Aristotle believed there were three parts of an effective argument: logos, pathos, and Ethos3. Ok, ok, just ethos–but if he’d seen our work…
Anyway, the logos is your logic; pathos the emotional appeal; and ethos the credibility. This is not a choose-your-own-adventure suggestion; either all three are present in the correct balance and the audience is persuaded, or something is missing, or overdone, and the audience is not persuaded. Where do your presentations stand?
Working on the content side with our clients, I see all three elements on a regular basis, but they’re rarely balanced. Here’s what usually happens:
1. Someone is so excited about their product or service that the presentation is almost entirely pathos. Lots of hype and clever statements, but very little logos and even less ethos. This is usually a pitfall for startups or relatively new ventures with few concrete facts to support their claims–think about the way you had to sell yourself at a job interview right out of college vs. seven years later when you had quantifiable results to support your claims.
2. An experienced company with plenty of results makes an appeal based entirely on ethos. They expect their reputation to carry them, so there is very little pathos in the argument and almost no effort is made to make the logos accessible. After all, they’re Big, Inc. and the audience will just say yes, right?
3. A mid- to large-sized company tries to differentiate from the competition by “cutting the bull”. The argument is all logos–only charts, graphs, and data will do. This is usually a frustration play: they feel that if only the audience knew the real facts, they’d be persuaded. And yes, it’s a huge mistake.
When these three elements are out of balance, they function like a game of paper, rock, scissors–you throw logos on the table, and the lack of pathos leads to a disengaged audience. You put pathos out, and the audience is peeved that you haven’t given them any logos. So on and so forth, into eternity.
This is why story telling is so essential to your argument. It’s the perfect way to frame facts and figures (logos) into a meaningful emotional experience (pathos). With the proper introduction and knowledgeable presence (ethos), you’ve got a complete argument. That’s why, each and every time a client comes to us for content help, we get down in the trenches to try and understand the total heart of the argument. Everyone has a story, and so does every business. Sometimes it just takes a set of fresh eyes to figure it out.
