If your demo content isn’t meaningful, adding decorations won’t help. In fact, it may hurt!
“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”
– Mark Twain
You’ve just entered an elegant restaurant for a celebratory dinner (congratulations!). The lobby is beautiful, but you wait a long time to be seated. Finally, you are escorted to your table and are seated in architecturally stunning, but uncomfortable chairs. The table is covered with white linen with an extensive array of plates, glasses and silverware, and each napkin is cleverly folded into a swan in the precise center of each dinner plate. A fresh bouquet of flowers decorates the center of your table, flanked by expensive salt and pepper grinders.
Everything looks fantastic!
Your waiter takes your napkin, opens it with a flourish, and drapes it carefully across your lap, then hands you the menu showing today’s offerings, luxuriously described with an abundance of adjectives.
Everything sounds fabulous!
After perusing the options, your waiter takes your order and then returns with mineral water, bread rolls, butter, and a glass of the wine that you’ve chosen.
You sip some water, but it is tepid and flat. You taste the wine, but it is not particularly good, and it is certainly not what you would have expected from this restaurant (and for the price)! The butter is warm, and the rolls are hard and dry. You are beginning to get disappointed, but you brush it off thinking, “I’m sure the balance of the food will be wonderful…”
Sadly, it’s not! The salad lettuce is wilted and old, the salad dressing is simply sour, the croutons lack crunch, the soup arrived cold (albeit in a gorgeous tureen), and your main dish was unacceptably awful. Overall, while the plating and presentation of each dish were exceptional, the food itself was pretty poor.
Would you return or recommend this restaurant to others? Likely not!
Moral: In your demos focus on substance first, then style.
PS – just wait until you get your bill (which will be presented in an extravagant custom holder)!
Want more fun, bitesize, engaging stories and lessons learned? See my new book “Suspending Disbelief!”
For practical guidance on the use of humor, language, and other factors in demos see Chapter 15 in Great Demo! here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9SNKC2Y/
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