking your experience and helping the world become better. And if we all did it would, it would be good. We’ll it’d be a nicer place.

 

Jackie Barrie: 14:55 I like to think I’m making the world simpler because it saves people wasting time when they can read a clear communication and get the point very easily. Everyone’s so busy these days, but if people can communicate simply, other people can understand it simply, I never think can just chug along in a nice, easy and calm and more peaceful way.

 

James Nathan: 15:18 You’ve talked about up top down and bottom up communication, but you’ve just hit on something a little bit different there in terms of making it simple and easy to digest and I’m thinking about that, thinking about a lot of things are written in such a complicated way, businesses try to show their cleverness at times or actually what they’re doing is baffling people into not working with them. Is that a big problem?

 

Jackie Barrie: 15:41 I see this a lot when I’m working with recruiters where I work with Mitch Sullivan to train them how to write better job ads. Often if you get a junior recruiter who is writing for, I don’t know, a c suite job, they seem to imagine they’ve got to use lots of long words and archaic language to sound more professional, more corporate than they really are. And yet what really busy people appreciate is clear and simple language. No one gets offended by a message that’s easily understood where some people will get offended and you’ll lose them if you use words that are complex or you make mistakes in your grammar. So the secret is actually to write as you speak.

 

James Nathan: 16:32 And in advertising, the niceties of, well I talk about this quite a bit to my recruitment clients as well as you could imagine, but the niceties of and the structure of grammar should I say is not as important as writing something that people would actually apply to.

 

Jackie Barrie: 16:49 No. In marketing and advertising, it’s practically compulsory to start a sentence with and, or but. English teachers at school would have had me hung, drawn and quartered for that.

 

James Nathan: 17:01 I think if I look at my blog posts, Jackie, you probably go through them now and say, James, for God’s sake, stop that. I do that all the time, ‘and’ is one of my favourite ways to start a sentence.

 

Jackie Barrie: 17:11 I’ve thought about an answer to your earlier question now about one of the changes since the world’s gone so digital and that is when you write in prose, you can write long convoluted sentences and very dense with not a lot of spacing. So if you imagine a book or a newspaper, you’ve got a lot of text and not very many images always and online because people read differently online than they do on print. In that online, the light is shining directly into your eyes, whereas in print the light is bouncing off your shoulder and off the page back into your face. So reading online it’s harder on the optic nerve, it’s hot and it slows down comprehension. What that means, your writing is you must have short sentences, short paragraph, short words, lots of white space subheadings. You’ve got to help people navigate their way around the information in a much cleaner and simpler way. Where in print you can just put all your words out on paper and you’ll still get people who start at the beginning and read all the way to the end.

 

James Nathan: 18:11 Is there an option? Well, I was just when you were speaking then I was thinking about business books because I read a lot of them and I’m going to talk about….. And yours because I know you’ve got a new book coming out soon, which is very exciting. When we write business books, should we be taking some of the lessons from digital and putting them into the print?

 

Jackie Barrie: 18:28 Well that rather depends because a print book can still be read without a lot of the sort of stylistic and typographic suggestions that I’ve just mentioned. What I have however found with business books is that it’s more people read them on a kindle or a similar device than will read them in print. A print book in my experience makes a brilliant gift or competition prize or the best business card in the world to position you as an authority because you’re an author. But the people who consume that content, business people tend to, I think now predominantly buy online so that they can read it on their kindle device, in which case, well, it will reformat it by itself depending on their settings, but it will just be scrolling down and again, you need lots of short, easily digestible content so that people can see and communicate, get your message on a screen.

 

James Nathan: 19:34 It’s an interesting change that book reading thing. I know that I spend a lot of time on tube trains and it used to be that you could tell what the book of the time was, you know, what the novel was people were reading and what the business book that people were reading because you could see it and now you see the back of a kindle or a phone, it doesn’t work quite the same way, which is a bit of a shame really

 

Jackie Barrie: 19:55 It’s a shame for the authors because they’re not getting that marketing now.

 

James Nathan: 19:58 Absolutely. Absolutely. But I’m also one of these awful people that I’ve got a big stack of…. I’ve got loads and loads of print books in my office here. But if someone gives me a book, I will then go and buy it on kindle and read it like that. Cause that’s how it’s easy for me. Or I’ll pick up an audio book, you know, and listen to it that way. And so the print book sits there looking beautiful. Very rarely, unless I want to go back to it. If I want to go back to it and then annotate it or to pick out bits and pieces to use later somewhere else, then I use the print book.

 

Jackie Barrie: 20:28 They are easier to flip through sometimes

 

James Nathan: 20:32 Much, much and I’m in fact defined. I find that actually going back to something, well an audiobook’s almost impossible to do that with even though you can annotate it. But even on a kindle, just flipping through to the right bit is, is pretty much impossible.

