Introducing the Seven Second Sell 

The benefit of shifting to short 

There’s a challenge afoot in the way companies communicate what they do and why anyone should care. And it’s only getting worse. 

At Heavenly, we spend our days helping organizations get to the nub of what’s important about what they do. What makes them distinct and different from their competitors. To help them engage audiences who are battling distraction. 

This means tackling a number of different dynamics that are particularly exacerbated by the volume of information we all have to process, every day. 

At least four factors in favour of cutting to the chase 

#1 Diminishing attention spans 

Pay attention. This bit is important. 

It’s well-documented that attention spans aren’t what they used to be. Microsoft currently puts the human average at 8 seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2000. And mobile ad firm Jampp has this figure declining at a rate of 88% each year. 

Nudges and notifications on social media contribute to the distraction factor. But fundamentally we humans like novelty. The thrill of the new. And we’re less inclined to invest time in something we don’t rapidly understand. 

Marketers and media companies get this. And are making shorter commercials. Particularly pre-rolls on YouTube which can now be an unskippable 15 seconds. Fox and NBC have introduced 6 second ads. Taking things to extremes, check out the Miller High Life Super Bowl ad from 2009. Just one second of concentrated communication. How refreshing. 

And TV producers, music video and moviemakers are decreasing shot lengths to average around four seconds. Even intros to music tracks, the bit before the singing starts, have reduced from 20 seconds to around 5 seconds over the past thirty years so they can hook listeners quicker. 

We’re living in an impatient world. 

#2 Growing category noise 

There’s lots of brands out there. Around 500,000 acknowledged as ‘mainstream brands’ worldwide.  

In 2007 there were 121m websites. Today there are 2BN+.  

In 2010 there were 125m companies in the world. Now there are 200M+. Globally, Statista estimates the total number of start-up launches at around 50M annually. Even with a 90% failure rate, they’re still adding to the confusion, however long they survive. 

All these “assets”, for want of a better word, are staking a claim to something. Selling an idea. Jostling for relevance. Trying to own some mental real estate for a few moments. 

It’s noisy out there. 

#3 Intellectual Property landgrab  

Accompanying the race for mental real estate is the legal one. Businesses like to bolster their balance sheets with valuable IP, as well as grabbing the vernacular before their competitors do. Brand names, messaging, and taglines are always strengthened with trademarking. 

Not only does this put pressure on being proprietary, coining unique language. It also puts an onus on ownability. 

During 2022 an estimated 11.8M trademark applications were filed globally. Even though this number is down 2.2M on the previous year, the volume is still enormous. In the US alone, over 13M trademark applications have been filed since 2003. And yet the Oxford English Dictionary cites only 171,476 words in regular use. Not really enough to go round, are there? 

If you think about it this way, the world is literally running out of IP. 

#4 Increasing content overload 

Science Daily estimates that 90% of the world’s data has been created in the past 24 months. That’s websites, newsletters, eBooks, pdfs, presentations, ad campaigns, social media shares, photos, and posts. Content, in some shape or form. Statista estimates that 5BN photos are taken each day. That’s a lot of stuff. Jostling for the attention we highlighted in #1.  

And it’s going to get a lot worse with Generative AI platforms that will make it even easier to write articles like this. People who are already jaded by the volume of spam in their inboxes are bracing for the curse of even more content. More content to sift. More content to process for relevance. If you can be bothered at all. 

What’s in it for me? 

When the world’s elevators are getting faster, we need faster elevator pitches to ensure the message gets through. 

Welcome to what we call the Seven Second Sell. Simply put, it’s nailing the what and why of your organization to capture digital-era attention spans. 

We boil down the complexity of what you do and why it matters to capture the average attention span. With one message, everyone in your organization sings from the same hymn sheet. And your corporate vision, pitch decks, product propositions and website reinforce what matters most. Think of it as the compression of expression. 

Your Seven Second Sell captures the most compelling components of your offer in fewer words than this sentence. 

While the Seven Second Sell is very much about ‘lessness’, our process for getting to this invaluable phrase is something we call M.O.R.E. Four filters we go through to ensure that the Seven Second Sell we create for you is:  

• Memorable: it captures people’s imaginations and they remember it. No mean feat given the communication chaos that surrounds us. 
• Ownable: it is unique to you. You can acquire Intellectual Property in it. To act as a defensive shield and add value to your balance sheet. 
• Relatable: it is engaging, mixing magic with the logic. It references the benefit your organization brings to its customers. They ‘get’ it. 
• Extendable: it inspires activity and action. You can do a lot with it. It’s pregnant with potential, if you will. 

Why a Seven Second Sell is important – and useful 

Confident brands are making “less is more” fashionable. Apple likes minimal messaging on its packaging and comms. Amazon favours concise narrative speeches in meetings over on-screen presentations, echoing its one-click approach to ecommerce. After all, why should being able to communicate your idea in a minute or two be less compelling than losing people’s attention with a 200-slide deck. This sentiment has echoes of Winston Churchill banning extraneous words from internal memos so that ministers could speak and act more rapidly during wartime. 

The Seven Second Sell works because it is highly efficient. 

• It standardizes the message, which saves management time. Meaning more focus on business priorities such as generating revenue. 
• It helps audiences better understand why they should pay attention to you. Whether that’s internal teams, customers, investors, partners, the media, and so on. 
• And it allows you to succinctly differentiate what you do in a distinctive way. 

As Blaise Pascal once said, “I’m writing you a long letter because I didn’t have time to write you a short one”. The Seven Second Sell gives you the postcard-sized version. 

Welcome to a new kind of distillery. To find out more, visit www.sevensecondsell.com