The Curse of Knowledge
Knowing too much about your business can make marketing it extremely difficult
By Reid M. Neubert

I have long wondered how it is that companies can do such a poor job of communicating about their products and services. This is probably most pronounced with technology companies, and with all the advances and new products in recent years, we poor consumers have been left to try to educate ourselves. First it was computers and software, then telephones, cell phones and mobile service plans, high-definition televisions, and on and on.

Then I read Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. One of the concepts the brothers Heath discuss in this fascinating book is called the Curse of Knowledge: When you know a great deal about the subject you are talking about, you forget what it is like NOT to know.

As a convincing example, they offer an experiment. Try tapping out a song with your fingers and have someone guess what the song is. It seems like it would be easy for the listener to figure out the song, because you can hear it in your head as you tap. But all the listener can hear is the tapping, and rarely can people guess correctly. Try it!

Those Cursed Web Sites
If, like me, you have found Web sites that are clear as mud and wondered if it's just you who doesn't understand, rest easy. It's not you. It's them.

On their Web sites, companies too often present us with product choices based on their own made-up names for their product lines. GE Monogram vs. GE Profile appliances, for example. If we are looking for appliances, how are we supposed to know which is which? We can't hear the tune they are tapping.

The Four Cursemen
I realized that there are at least four categories of those afflicted with the Curse of Knowledge. You have probably run into them yourself. I call them the Assumer, the Professor, Minutia Man, and the Barker.

The Assumer doesn't communicate his business offerings clearly because he doesn't start with the basics we need to know in order to understand him. He has a serious case of the Curse of Knowledge. He assumes we know the industry-specific information and the jargon, while there is no reason we should. A lot of techies fall into this category. A lot of company marketing, like GE's, also falls into this category.

Next is the "Professor." He wants to impart to us more information about his business than we care to or need to know. And rarely does this professor make his class interesting. He has worked in his industry for a long time. As a result, he knows too much AND assumes everyone else wants to be educated about it.

Closely related to him is Minutia Man. While the Professor is a relatively big-picture kind of guy, Minutia Man can waste your whole day going on and on about all the nits and bits of his business that he seems to find endlessly fascinating. You've met this guy before, I'm sure.

Fourth is the Barker. He thinks his job is to pitch us about all the great features of his product or service. He is cursed with knowledge about what he is selling, however, it is absent any idea what we are interested in. I am reminded of the old microwave commercial in which a presenter goes on and on about the features of a microwave oven, then a man in the audience asks, "But, does it brown the food?"

Cell phone manufacturers advertise how cool their new phones are and how many features they have. But then we ask, "How is the sound quality?" Uhhhh, I dunno.

Companies that suffer from the Curse of Knowledge seem to be primarily Assumers or Barkers. I run into this with clients all the time. In fact, helping them overcome the Curse of Knowledge in their marketing is one of the most important services we provide.

The Curse of Dishwasher Knowledge
I have been butting heads with the Curse recently, because I have been researching appliances for our kitchen remodel. If you want an exercise in frustration, try doing that on a Web site like ge.com. On the Appliances page, we find two links, one to "GE's APPLIANCES WEB SITE" and the other to "GE's MONOGRAM WEB SITE." But isn't "Monogram" one of their appliance brands? Why, yes it is. Farther down the page, we see, in fact, that Café, Profile, Monogram, and plain old GE are all brands of GE appliances. But do they explain the differences between them? No.

KitchenAid is another company that is both Cursed and enamored with their own product designations. On their Web site, when we click on "Dishwashers," for instance, do we find information that helps us choose which model we might be interested in? NO. Instead, we find a list of "Series": the S Series, the T Series, five different Series in all.

In an effort to be helpful … apparently … KitchenAid's main dishwasher page has a thumbnail photo of each model and a summary description. Amazingly, these don't help! In the U Series, for example, the description of all three models says,

"Fully Integrated Console
ENERGY STAR®
Qualified
5 Cycles & 6 Cycle
Options
Architect® Series II"

We know what Energy Star is, but what the heck is a "fully integrated console?" We have an idea what a dishwasher cycle is, but what is the Architect Series II? A series within a series?

But wait. To make matters worse, we find exactly the same description of all four T Series models as well! They look the same, too. In addition, the descriptions of all seven S Series models are also practically identical! And so on.

And, shame on their Web developers, who should have steered them to a much more consumer-friendly Web site. (Blatant plug: this is one of the ways we help our clients tremendously.) Boy could we help these appliance manufacturers!

I ended up calling Kitchenaid's 800 number, by the way, where a very helpful fellow was able to clarify the differences between their series and models right away, and help me understand which ones best met our criteria. So, the Curse of Knowledge cost them an 800 call instead of an interested prospect being able to find the information on their Web site! It may well be costing them customers, too, which is much more expensive than an 800 call.

Know Thyself
If you recognize yourself or your company in any of these descriptions, you might want to consider how badly you suffer from the Curse of Knowledge. Sometimes correcting that can be accomplished with fairly minor changes in your communications. Other times it is more deep-seated, however, requiring fundamental changes to cure.

Isn't communication a wonderful thing?

Copyright 2008 by Reid M. Neubert. All rights reserved.