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Communication
Introduction
Communication is central to any enterprise – it is part of the day-to-day engagement with customers, clients, funders, co-founders and employees. In most instances communication is an act of persuasion, and it involves you (as an entrepreneur) trying to persuade someone else of the benefits of your product, process or service. Communication means engaging with others so that they support you in your goal, through buying your product, through funding it, through providing in-kind support, through believing in you and your idea.
By the end of this unit you should have identified some key audiences and where you might find them, thought about how to communicate and how to use communication as a dialogue, and set out a plan for engaging with those different audiences.
The unit is structured around the different audiences you are attempting to persuade: starting with customers, then looking at those who might provide support in other ways like funders, or other companies you might partner with, or even family and friends. It looks at how you communicate within the business as it grows by introducing you to ‘classic theories’ of communication and asking you to reflect on how they might apply (or not) to you.
1 Sending and receiving communications
The notion of a sender and a receiver is common to most models of communication, though each has its own distinct emphasis. For example, telecommunications and electronics talk about the information or signals that are transferred between a sender and a receiver, as in the Shannon-Weaver model (Shannon and Weaver, 1963).
The Shannon-Weaver model is the basis of much of communication theory and grew out of work done by Shannon at Bell Labs (a world-leading electronics and communication centre). This model suggests there is:
a source of information (a sender)
a transmitter that sends a signal (perhaps encoding it)
a channel with the potential for noise interference or feedback
something that receives a signal (perhaps decoding it)
a destination where the information is received.
While the Shannon-Weaver model and the others that derive from it are not based on one-way communication, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking about the sender and the receiver as one-way communication with turn taking. Our lived experience can be very different.
Another model of communication is the set of five useful axioms suggested by Watzlawick et al. (1967):
You cannot not communicate; even saying nothing or in attempting to give nothing away you are communicating something.
All communications include more than the meaning we might attribute to the words or images within it; we must account for the context and the relationships.
All communication has someone who sends information and someone who receives it, and there is a structure to these exchanges.
Communications happen across a number of media – it is visual, textual, electronic, and can be embodied (i.e. we can communicate through our bodies).
The relational aspects and the tendency to see cause and effect means communications are often concerned with differences in power and influence.
Activity 1 Applying the five axioms
Thinking about Watzlawick et al.’s five axioms, can you think how these might, or might not, apply to you and your context? Try to note down something for each of them.
Discussion
Everyone’s context is different, and your thoughts about these axioms will be different. You might have reflected on a time when you were asked to summarise your idea and were lost for words, or felt you spoke too much and didn’t listen.
You might also have noted that not all of these axioms have aged well; for example, the faint glimmer of digital communications behind the call to recognise them is now so bright it is hard for the entrepreneur to think of communication as anything other than digital. As contemporary philosopher Floridi (2014) has noted, the digital or information age may be fundamentally changing our way of understanding the world, and represents a ‘Fourth Revolution’.
Some of these axioms benefit from being looked at in more detail. For example, McKeon (1957) noted that context changes over time and thus our understanding of the whole meaning changes over time and, one might argue, geographically. McKeon also suggests that within the sender–receiver model we tend to ascribe cause and effect, and different people within the conversation will understand the causes and effects differently.
Other axioms have become more important with time, in particular questions of power within communication and what is considered suitable content and forms of communication – something we return to later. The one that does stick out is the sense that even saying nothing, or attempting not to convey any information or meaning still communicates something.
If we think about what always communicating means in the digital age, imagine arriving at a brand’s Facebook page and seeing they have not posted for six months. What does that communicate?
2 Communicating with your customers
The relationship with the customer is central to the operation of most enterprises. These are the people whose decision to engage with your product or service will provide the revenue to support the business.
In this section you will be considering the following questions:
Who are your customers?
How well do you know your customers?
How might you get to know your customers better?
Where are your customers located? Are they local or spread out?
What media do your customers engage with and what media engages their their interest?
How are you going to communicate with your customers? What kinds of messages will you use? What is the nature of your conversation?
As you work through the activities in this section we’d like you to think about the nature of the audience for a new product, where they are, and how you will communicate with them in relation to the media you choose to use.
