Why Speeches and Presentations Are Boring

 The explanation lies in Marketing Theory-believe it or not!

Who are you speaking to? The audience, for the duration of your presentation, are to be treated like customers. 

Who are they? What is their motivation? What is their level of interest in the subject of your presentation/talk/speech? These are critical questions, not the great wisdom that you are about to spout.

I had once thought that Communication classes- a course in IIM Bangalore during my MBA- were useless, but now find that many speakers are in dire need of training in basics of communication. 

I cannot summarise all my learnings, but in general, it helps if you can-

Speak the language that the audience understands

1. Use examples, anecdotes
2. Use some appropriate humour
3. Be Enthusiastic, if not passionate
4. Ask questions-even if rhetorical, they break the monotony
5. Wrap up well, keep your key points up front or in the middle.

This includes academic presentations at conferences, but not just those..

Presentations -Destination Marketing

Some pics from my assignment given to Lexicon Institute MBA students. They had to come up with a marketing plan for a chosen destination-

Some Unique Learning Methods

At IIM Bangalore during my MBA (then called PGDM), I was exposed to learning methods like Take-home exams, presentations, book reviews etc. for the first time. I have preserved a few handouts from that era, and here are a couple from Prof. S.K. Roy's Organisational Behaviour course. But this is a writeup by the group of students who were aksed to do a Book Review- all of us had to review and present a book. We did one on Intelligence Testing, I remember. But these are from two other groups. These were really good learning experiences, both for the process, and content. 

 

Digital marketing- In class Exercises

While teaching Digital Marketing at IIM Indore, for both executives and regular MBA students, I tried many new things. I was also teaching the course for the first time, so I had kept it to 10 sessions, half the usual.

I like to experiment with assignments rather than just use cases- so I tried an assignment on blogging about Digital Marketing topics, a Bidding game that simulated Keyword-based bidding that happens in real life for each platform, and writing of emails addressed to a specific target segment or Persona (to me, sometimes) as some exercises, besides a website design exercise  only the broad structure) in my digital marketing course. Live exercises and projects are good for learning, in my experience. Particularly when accompanied by presentations with Q and A. I can literally "see" the learning in many cases.

When blogs were given as an exercise, the students were also required to promote the blog on their social media pages. A free blogging platform was to be used, such as Blogger or Wordpress. Quite a few interesting presentations resulted, including viewership statistics at the end of 5-6 weeks.

Youtube ads also were simulated through making a small video to advertise a given product or service, as a classroom exercise or assignment.

Of course, we discussed a couple of cases too, but the hands-on exercises were far more useful as learning tools.