Re-Grading Your Traffic Lights
Daily Mail fail – make sure you align your boxes in neat columns…
Much consternation across the rabid English media. Despite averting a second national lockdown – those peshky kidsh – the politicians (specifically, the one holding the purse strings) overruled the consequence-free scientists and went instead for a Three Tier approach.
The country split into risk categories. The norm defaults to low-medium-high. Here, tiers are different; medium, high, very high. And so the colours alter too. Rather than the typical traffic lighting of green-amber-red, as seen in the excerpt up-top, we have amber, rusty orange, dark red. A kind of amber, red and redder.
Rolling news hosts dupe callers by howling, ‘where’s the ‘low’ risk gone’. As if any scale without this cannot be accurate. Surely they know the ruse.
There is no ‘low’. The bug is on the loose. Coronavirus is everywhere. Low risk a distant memory of 2019.
This is a decent lesson in framing.
So many a sale bands threats or opportunities into the usual trio.
Yet is one layer ever truly in play?
It is often an extreme. Yet you could gain both power and extra points from sliding the window.
Your prospect likely has a situation not of lo-mid-hi, but mid-hi-higher too.
And to switch the colours can also bring impact that sets you apart.
Footnote 1; note how the colours can also be softened. Here to a dulled VERY SOFT YELLOW, BRIGHT ORANGE & STRONG RED.
Footnote 2; also a useful technique should you have a restricting binary sounding choice. You can now ‘expand’ the horizon by adding this cheeky third layer. One closer to your pole of desire rather than any wet middle ground of meaninglessness.
Think for instance of decisions to launch a new product. For almost two decades now often framed by strategists as choice between blue ocean or red. No-one ought release into bloodied waters. Yet where is the purple? (Or violet, or mauve, or …) Electing to offer degrees of either carnage or calm as suits.
You can now avoid the stop-wait-go which builds in fence sitting status quo indecision.
In a keep losing ground, lose ground tomorrow, shoot for the moon styling.
Footnote 3; cartoonists know how to frame a sale point too;