MINE EYES HAVE SEEN ...

Six billion every day.

No, not McDonald’s burgers, but emojis sent and received via the world’s two-plus billion smartphones.

Advocates (and there are many, with tops being ad agencies) claim these little pictures emulate our feelings and the expressions and gestures we use talking with others in face-to-face conversations.

Still others who have plumbed the psychology of these stimulations du jour insist they’re changing our speech patterns and expressing our authentic selves – our interests, our reactions, even innuendoes. 

We don’t buy it.

Though this trend started in the ‘90s and gained steam of late, thanks to marketers like Coke and Dove, Bud Light and Starbucks (among others), it’s simply another way for us not to talk – and, by extension, not to understand each other. 

Sure, it promotes our brain’s desire for visual communications.  And it’s definitely a convenient shorthand to capture one, maybe two emotions.  But even those frequent users insist that there are clear rules for campaigning with these Japanese little pictures:

  1. Know your audience’s emoji usage habits, like age, location, and gender
  2. Identify the most common emojis and
  3. Know how the audience speaks.

Hmm.  So if we truly studied our target audience’s speaking patterns, as number three recommends, wouldn’t it be easier to just, er, talk with them?

NO MORE SKIRTING THE ISSUE

For a while now, we’ve deliberately avoided the topic … even though we’re an MWBE company.

But when piles of recent clippings talk about communications differences between men and women, when our own body of work acknowledges the gaps, and when more academes are seriously studying gender conversations, we figured it’s time.

And despite the naysaying about John Gray’s decades-old philosophy stating that Men are from Mars, Women are From Venus, there’s much proof that he’s right.

Women talk. 

Men shy away from openness (especially in stressful times). 

Rosalind Wiseman, in her Masterminds and Wingmen, interviewed dozens and hundreds of teenaged boys, with the conclusion that as boys enter manhood, they do begin to talk less.  Even if they’re as emotionally invested in relationships as girls.

That retreat mentality should be obvious to anyone who’s worked in the business world, even when there’s no reason to dive into a cave.  Straightforward prose and (some) dialogue infuse meetings and reports when males are in charge.  Many women bosses tend towards the chatty, the ‘let’s talk’ narratives, preferring to expose all aspects of a particular issue and all its possible solutions. 

No, this delineation isn’t100 percent true.  But we see it often enough to question if there needs to be some sort of segmented communications by gender as well as by demographics.  Or, perhaps, messages that are composed and directed to specific audiences, each with the same content but different presentations.

Are we on opposing planets?  Please RSVP …