Presentation skills are my passion, and it is the kind of passion that follows me everywhere. Every step I take, every glance I cast, I find myself analysing my surroundings through a communication lens. Today the contest is between two supermarkets near my home.
For as long as I can remember I have been loyal to one of them, the one with warm, red branding that makes the shop feel welcoming. The other wears cool blues and greens, with barely a warm colour in sight, and plenty of people I talk to describe shops like it as feeling cold and unwelcoming. I used to agree. Colour steers a great deal of what we think and feel, both consciously and unconsciously. Red and yellow turn up constantly in fast-food branding, precisely because those colours have been shown to sharpen our hunger and our craving for food. In one study, the noise level of children at an after-school club dropped dramatically when the white and yellow lights were swapped for lamps with a faint blue glow. Colour matters. But perhaps it is not everything.
Where I live, three shops sit within roughly the same short walk. And yet one day I realised that, "warm-colour person" though I am, I almost always choose the cool-branded one. How odd, I thought, and I decided to analyse the place from the front door to the checkout. Below are four of the quiet influencing effects it works on those of us who shop there, and, far more usefully, how you can borrow every one of them to sharpen your own presentations and rhetoric.
1. Welcome home to us
The first thing I meet as a customer is a sign that always stands right out front. With little hearts and a light, cheerful line of text, I am welcomed "home" to them. I remember when they first put it up, and I found it a touch strange. Now it feels exactly as intended, as though I really am warmly welcome. After forty or so exposures, that sign has worked its way into my brain, and I completely love this shop.
Use it like this in your rhetoric: if you are welcoming, open and willing to offer a little of yourself at the very start of your presentation, your audience will recognise themselves in you far more quickly, and you will win them over faster. The simplest tips of all are to smile and to keep an open body language.
2. No barriers, just a red carpet
Come down the escalator and something unusual greets you. There are no gates herding people in and out. It is quietly genius. You feel welcome, trusted, accepted as a human being, and the feeling is immediate. No more being funnelled like sheep through one turnstile and out of another. And as if that were not enough, you are met by a red carpet. The red creates warmth. The carpet primes you to reach for the memories and feelings you already hold about red carpets, which are almost certainly positive ones. In short, you feel special.
Use it like this in your rhetoric: more than anything, the shop wants you to feel welcome and special. You can spark that same feeling in your audience by opening with a respect section early on. That simply means expressing, from the heart and in one way or another, your appreciation for their presence, their knowledge, their success or their thinking. Be spontaneous and take it from the heart; those are the only real rules. Other lovely touches are playing a little music, thinking about how the room is arranged, and greeting people at the door.
3. Reduce the noise
All communication carries noise. In a shopping situation, the owner realises that children can become a form of noise in your buying process. The simple conclusion, from both common sense and research, is that every extra minute you linger increases the chance you will buy a little more, so hurried, stressed parents are exactly the people you want to put at ease. And the beautiful thing about the sign I spotted is that it offers children a free piece of fruit, any fruit they like. That one sign does three things at once. It reduces noise, it signals generosity, and it deepens that feeling of being at home.
Use it like this in your rhetoric: your aim is for what you say to arrive as clearly and intact as possible. To manage that, you need to reduce the noise around you. Tidy the space you are presenting in so there are no stray banners, clutter or eye-catching objects in the way. Dress like your audience and avoid standing out too much, unless standing out is the whole point. And trim the amount of information in your presentation and your slides, because every scrap of surplus information creates noise and makes it harder for your listeners to know what to take in, what to focus on and what to store. One more lesson hides here too: create a warm, familiar atmosphere by offering a little of yourself. Few things soften a presentation, or earn a laugh, like being willing to smile at your own expense.
4. Care
Dotted all over the shop are small signs whose curiosity and simplicity give off a sense that they care about you on some level. Of course it is also there to sell more. But then, selling more is the goal of every shop. The difference is that someone has made the effort to teach you something about what you are buying. And that is a clever move. When we learn something interesting and relevant, a little nugget of trivia, we feel a small tingle of wellbeing in our heads. A dose of dopamine has just been released, and all at once we feel a touch better and a touch more motivated.
Use it like this in your rhetoric: give people relevant, concrete, usable tips and tools they can put to work in real life. Spread those tips evenly across your presentation so these little aha-moments, these small lifts of dopamine, keep arriving throughout the journey.
A word before you go
I want to make one important point. The influencing techniques I have described here can be placed there for genuine reasons or for manipulative ones. In this case I judge no one, even though, down in the details, I can see the difference between manipulation and genuineness. The ordinary, non-analysing customer cannot tell them apart, which is exactly why the best and highest path is to be genuine, with your customer and your audience firmly in focus. Speak from the heart, with logical reasoning underneath.
And for those of you wondering whether that was every "method" the shop used, no, it was not. I counted eleven influencing techniques in all. The other seven, though, are pure and simple neuromarketing, things like product placement, shelf orientation and signage, which live in every shop and belong mainly to store planning rather than presentation skills. Since presentation skills and rhetoric are what you came here for, we will happily make do with four fine tips that make you a better presenter.
Want to become a better presenter?
This is a short piece from David's knowledge bank. To go deeper, the best places are a keynote, a course, or one to one coaching.