Ellen de Vries: Freelance copywriting, Brighton

What do you reckon is the best way to get people to absorb information?

There’s a huge ‘can’t-believe-I-never-saw-it-before’ link between successful marketing and this lovely theory called ‘Andragogy’ (coined by Alexander Kapp and expanded by a guy called Malcom Shepherd Knowles).

If you do have anything to do with marketing on the web, you probably spend a lot of your time thinking about how to:
A) get people to absorb information
B) get people motivated to take action
C) get people to think you’re talking sense
D) get them to take action based on the information they’ve absorbed

Knowles spent alot of his time thinking about these ideas from an education perspective when he created his theories on Andragogy; a study of the psychology of adult learning. As a word it’s just a basic progression on the on the term ‘Pedagogy’. Knowles put forward a series of principles that he found to be the key defining conditions for adults when they come to learn or absorb information…and I’m thinking why not apply this to marketing too?

Here are 5 of the key principles behind learning design and adult learner motivation. I’ve bolded the concepts that should set off alarm bells for those of us in new media marketing, especially when it comes to structuring our words and information:

1. Self-concept: As a person matures his self concept moves from one of being a dependent personality toward one of being a self-directed human being

2. Experience: As a person matures he accumulates a growing reservoir of experience that becomes an increasing resource for learning.

3. Readiness to learn. As a person matures his readiness to learn becomes oriented increasingly to the developmental tasks of his social roles.

4. Orientation to learning. As a person matures his time perspective changes from one of postponed application of knowledge to immediacy of application, and accordingly his orientation toward learning shifts from one of subject-centeredness to one of problem centredness.

5. Motivation to learn: As a person matures the motivation to learn is internal
(Knowles 1984:12)

As a result of thinking about these concepts, using them in my own writing for both e-learning and marketing media purposes, there’s a sort of checklist that emerges when coming to developing campaigns:

The checklist
1. Make sure the learner/user knows why they’re learning/using it
2. Make sure that self-directed learning and investigation is encouraged, they should also be responsible for their own decision making before being encouraged in any particular direction
3. Encourage them to draw on previous experiences as a rich resource of successfully adopted knowledge
4. Their motivation should come from inside, in order to perform tasks in their life situations

(Adapted to fit my ideas about marketing from The Adult Learner: The Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development By Malcolm Shepherd Knowles, Ed Holton, Elwood F. Holton, Richard A. Swanson Published by Butterworth-Heinemann, 2005)

If you want to see how some of this might be put into practice on a practical level (without the heavy academic emphasis) - then come to ‘The Presentations Workshop (that gets people sitting on the edge of their seats)‘ at the Werks on the 30th of October 2008 at 7.00pm.

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