Ben Gutmann
speaker
194 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 15 Nov
Ben Gutmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
If you've ever worked in marketing, if you've ever worked in sales, the first thing that you're going to learn is that people don't buy features, they buy benefits.
People don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.
People don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.
They don't want the thing, they want what the thing does for them.
Well, the essence of why simple is better is a word that we all know, which is called fluency.
And we know this in our daily life, right?
We can be fluent in English or Spanish, but that word means something else to a cognitive scientist.
If you ask them, fluency basically describes how easy it is to take something from out in the world, stick it in your head, and make sense of it.
And it turns out that
something that's easier, that takes less effort, that takes less sweat, well, we're more likely to trust it, more likely to like it, more likely to buy it.
And the opposite is also true.
If it takes a lot of work, if it's hard for us to understand, if it's hard for us to remember, well, we don't like it, we don't trust it, we don't buy it.
And most of the time, that's not what we want.
Oh yeah, I mean, there's the famous quote which is misattributed to Mark Twain often, which is, I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write you a short one.
It's hard.
Simple can be effective.
We can know it can be effective.
We know that as a receiver it's effective.
But when we're in the other role, when we're the one who has to send, who has to make an advertisement, send an email, make a presentation, well, we have a really hard time getting out of our own way.
No, no.
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