2.1 Out there waiting
Just because you think you have something interesting to say doesn’t mean anyone is listening.
It feels like the start of a hundred internet memes, and you should feel free to pick an appropriate openly licensed image to paste it into. As a statement it challenges the assumption that a sender always has a receiver, as in the Weaver-Shannon Model. It is tempting to think that your bright idea has a group of people out there waiting for it. When you think about communicating with customers, how do you imagine them? Have you heard yourself using phrases that assume customers are just out there, waiting for your product or service?
It is an easy assumption to make. For example, in the film industry it seems logical to assume there is an audience out there for a next super hero film, or for a musical based on the songs of a famous band, and so on. However, another way to think about it is that the audiences and customers are not out there waiting, they only form once they hear about the offer.
This is a perspective that comes from those who study politics and ‘the public’. It suggests that we really need to talk about public in the plural, to think about publics, with ‘a public’ only forming in relation a particular issue or idea. The formation of a public is entirely dependent on the ability of someone to persuade them of the importance of an issue (Warner, 2002; Hauser, 1987).
This concept is relevant to business enterprises because they too can be tempted to assume that there is a public out there waiting for their product or service. Instead, we suggest that the idea creates the market, with the audience or market brought into existence only when your product or service exists and people have had an opportunity to be persuaded of the value of your proposition.
Interesting as it is to flip your perspective on the audience for your communications, what does it mean if they are not out there waiting to hear from you? How do you find them, and how do they find you?
Market research can tell you where your customers are located, how many there are, how much they might be willing be spend, and so on. However, in order to communicate effectively and to tailor your message, you not only need to understand where your customers are but also how to reach them.
2.2 The medium is the message
Questions of where the customers are, and how to reach them, today often revolve around digital media. There are those who suggest content is less important than the medium of exchange, most famously Canadian philosopher of communications Marshall McLuhan (1967) who suggested ‘the medium is the message’.
McLuhan argued that the medium of exchange – how we exchange information between each other – is more important than the content of those messages. For example, he suggests the act of communicating and the way it structures our communication, our thoughts and discourses is more important than anything a person might write or read.
Activity 2 The Medium is the Message
3 Communicating with stakeholders
In the previous section you explored how to communicate with your customers. In this section you will be considering the other people who might be important to your business. These stakeholders can range from family and friends who might provide funding or support, to people who might invest for a share in the business, to lenders, suppliers, retailers and distributors, complementary services, and even competitors whom you might cooperate with at some point.
These are a diverse range of stakeholders. This section asks you to think about two areas of communication:
Pitching your ideas – whether it is to suppliers, distributors or investors.
Internal communications with co-workers as your enterprise develops.
3.1 Pitching your ideas
If you have already thought about how you pitch your ideas, you will have decided how to get your stakeholders to listen to you, about the clarity of the message, how you communicate your passion, about your phrasing, body language, eye contact and so on.
As you will see in this 6-minute video, Pitch: ‘Berlin as a Startup City’ (Sollich, 2016) pitching is something like a swan swimming, moving smoothly on the surface and paddling like crazy under the water. (Please note this video contains some swearing and implied nudity.)
This is what we think of when we think of a pitch, and you can find plenty of tips online on how to hone your pitch, which we do not propose to go through here. When communicating your ideas to your stakeholders, it is tempting to focus only on what you are doing. However, whether pitching your idea to a funder, gaining the trust of a distributor, or encouraging a supplier to increase your credit, there is a need to listen.
Listening means more than waiting for your turn to speak – it is an active, two-way process. Rogers and Farson (1987) suggested active listening involves:
Listening to the full meaning, the content of the message itself and the attitude or emotion within it.
Responding to the emotional elements, which can often be more important than the content.
Attending to other cues, beyond the words used – pauses, body language, the gaze of the person speaking, their posture all provide cues.
Listening is a form of communication – it tells the person you are interested in what they have to say.
Activity 3 Active listening
Think about the last time you pitched to someone – it might have been your big idea, or even something else. You probably planned what to say, but did you plan when and how to listen? Can you think of opportunities to listen that you didn’t take?
Note down what you might do differently next time you are pitching an idea.
