by Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ

Do your presentations have headlines? When you’re delivering a presentation, is there one sentence that sums up your presentation and sears it into the minds of your audience?

When Steve Jobs announced the launch of the iPod years ago, his headline for his presentation was “1,000 songs in your pocket.” When he announced the MacBook Air, his headline was “The world’s thinnest notebook.”

Those are headlines that immediately capture the essence of the presentation. And even more importantly, because the language used in those headlines was both pithy and highly visual, every audience member instantly remembered it. In fact, most of the press coverage following those presentations used those headlines right in the articles.

Here’s a fun little test of the ‘stickiness’ of those headlines: Googling “1,000 songs in your pocket” returns more than 71,000 results. And “The world’s thinnest notebook” returns more than 457,000 results. That’s the kind of retention and viral discussion you get with great headlines.

Speaking of Google, when the founders of Google were seeking venture capital to launch the company, they described the company by saying “Google provides access to the world’s information in one click.” Starbucks founder Howard Schultz said in his presentations that “Starbucks creates a third place between work and home.”

Like the Apple headlines, notice how these headlines are short and highly visual. I know I keep beating this issue that headlines have to use highly visual language, but there’s a great reason why...

To learn about headlines, and much more, check out our upcoming webinar called The Secrets of Killer Presentations.

There exists a whole science of language retention that looks at the use of visual language (also called “concrete” words). Allan Paivio, now professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario, is the scientist who pioneered the concept of concrete words (aka visual language). In one of my favorite studies, Paivio analyzed peoples’ ability to remember concrete words vs. abstract words.

Concrete words have high “imagery value,” that is you can visualize or picture that to which they refer. For example, words like road, bridge, clown and even picture, are all pretty concrete (and thus highly visual). But words like condition, amount, request and purpose are all pretty abstract. (Even before you read the rest of this article, just ask yourself, are the presentations in your organization filled with more concrete words or abstract words?)

Paivio paired concrete nouns and adjectives and tested them against paired abstract nouns and adjectives, to see which words were easier to recall. Some of the word pairs were related, like “young lady,” and some were not, like “soft lady.”

In every case, recall was better for concrete word pairs than it was for abstract word pairs. It’s just easier to remember “dead body” or “happy clown” than it is “essential nutrient” or “significant result.” In fact – and this is critical – you’ll remember totally unrelated concrete word pairs way better than you’ll remember related abstract word pairs. Across Paivio’s experiments, concrete words could be remembered as much as 2-3 times more frequently than the abstract words.

Now here’s the real kicker: The majority of presenters in today’s organizations suffer from abstract word disease. Let me share some of the actual abstract word pairs tested in Paivio’s study:
• Complete set
• Annual event
• Useful purpose
• Original finding
• Critical condition
• Reasonable request
• Constant attention
• Adequate amount
• Significant result

If you’ve ever heard a corporate presentation, I guarantee you’ve heard word pairs like this (and probably these exact ones). Over and over again we hear presenters use abstract language. Then they look around bewildered as to why nobody remembers what they said. And the reason is because they are using language that is guaranteed not to be remembered.

Nobody’s going to remember every single point you make in a presentation. But if you give them a great headline – that’s both pithy and highly visual – they’ll remember the most important parts. And when other people ask them what they heard in the presentation, they’ll spit back the exact message that you want the whole world to hear.