How Do You Make A Sculpture Of A Duck?

Question: How do you make a sculpture of a duck?

Answer:

1. Take a lump of stone, marble, granite, etc. Whatever you prefer.
2. Get a hammer and chisel.
3. In your mind, form an image of a duck.
4. Remove everything from the stone that’s not part of the duck.

Certainly, the form of a duck exists within the stone. However you could also say the form of a horse is in there somewhere too. There’s also a tree, dolphin or 1001 other possibilities.

Rodin said something similar about his own process, though like most great quotes attributed to great artists, historians argue about whether he actually said it or whether someone said it on his behalf after he became famous enough to appear on BrainyQuotes. Michelangelo is said to have described sculpting as releasing the figure already imprisoned inside the stone. Picasso, considerably more provably, called art “the elimination of the unnecessary.”

What strikes me about all of this is how counterintuitive it can feel from the outside. We associate creative work with ‘addition’. With producing, constructing, fabricating. The very word “create” invokes the meaning of manifesting something out of something else, or even out of thin air. But the sculptor’s process, at least as these people described it, runs contrary to this. They’re not so much making something, as uncovering it. Allowing it to come out.

What we actually do instead

We can think of effective communication as having a similar goal. In order to effectively communicate, we often have to pare down the extremes to let the core message stand out, and be quickly and effortlessly absorbed by our audience. In which case why, when we create customer-facing communication, do we usually end up wanting to confuse, confound, and obfuscate?

Most marketing we encounter is not the result of disciplined removal. It’s the exact opposite, the result of constant addition, layer upon layer of features, testimonials, and CTAs stacked on top of each other like geological sediment. By the time a buyer gets within five paces of it, the duck is completely ensconced, to the point where it no exists. Duck? What duck?

We could easily blame this on negligence, or inexperience, but it most often comes from a well-meaning intention. We want to thorough, not to leave anything to chance. The objective is to anticipate every possible sales objection before it even pings in the mind of the prospective buyer. The thought process is understandable, but what so many marketing and sales people are missing is that this kind of thinking reduces the chances of a sale, instead of increasing it. We’re throwing the game against us, and we don’t even realize it.

Research from Nielsen on people’s online reading habits confirm what most of us already know: people don’t read, as much as scan. They’re looking for the answer to a question in their heads, and the moment that answer isn’t obvious, they give up and go elsewhere. We’re competing for attention when attention is the scarcest resource, and our response is, bizarrely, to add even more content.

The cost of being thorough

There’s a concept known as Cognitive Load Theory, from the world of behavioral science, that explains why we’re shooting ourselves in the foot by adopting such an approach. Cognitive Load outlines the limits on what the brain’s working memory can process at any one time. When we overwhelm buyers with too much information simultaneously, we don’t produce better decision-making. Instead, the firehouse of unrestricted content unintentionally produces decision avoidance. The mental effort required to parse the overwhelming amount of message, exceeds a buyer’s perceived value of making the effort. The result is buyers either disengage, or they keep the decision open so long it effectively never happens, which at the end of the day amounts to the same thing.

The issue with Information Overload isn’t that people get annoyed by too much content, it’s that cognitive effort of managing it degrades the quality of whatever decision is supposed to follow. Buyers who feel overwhelmed by the amount of data aren’t more likely to make bad decisions. They’re more likely to make no decision at all, for fear of making that bad decision. Hick’s Law describes how the time required to make a decision increases in proportion to the number of available inputs. In other words, giving a buyer increased choices, information, or options doesn’t necessarily lead to a more likely positive outcome. It actually ends up with a longer deliberation, more cognitive strain, and a higher probability that the buyer simply decides not to decide. This is why so many pricing models are presented as three options – Low, Medium, High, Bronze, Silver, Gold – whatever. It’s because we’re more likely to pick from a choice of three than a choice of five, seven, or twenty-six.

