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Change Communication
At Muse, Jackie works with business owners who promise some type of transformation to their clients. This type of work requires a different approach to marketing than a place that is selling you a physical product. It’s actually a bit more psychological in nature. As business owners, we want to find the best way to communicate the transformation to our potential clients. So change communication is the practice and technique of communicating with people in order to spark new changes in their life and help them maintain those changes over time.
Change Communication and Creative Entrepreneurs
Understanding this type of communication is crucial to creative entrepreneurs that are selling an online course or a coaching program or even branding and graphic design services. Typically, we tell our clients that the strategy that we teach them or the branding package we give them is going to provide value to their life and offer up some sort of transformation. Knowing how to communicate that to them and make them want to buy from you is often difficult! That’s where Jackie helps.
Not an Easy Before & After
It’s usually not an easy before and after that we are promising. In fact, the result of the product or service often depends a lot on the client as well. The client has to be willing to put in the work. For example, if you’re a physical trainer and you want to offer your training services, it’s not going to help your client if they don’t show up and put in the hours of exercise in. So for transformational brands, the communication techniques we use are so important to communicate that process to the client and motivate them to maintain this change in their life.
Jackie’s Journey to Understanding Change Communication
Jackie has been in the marketing industry for 25 years. She recalls the story of being a young copywriter and she used a phrase like “this will change you.” Her creative director read that and told her that it’s not a good idea to use the word change in marketing because people are afraid of change. They might walk away from the product because they’re intimidated. So that sparked her interest. She wanted to understand why that was the case. She is always trying to keep herself growth-oriented, as all of us business owners should, and she wanted to know how to do that. You have to get fear out of your mental space and instead move into hope and optimisim. (If you need a mindset boost, check out episode 43 HERE)
Change is Not Linear
We typically think of change as being a linear event. We start at A and we move to B and so forth. But Jackie suggests that change is actually cylical. And that’s something she teaches in the Change Stage Framework. In almost all cases, as humans we usually start something and then we stop for whatever reason. And we have to adjust from there. So truly it’s not linear but cyclical. Instead of looking at the stopping as a failure, Jackie suggests looking at it as an opportunity for experimentation. Ask yourself, what lesson did you learn from that? And how are you taking that lesson into the next experiment?
Give Yourself Compassion
It’s okay to have cycles of productivity and non productivity. Our culture has framed failure as an end. But what if it was just the beginning? How can we take those lessons we’ve learned and apply it going forward? How would you grow? And how can you use that to help your clients?
If you want to listen to the full conversation with Jackie, give it a listen at the top of this blog post or whever you get your podcasts.
Or, download the full transcript here.
There’s SO MANY good nuggets in this episode!
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