Repetition

When your goal is to help people remember information, repeating that information as often as possible is highly effective. The problem is, the more you repeat information, the more annoying you will be, and the less people will want to hear what you have to say in the future.

Advertising campaigns are all based on the principle of repetition. When a major brand wants to inform you of a new product, they spend tens of millions of dollars to show you their ads as often as they can, wherever they can, whether you want to see them or not.

Think back to the last advertisements you remember, how many times do you remember seeing or hearing them? Once, a few times, dozens, hundreds? How many times have you heard an advertisement for pizzas, cars, or upcoming movies? Advertising agencies operate on a simple truth of human cognition: the more times you hear something, the more likely you are to remember it.

A vital aspect of communicating clearly is making sure your audience remembers the key points of what you are presenting. As repetition is one of the best ways to make sure someone remembers something, the best presentation would seem to just need the main point, said over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.

For example: Our project needs more time. Our project needs more time. Our project needs more time. Our project needs more time. Our project needs more time.

Now, if I ask you, what does our project need, what do you remember? Hopefully, you remember, "More time."

While this technique is highly effective in helping your audience remember important points it is incredibly annoying. When next a project status update meeting is scheduled, would you really want to attend if you knew that the same information would be repeated over, and over, and over again? Probably not.

The challenge then is to disguise the repetition of information so that it is repeated, while not sounding like it is being repeated.

For example, "Our project needs more time. We have added more resources, but this has not helped. We have asked for the number of features required to be reduced, but this has not happened. We have already asked people to work overtime, and they are now overworked. If we are going to be successful, we are going to need to have the deadline moved."

Once again, we repeated the same information five times, but we disguised the repetition to make it less obvious what we were doing. The process of hiding our repetition also gave us the bonus of adding additional information that helps support our point of needing more time. Unlike the first version with its mechanical, monotonous repetition, the second version helps answer the question of why more time is needed, not just that more time is needed.

There are many techniques to disguise repetition, but one of the most famous is "Tell 'em what ya gonna tell 'em; tell 'em; then, tell 'em what ya told 'em." Proper English usage aside, this three-stage process is often used in the introduction and conclusion of documents, or the opening and closing of a presentation. In an introduction or opening, we would tell them what we are about to tell them; then in the main body of the document or presentation we would tell them what we wanted them to know; in the conclusion or closing we would tell them what we told them.

For example, if we were presenting a product strategy, we might start with "Our product strategy is: listening to customer feedback, addressing customer concerns, and making our customers happy."

The main body of the presentation would then include when we listen to customer feedback, how we address customer concerns, and what we do to make customers happy.

We might close the presentation by saying, "In conclusion, our product strategy is to carefully listen to our customers' feedback, quickly address our customers' concerns, and do everything we can to make our customers happy."

In this example, we told them what we were about to tell them, then we told them, and then we summarized the presentation by telling them what we told them.

Of these three parts, it is the last "Tell them what you told them" step that is the most important, as we tend to remember best what we heard last. This is why it is important to have a strong conclusion to a meeting, conversation, discussion, or presentation, as the last thing people hear has the highest probability of being remembered.

Though repetition is critical to helping someone remember what you told them, there is a fine line between repeating a point so that it can be remembered and nagging. Nagging is repeating a point when you know the person is already aware of the point you are making.

For example, if you were to keep repeating, "We need to be done by Friday" to your teammates when they are fully aware of the Friday deadline, you are not helping them understand or remember anything as they already know that they need to be done on Friday. Instead, it would come across as you nagging them to work faster. Whether or not nagging is an effective way to get someone to do something is highly debatable but repeating something that someone already knows doesn't help you communicate more clearly, it only earns you the reputation of being annoying.

A common pitfall of using repetition, is not being aware of if your audience already knows the points you are making. If an audience is hearing you present your points for the first time, they may appreciate having the most important points repeated throughout the presentation. However, if your audience already knows the points you are making, even stating a point once can be annoying. For example, if the audience already knows that timesheets are due at the end of the week, mentioning at the start of your presentation that timesheets are due at the end of the week will not win you any fans.

When we repeat a point, we increase the chances of people remembering what we say, but also increase the chances that they will not want to hear from us ever again. A careful balance must be struck so that we can present critical information to them today, while still maintaining their desire to hear from us again tomorrow.