 

Jackie Barrie: 20:48 And they have such features and such light built in and you can highlight sections. It’s again, the way the human brain works. My degree is psychology and psychology and copywriting are very closely linked in that what you’re trying to do is use your written word to influence behaviour and psychologically human being’s, memory strategies are often triggered by a visual thing. So for example, a post it note on a page in a book or let me think of a different example. You know, if you want to take something the next time you go out, you’ll leave it by the front door. Yes. Or you put it on the stairs ready to carry up. That’s because it’s a mnemonic… I can’t even say it, I can spell it, I can’t say. Because your brain will see the thing visually and then that will trigger your memory. Oh, I’ve got to take that object to that place. And I think that’s what we miss out with the virtual world.

 

James Nathan: 21:45 It works for adults, I know for 12 year old boy, If you put something onto the stairs, they are very easily and happy to just walk straight over the top of it. There was a…. just jogged my memory, but I saw something recently on Facebook which was a picture that said no one is more optimistic than the mother who leaves something on the bottom of the stairs hoping somebody else will carry it up. So let’s talk about your book cause I’m a bit excited about this. When’s it coming out?

 

Jackie Barrie: 22:16 It should be out in June, 2019 fingers crossed.

 

James Nathan: 22:20 Fantastic. And what are you going to call it? Have you got a working title? You’ve got the real title ready?

 

Jackie Barrie: 22:23 I’ve got a real title and you’ll be one of the first to know. It’s called the experiential speaker. No, it’s not. It’s called Experiential Speaking. I’m going to have to get that right aren’t I!

 

James Nathan: 22:35 Experiential Speaking. I love the sound of it. I love it. Anything that has experienced in the title

 

Jackie Barrie: 22:41 And where it’s come from is that I co-founded the southeast region of the Professional Speaking Association. Okay. And in that role, I was often called upon to run an active networking activity with our members at our events. I would often do something really creative that I’d either invented or I’d picked up over the years from back in the day when I was a manager in the corporate world or from courses I’ve attended as a delegate or as I say, things I’ve just been inspired by from TV or playground games and just invented anyway. A couple of years ago colleagues from the PSA said, what book do you get your ideas from? And I said, no book. I get them out of my own head. And they said, well, you must write the book then. And that’s what I’ve done. And it’s about 30 activities that speakers and trainers and facilitators and presenters can use to engage their audience.

 

Jackie Barrie: 23:37 They’re all low tech, so they involve paper tearing, throwing, running about, they are, I’m told I can say quite unique, but the were quite, doesn’t belong with the word unique. The feedback I’ve had from people that have seen it so far that there’s, of the, I don’t know, 20 something activities the majority they’ve never seen before. But it comes from being a writer. It comes from thinking, what is the best way, what’s the best channel to get your message across? Because sometimes it’s the written word on paper. Sometimes it’s the written word on screen. Sometimes it’s the spoken word from the stage or from the front of the room. And sometimes it’s an activity that the audience engages in because by engaging in the activity, they will remember the experience more than they will remember anything that you say or do. And then they will remember the lesson you learned from it. And that’s the key difference with all these icebreakers. They’re not just for fun, although they are fun. They are actually because at the psychological level, they embed the message.

 

James Nathan: 24:38 Now, I’m trying to think of a, does a quote that’s coming to my head and I’m think it might’ve been Tom Peters who said something like experiences and memorable no matter how trivial.

 

Jackie Barrie: 24:47 Yeah, that’s another quote I’m familiar with. But I know Aristotle said something about…

 

James Nathan: 24:52 Didn’t Abraham Lincoln say it and also probably Henry Ford as well. There’s so many people quoted for that. Well, supposedly said certain things. But the truth is that we do remember experiences and they stick with us. And which is part of the reason my business is called the James Nathan experience. It’s about what do they take away to love and cherish? What do they remember? And how do you help them do that? And I think the fact that you’ve put this into a book is fabulous because we all love to learn from the people who do things best.

 

Jackie Barrie: 25:27 Well thank you.

 

James Nathan: 25:27 Well, it’s very true. And if, you know, it’s very difficult at times to have time with people who have these, these great ideas or to actually get them to, to take their time to speak to you, which is why I’m so thankful for the number of people who’ve come on this show who take time out to discuss their great ideas or the things that make a difference for them.

 

Jackie Barrie: 25:51 Well, there’s a couple of things I would say. One thing is the book itself is interactive and why it’s taken so long is that each chapter links to a video of me demonstrating the activity. So the print book, people will have to type in the respect URL, but in the ebook they can just click a button and having reading the chapter that explains how to run it, why, what to expect. And all that, they can then click through to a webpage that has a video and they can see it in action, see the audience reaction hear them running about and enjoying themselves and therefore when they choose to do a version of it for themselves, they’ve got much better chance.

