Does your message have broccoli appeal?

A good message is founded on an audience benefit.

But this alone is no guarantee of engagement, because people don't always do what's good for them.

Take children and food.  As any parent knows, children have a profound resistance to eating things that are good for them.

Offer them something high in fat, sugar or salt (preferably all three) and they'll bite your hand off. But something green, healthy and plant-based? Umm, I'm not hungry.

With my little cannibals, I tried every technique in the book to get them to eat their veg.  Hiding it under the meat, mixing it up in the food, playing games with it, pleading, begging, cajolery, bribery and threats. It all ended in tears.  Mine, not theirs.

Until one day I noticed (and I can't be the first person to have done so) that a broccoli floret looks a bit like a tree, with its canopy of lush, dark green foliage branching over a pale green trunk.

Eureka.  "Tonight", I said "we're going to eat some trees."  Two pairs of eyes gazed at me.  "Look, here they are."  The eyes dropped to the plate and widened.   "I wonder who can eat the most trees?" A pause and then a flurry of broccoli-guzzling to warm the cockles of the parental heart.

Sprouts, too, were a success.  But only when 'sprouts today' (yuk) became 'who can eat a whole cabbage in one mouthful?' (wow), then 'eating baby cabbages' and then finally just 'babies for supper' (yum).

What learnings do I bring you from this rigorous field-study? That eight in 10 kids would rather eat a baby than a Brussels sprout?  Probably.

That for the audience to perceive a benefit in your message, it must appeal to their imagination? Definitely.

To do this you need to add a twist that takes the message out of the mundane and into the adventurous.

Here's an example, announcing your plan for this year's company conference.

With broccoli:

This year we're going to review our policies, procedures and systems to determine how we can work more effectively as an organisation.

Without broccoli:

This year we're going to rip up the rule-book and re-invent the business to make it work better for everyone.

The same message, but transformed to offer the potential of some excitement. (Not as much as the karaoke planned for later, but there it is.)

The thing about most business communication is that the default is set to 'boring'.  Consideration is needed to transform your message into something that will engage your audience.

But it needn't take much effort, so long as you use your own imagination to appeal to theirs.