Discussion
You will have started to recognise that active listening is rather more than repeating back in your own words what you have heard to ascertain whether ‘this is what you meant’. Active listening suggests a deeper engagement.
Next time you are attempting to persuade your stakeholders of the merits of your idea, it might be worth considering how active listening might help to win them over.
3.2 Hidden meanings and internal communications
In the same way that saying nothing communicates something, without intending to we can fold a range of information into our communications. The way we structure our communications – the grammar, the words or the images we use, the platforms or medium, and the behavioural norms we adopt or seek to challenge – all say something.
When you are working in a small team you often have a shared understanding – a shared view of what the enterprise is about, its values, its norms, a way of communicating about the business. When someone communicates, these norms are folded into the message – think of it as a hidden code. When we hear or see these messages we need to decode them.
However, this process of encoding and decoding is far from perfect, as race and power cultural theorist Stuart Hall explains in Encoding/Decoding (1980). You might ask, what does a cultural theorist interested in race and power have to contribute to entrepreneurship? However, his work on communication can teach us a great deal about misunderstanding, and how ideas outside the norm are received and understood, which can help to develop a richer sense of how messages are received and understood by customers, funders and the people we work closely with.
In Encoding/Decoding, Hall (1980) suggested we should see how an audience derives meaning from communications in relation to:
A dominant position – the meaning of the communication is understood as the person who made the message intended, because the audience accepts the established norms of communication and the views expressed within the message fit with their own.
A negotiated position – the audience accepts the views in the message because they generally accept the ways in which the message is communicated, and they understand the views expressed are the mainstream, but they still retain their own views.
An oppositional position – the audience understands the meaning of the message but rejects the dominant meanings of the words and the norms it suggests, preferring their own reading of the situation.
Part of being an entrepreneur is being able to see problems and solutions in different ways from others, often pushing against dominant meanings. This sense of communication as having norms (which you may seek to embrace) or challenges is at the heart of being an entrepreneur and can be a source of frustration. For example, think of an instance where a customer seems to accept the premise but is not convinced by your product or service.
The challenge of winning over customers, or even funders, is probably familiar, but what about winning over your employees? How you do this will vary depending on the context, as internal communications are social and situated. Growing a business involves building teams to take tasks forward. Those ‘in at the start’ may be invested in the idea – they understand the potential of an oppositional or a negotiated position and share the reading of the situation.
As the team grows it becomes more difficult to develop a shared understanding. Some companies are very good at setting themselves up as being ‘different from everyone else’, and people are attracted by the image the organisation presents to the world. An early example of this might be the UK ethical toiletries company The Body Shop, or one might think of the way a corporate monolith like Google presents itself as being different, an impact somewhat dimmed now that many other companies have copied those differences.
What Hall’s work suggests, is that if your message proposes a solution that puts your venture into either a negotiated or an oppositional position, and the message is only received and understood in relation to the dominant narratives about the range of potential problems or solutions, then the strength of the argument will be undermined. Part of growing your business involves moving your oppositional view to being the dominant one, but on the journey you need to take people with you, especially those who work alongside you.
4 Developing a communications strategy
This sounds very grand. However, at its simplest it is about having a plan for how you communicate with the different people you need to engage with to make a success of your business. In this final section you will be considering what should be in your communication strategy. In particular, you need to consider:
how your communication with different stakeholders can add value to your enterprise
how to develop ‘a voice’ that is appropriate to you and your enterprise
how you will organise the practicalities of managing your business communications.
You will consider these questions in relation to finding your voice and developing appropriate ways of capturing the value of your communications to your enterprise.
4.1 Communication and value
We’d like you to think about communication as a two-way dialogue. One of the critical points of this dialogue is finding out who you are talking to.
In the design-based approaches spilling out from the development of technology into enterprises, it is becoming increasingly common to use a ‘persona’ to capture the different types of customer. Personas can help you to model how your customers might interact with your products or services. Personas can be simple and just concentrate on age and occupation. However, you will gain more insight from more sophisticated personas.
Activity 4 Developing a persona
Identify the different customer segments you want to target and represent them as personas. At this stage it might be largely guess work, or you might have a reasonably detailed understanding of your ‘ideal customer’.
