Finding more than one way to make the same vital point in your innovative presentation repeatedly effectively accomplishes your objectives of branding, name recognition, and message recognition. Attendees at your presentation respond more positively to the same argument stated several interesting and impacting ways rather than hearing the same message over and over.
Sheila G., a VP of operations, wants her company’s executive staff to approve her new “Smart Strategies to Reduce Waste” program. She repeats articulate variations of her message throughout her 30-minute presentation:
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You need to cut waste right away. It is bleeding your profitability.
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Cutting waste is vital to our being more competitive and staying that way.
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You must minimize waste if you are to free up funds for our other important opportunities.
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Why tolerate this level of waste when the Smart Strategies program will slash it?
Notice how she uses repetition masterfully in different statements, but all focus on making her point about the critical necessity of dealing with waste that she identified in her company. Sheila takes a creative step in applying the Law of Repetition by using her laptop.
On three of her twelve slides, she superimposed a text crawler — a message that flows across the bottom of the slides (like you see on the major news networks) — designed by a professional using a video editing program. The text crawler repeated her key points with other consistent, supportive messages such as “W.A.S.T.E.: We Are Squandering The Efficiency of our operations!”
She knew that the audience would be reading the moving text as she spoke, but was willing to cede some of the attention away from her during each of the eight-second scrolling — and somewhat subliminal — messages.
Think of imaginative ways you can use the spoken word along with text, images, illustrations, audio, or video from your laptop or tablet to repeat and reinforce your key points, messages, or overriding theme. By varying the phrases you use, you can still hammer home your message using repetition.
And, besides voicing it, you can repeat and reinforce key points by using photos, video, visuals, props, handouts, and anything else that stresses, highlights, showcases, or emphasizes the one or two things that are critical for you to meet your presentation objectives.
An architectural firm wants to close a deal to build a 15-story, multi-purpose building that includes office space, retail stores, and upscale restaurants. Their value proposition in their presentation focuses on what they call “Green Beauty.” It involves communicating their strength in sustainability and superior energy efficiency through advanced technology and building materials (green) along with ultra unique architectural designs (beauty).
Rather than repeat their thematic value proposition in words, which they do in their introduction and conclusion, they decide to get creative with animation.
When they want to emphasize their strength in combining breathtaking, elegant design with impressive energy-saving engineering, part of their presentation was emphasized with an animation that starts with a slide showing their value proposition “Green Beauty” in simple black text where, seconds later the word “Green” morphs into an exquisite green floral design and the word “Beauty” transforms itself into a stunning rendering of the proposed building.
In addition, they cleverly include vital summary information (that dissolves) in that section of the presentation on the lower part of the visual after the animation concludes. The architectural team repeats the animation four times (each with new summary information) over a period of an hour. The Law of Repetition — applied using a captivating visual — proves to be an integral part of the presentation’s winning strategy.
American motivational author Robert Collier noted, “Constant repetition carries conviction.” That it does, indeed. Use it just right in your presentations, and the Law of Repetition will serve you mighty well.