 

James Nathan: 26:27 Very cool. I really like the sound of that.

 

Jackie Barrie: 26:30 The other thing is it fits very closely with your key topic, which is about customer experience and how that has become massive on the agenda at the moment as a differentiator. Whether you’re selling goods or services, all about what the customer gets rather than what the business thinks they want to offer.

 

James Nathan: 26:48 Do you know, you mentioned very early on in this conversation that you know, the psychology of people hasn’t changed. And it’s just the sort of shop window, I guess it’s different at times. And services, exactly the same services never been any different. It’s just that people are starting to take notice that actually there are businesses we talk about and there are others we don’t. And the ones we talk about, are for good reason and if we can bottle that reason, we can, we can learn from it. And that people actually enjoy personalized service. You know, if I remember going to to the fruiter or with my grandmother in Melbourne and you know, walking into the place and he treated it like a long lost relative, you know, great friend and we’ve got these tomatoes and here are the strawberries and I know you like these little bit greener or whatever it might be. And it was just a very lovely experience and it didn’t really matter what he charged. I don’t think she cared. Unless he’d gone silly with this pricing, she would’ve gone back there every time.

 

Jackie Barrie: 27:47 A similar story. I went to a restaurant with my parents for lunch recently and six months before I had a group booking there for a school reunion. And the chap recognized me, which I was amazed by, made a big fuss of me and my parents, really looked after us beautifully and I’m now more inclined to go again. The trouble is my parents have been loads and they were pig sick because he didn’t recognise them. They’d never done a big block booking like I had…..

 

James Nathan: 28:15 You must be a much more memorable person.

 

Jackie Barrie: 28:19 Well I don’t know about that.

 

James Nathan: 28:21 These little things do make such a difference though they don’t. They when they just say, Hello Jackie, Hi Jackie, how are you? Nice to see you again.

 

Jackie Barrie: 28:26 Yeah, and it does give you that warm fuzzy feeling, which is the experience that you want your customers to have. No matter what service or product you’re selling them. And it links to another twist in marketing that has become really important these days and that is all about social proof. But if you include reviews, testimonials, recommendations, star ratings, any of those things, when you are trying to promote yourself, people will believe those because what other people say is much more compelling than anything you say about yourself. If you’re a hotel and you write about your wonderful venue, everyone’s going to know you’re after the money in their pocket and think when you would say that, wouldn’t you? Whereas if somebody else says yes, this place was amazing and the service was fantastic, they’re much more likely to believe it. And I know there is cynicism around reviews too because they can be abused, but it’s a marketing technique that I think has come to the top of the agenda in the last decade.

 

James Nathan: 29:33 Well, we just have to say the kind of the growth of things like TripAdvisor and Yelp and those sort of, you know, and Glassdoor in the recruitment world where, you know, if you don’t know yourself, you go and look to see, or even when your buying from Amazon and you know, you look at reviews and there’ll be a couple of, you knows odd ones, which will fall out the way. But if the general gist is good, we’re more inclined to go ahead with it.

 

Jackie Barrie: 29:58 And, that links back to something you said earlier about people need that analytical mindset in that not everything that is put on the internet or indeed in print is true. Therefore, you’ve got to have the ability to sift through all the information that’s out there and make your own decision about what makes sense

 

James Nathan: 30:18 And good writing will help the reader make a good decision for the business, won’t it?

 

Jackie Barrie: 30:23 Which is why you have to backup every claim you make with facts and on occasion numbers will sell harder than words.

 

James Nathan: 30:30 It’s very interesting. We’re about to jump into a yet another realm of advertising, where you know, you look at the….. I’m fascinated by Loreal, the hair care business and their adverts two minute copy or minute or whatever they have on the tele these days. They managed to cram in absolutely everything, including some very pointless statistics. Just to prove a point. You know, people will see statistics and go, oh, well if 86% of 12 people thought their hair looked nicer, then they’ll buy that product. But they squeeze the lot in.

 

James Nathan: 31:02 Jackie. I don’t want to go on and on, but I’m having such a lovely time chatting to you. I’d love you though to leave us with one thing, one point, one golden nugget that people can do to make their businesses better today and better for the future. What would that be?

 

Jackie Barrie: 31:19 It would just be to remember it’s all about them and it’s not about you.

 

James Nathan: 31:23 Fabulous. Jackie, thank you so much for your time. It’s been great chatting to you and I hope you have a fabulous day and I hope that the people listening, I’ve got some really interesting, great thoughts to take away and some nice things that they can perhaps do now to change their business.

 

Jackie Barrie: 31:38 Thank you.