Try to include as much detail as you can. You might want to write it out as a narrative, including details about each person and imagining how your product or service meets their needs. Alternatively, you might want to draw a picture. Just do what works for you.
This resource from the Interaction Design Foundation ought to help:
Discussion
Developing a persona of an ideal customer is difficult. Often the process will tell you more about what you do not know, and highlights the gaps in your understanding. These gaps might be at the level of how much the customer might be willing to spend, but they might also show how little you know about how to communicate with your customers. In particular, it might show how you need to think through how different people in different contexts might understand the explicit and implicit meanings contained in your communications.
Developing a persona is one way of capturing what you know about your customers, as it gives you someone to talk to when you try out your communications. Lots of other ways exist, but developing a series of personas can be a useful way to sense check any communications before you press ‘send’.
4.2 Finding your voice
One of the themes implicit within our focus on communication has been miscommunication: from interference in the signal, to problems decoding, from hidden meanings to the way that meaning changes over time. It also broached the issue of what is not being said, how our communications contain all sorts of content that we might not be fully aware of, whether it is the cultural norms we adopt, or simply the medium we choose.
In the previous activity you were asked to develop a persona of your ideal customer in order to address these potential issues. It is also useful to think about your enterprise’s persona.
Activity 5 Creating an enterprise persona
Try to imagine your enterprise as a personality:
What kind of person is it?
Is the enterprise you? If it is not you, who is it?
How would this person communicate?
Where do they hang out?
Do they read trade journals?
Do they use social media? Are they on Twitter or Facebook?
What sort of language do they use? Is it formal or informal?
What sort of people would this personality appeal to? Are they the sort of people you want to attract?
Discussion
As well as helping you refine the messages you send out to your stakeholders and customers, having a ‘voice’ for the venture will help you to understand the brand; for example, what kinds of things your brand would say and what it would not say. This is likely to be important as the venture grows. Having a personality for your venture will also help those who join you, and may end up being your ‘front face’ as it indicates how everyone ought to communicate.
Summary
You have considered whether customers are out there waiting, or whether it is your value proposition and the ability to persuade people of its value that creates the market. Some truly innovative products do create markets. For example, Apple didn’t completely invent the idea of a smart handheld device that can also communicate, but it did create the app-based ecosystem that dominates mobile telephony. We cannot all be Apple, but it may be useful to think about how your product or service creates an audience.
In this digital age it is difficult for us to think about how we communicate with our customers without thinking about digital channels. The suggestion that ‘the medium is the message’ asked you to consider what the medium you chose to use to reach out to people says about your business. You were also asked to think about how the medium, its norms and conventions shape the content itself.
Then you looked at how to simplify all the questions about sending and receiving messages (of noise and interference, of hidden meanings, of communication as listening, and the issues of miscommunication) into a simple question: Who is having the conversation?
It is far easier to think through your communication if it is from person to person – if you know where you are talking from and who you are talking to, and if you know who is talking and who is listening. These exercises will complement any work you are doing to clarify your customer segments and the channels of communication you use. If you are working through Developing your business model it will help you to refine your ‘Value Proposition Canvas’. As you look to establish the fit between the offer and the needs of the customer, think through the ways you communicate and develop value through your communications.
We also asked you to think about who your stakeholders are, and where and how you communicate with those whose support you need to grow and develop your enterprise. Listening is required throughout the enterprise, and is often part of the way we understand the market and engage with our customers. You were asked to think about listening as a form of communication, in particular listening to those you are attempting to persuade to be a part of your enterprise through investing in you and your business.
You have also been encouraged to think about the meanings hidden within our communications, from the language we use, to the degree to which we adopt or challenge conventions, and the extent to which the idea represents a radical departure from existing approaches. It was suggested that the need to be alive to those hidden meanings is not just an issue for our external communications but also our internal communications, as the team grows from its core to include others.
These are certainly not new ideas – after all, this is a tour of ‘the classics’ – and you have probably noted how many of them are implicit within our understanding of how to communicate. All we are trying to do in this unit is to take those implicit assumptions about ‘the way we do things around here’ and examine those norms, just like any entrepreneur would do.