Sir Keir Starmer is out.
The Labour leader announced his resignation on Monday, June 22, in a speech lasting six minutes and 26 seconds.
Yet, it felt like it took him six hours to get to the point.
Sir Keir made the classic mistake we see day in, day out.
He started with the most important point for him, which, in this case, was a rather detailed history of his work.
He wanted the audience to know what he had done while in office and make the point that he was a good Prime Minister.
Fine. Except the audience switched off after the second sentence.
This is what we call an upside down pyramid. It means your messaging is tailored to you, rather than your audience.
Outside of Westminster, it looks like the person who gives you their entire educational background before starting a presentation or the email you featuring an in-depth report of the sender’s weekend plans before dropping in the “urgent” task in the last line.
The problem is the audience is always waiting for the “top line”.
What that means is they want you to get to the point for them straight away.
They need you to tell them why they should listen and why this is of interest to them.
We knew Sir Keir Starmer was resigning.
If you’ve paid attention to politics you’ll know it was on the cards for weeks.
So, he needs to say it.
We have to hook the audience first and then build in the detail that we want to share.
Like all politicians, Sir Keir has his fans and critics.
By failing to get to the point for the audience, he’s helped his critics and stopped his fans from paying attention to most of his speech.
Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation: Our analysis was written by Maxine Montgomery and edited by Andrew McFarlan.