Knowing your audience helps (well, duh…)

A business spends months developing a product or service, accumulates a rich internal understanding of every nuance and capability, and then attempts to communicate all of it in the sales deck, the website, the email sequence, and the brochure simultaneously. The people writing the copy know the material deeply, which is precisely the problem. Familiarity with the content creates a kind of inclusion bias. If it matters to us, it feels important, so in it goes. Figuring out what to remove is considerably harder than figuring out what to add, partly because removal requires making a judgment about what the audience actually needs compared what we want them to know. What we want buyers to know is usually everything about why our product or service is excellent. What buyers need in order to make a decision is usually one or two things that speak directly to their specific situation. By blasting them with every iota of information we have, we’re actually showing buyers how lazy we are, expecting them to join the dots for their use case themselves.

Instead of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, we need to have made a conscious decision about who specifically we’re talking to. The specific type of person, in a specific situation, with a specific problem. Once that decision is made, most of what we need to say (certainly enough to pique the prospect’s interest) then becomes almost obvious. We’re not speaking to anyone in particular, we’re speaking to an imaginary generalized buyer, which is marketing’s equivalent of an untouched lump of stone.

messaging that tries to serve everyone ends up connecting with almost nobody. A sculptor who has no mental image of what they’re uncovering just chips away at random. That doesn’t result in a duck. That results in gravel. Quantity isn’t a proxy for credibility, yet we do this all the time. A ten-page proposal feels more thorough and ‘professional’ for some reason, just as a fifty-page website is seen as more authorative than a five-pager. But this is the same logic that produces marketing collateral nobody reads and email sequences with open rates so tiny you need a scanning electron microscope to see them.

Just like with making a sculpture, effective marketing communication isn’t a one-time editing pass. It’s a continuous and consistent practice of asking ourselves whether what we’ve put in front of someone is adding to comprehension or circumventing it, and being rigorous (and humble) enough to remove things regardless of how much effort went into including them in the first place. That’s the discipline artists from Michelangelo or Michael Mann follow. It’s not about some minimalism nonsense used as an aesthetic preference that results in buyer frustration, but removal of the superfluous as an act of clarity. The lump of granite that contains a duck, and the lump of granite that doesn’t, both look identical before work begins. The entire difference lies with what is removed. Buyer decision-making is less rational than we’d like to believe, and the conditions we create for that decision-making matter enormously.

The confidence question about marketing messaging

Businesses that over-communicate, that see every touchpoint as yet another way to blast the buyer with every available argument, are doing so because they’re not confident which argument will land. If we knew which two things would actually persuade a particular buyer, we’d lead with those two things, right? The fact that we’re not sure means that we say everything we can and hope the right piece catches. But buyers aren’t stupid, and are pretty darn good at sniffing out uncertainty. Messaging that tries to cover every angle reads as defensiveness instead of confidence. It send the signal that the sender isn’t sure why the buyer should care, which makes it considerably harder for the buyer to figure out why they should care.

Try this with a piece of your own marketing materials: look at it and ask what parts are doing the actual work, compared to what’s there for reassurance. The reassurance stuff — the credentials nobody asked for, the testimonials from clients in unrelated industries, the qualifications mentioned in passing — is usually superfluous sediment. The editorial question is always the same: what can we remove without losing the thing we’re actually trying to communicate?. That’s a harder question than most marketing content reviews bother with. Most reviews focus on finding errors, suggest (even more!) additions, when what’s really needed is someone asking what shouldn’t be there in the first place, and then actually removes it.

None of this means the volume of our content is the problem. Sometimes, we need to go into the weeds to explain, inform, or educate. Depending on what we’re selling, some audiences may need the full picture before they commit. But content volume earns its place through the quality of what’s included, not simply through its existence. Sculptors don’t remove granite simply because less stone is inherently better than more. They remove it because anything that isn’t part of the duck doesn’t need to be there.

The duck, in the end, is the only thing that matters.