Humor me for a moment. Let’s think of your company or idea as a beautiful home, carefully constructed with a solid foundation and full of innovative nuances that any prospective homeowner would be thrilled to have. You’ve gone through painstaking measures to craft this home and are ready to start marketing it to buyers, complete with a fair listing price. Just as you have everyone’s attention and prospective investors are lining up around the block, you decide to paint the house fluorescent pink and bust out all of the windows. The foundation and awesome features are still the same, but the investors take one look at the exterior and pass on your offer. You can’t understand why.
Brace Yourself…
I know what you’re thinking: “Yeah, they didn’t give us a chance because we made the home look hideous.” Correct. So if this example illustrates the importance of proper presentation so deliberately, why do so many companies approach their prospective buyers with presentations that look like this:
(Real slide. Logo and name hidden because we’re embarrassed for them.)
Soak that bad boy in for a moment. If you think my six-year-old son created the above presentation, you’d be wrong. He could do a much better job than that. No, the above is an actual marketing slide of a very successful beverage company that I’d bet my pink house you’ve heard of. This multi-million dollar organization actually used that to pitch a new product to a buyer. If they impressed their target, that juice is obviously laced with cocaine, because the presentation looks like a junkie threw it together on the wrong end of a 36 hour bender. Now here’s a glimpse of a company in the same industry that decided, wisely, to hire professionals:
We always preach the importance of first impressions and the fact that, by definition, you can only make one. Your presentations are a direct reflection of your company and how adept you are at accomplishing your objectives. When you look at the above examples, is it not blatantly obvious which presentation has an aura of professionalism and accomplishment?
The Science:
According to the coherence principal, adding useless, scattered, or confusing images or text to a presentation will not only look bad, but also decrease retention of the information than if you had just put black words on a white background. Likewise, utilizing effective design elements has the total inverse effect, increasing retention and stimulating the working memory. What do you remember from the juice slide? The grapes and banana? The strange Mickey Mouse ripoff? How terrible it was? Your working memory is probably as confused as the slide, which is exactly the point. There is no strategy present to focus your attention and stimulate memory retention; therefore the presentation is a failure. And an ugly one to boot.
Unfortunately the examples in this article are far from isolated. You invest so much time and energy into the ideas behind your presentation. You also invest a lot of time and money into your company’s brand. So why, at the point-of-sale, would you half-step the presentation, itself? If you want to be taken seriously, take your presentations seriously.
Source: Bridged Design
Further Learning: http://www.slideshare.net/kevingee/the-science-of-presentations-presentation#btnNext