Earlier, you learned about audience analysis. For instance, you may have described the demographics of the audience. How many women and men are there? What is the average age? You may have also considered the psychographics of the audience. What percentage of the audience is registered to vote in different political parties? Is the audience mostly favorable or mostly unfavorable to your position? The point here is that you likely described your audience in collective terms. You may have also thought about analyzing the situation that your audience is in. How many members of the audience are in a given space at a given time? Are they comfortable, can they see, or can they hear adequately? Do they have specific expectations of what is to be presented?
What makes a receiver (whether an individual or a group) different from an audience is that a receiver can act upon your message. Acting upon a message is more involved than getting the audience to laugh, gasp, or applaud a performance. In business, it is about getting someone to participate in a meeting, complete a task, make a decision, do repeat business with your company, or invest in your startup.
By analyzing receivers instead of audiences, the focus of your attention shifts. That means the kind of analysis you need to do is not so much about the demographics or psychographics of the group but instead about the interdependent relationship you have with the receiver. In the next section, you will learn about some of the ways you can analyze your receiver.
A receiver analysis focuses on different things than an audience analysis. The two primary components of receiver analysis are content needs and relational dynamics. Remember that when you are communicating strategically, your purpose is to achieve your goals. That means you need to figure out what your receiver needs to know in order to act upon your message. The “what” refers to your content needs.
Often, your receiver’s content needs are relatively easy to analyze. All you need to do is identify the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of your message. But even when you do this, you need to think about your receivers and anticipate their specific informational needs. Here are two broad categories to consider: information needs and level of complexity.
Information Needs: One of the first things to consider in your receiver analysis is what information your receiver needs or wants. For instance, if you are inviting someone from another company to a meeting at your company, it may not be enough to simply state in what room you are meeting. For someone who has not visited your company before, you might have to provide an address, information on where to park, and information on how to get a visitor badge to enter your secured building. You may also need to identify “what’s in it for them” and adapt accordingly. For instance, when presenting a new company initiative, you will likely have to include different information for the information technology team, the social media team, and the human resources team, as those receivers all have different needs. Whereas everyone likely needs some of the same basic information, the IT team likely wants to know how the system will interface with other computer programs, the social media team may need to know what kind of impact the program can have and how they can best promote it, and the HR team may need to have more detail about the impact the program will have on hiring.
Level of Complexity Another key component of determining content is to gauge the appropriate level of complexity (or simplicity). The level of complexity does not mean “dumbing down” your message. In fact, it is a good idea to assume that all your receivers are intelligent. But depending upon their needs, they may have different expectations for complexity and detail. If you are a business analyst and are presenting findings from a recent data dive, a receiver who also is a business analyst might be centrally concerned with your analytic procedures and will want more detail on your statistical tests. But a high-ranking executive likely will be more concerned with the bottom line and prefer much more simplified coverage of how you analyzed the data.
Once you have established your receiver’s content needs, you also will need to understand your relational dynamics. Relational dynamics are the elements that characterize your relationship with the receiver. In many ways, they are connected with the relational meaning and relational goals of your message.
The reason why understanding relational dynamics is important is because it helps you meet all of your communication goals, not just your relational goals. And getting relational dynamics wrong can have devastating consequences. Take for instance, Joe, a job seeker who writes to a high-ranking company manager to inquire about a posted vacancy for an entry-level job. If Joe addresses the manager too informally and without regard to the manager’s relative power (the power to hire and the projected hierarchal power between a manager and entry-level employee), the manager may be slightly irritated, if not downright offended, by Joe’s attitude. Not only will Joe be unable to meet his relational goal of establishing a positive relationship, he also may fail to meet his identity goals of being viewed as professional, confident, and a good team player. Should that happen, you can bet he won’t be getting a call back for an interview.
Relational dynamics include the following elements:
Power Relationship: One of the first elements to consider in a receiver analysis is the power relationship between you and your receiver. You may have more, equal, or less power than your receiver. Sometimes that power can be hierarchical, such as when power is embedded into an organizational structure, like when bosses have more power than employees. Power can also be based on other kinds of dependencies, such as when companies are dependent upon customers’ purchasing power. There might also be the power to hire/fire, the power of social influence, the power of reputation, and more.
Typically, the rules for interaction change depending upon the power relationship. Upward communication (to someone with more power) usually requires greater tact than downward communication (to someone with less power). For example, it may be perfectly acceptable for a boss to tell an employee, “Get me that report by 5 p.m.” But the same would not be true in reverse. Instead, someone with equal or less power than the receiver might need to make the request more politely: “If you could let me know if my vacation request has been approved, I’d appreciate it.”
Familiarity: Receivers also can be characterized by the degree of familiarity you have with them. The better you know someone, the more familiar your relationship is. If you have ever worked in a customer service industry, you know that some customers are unfamiliar, like the person who comes to your shop for a walk-in appointment or a one-time transaction, and others are “regulars” whom you get to know quite well. While you may be friendly with all customers, there are different expectations for those who are more familiar to you.
As a general rule, when you are relatively unfamiliar with a receiver, you may have to resort to general principles of business etiquette for guiding communication. But as you get more familiar, you will learn more of your receivers’ personal preferences or idiosyncrasies and will be able to incorporate those into your messages. You will learn if they have preferred methods of communicating, a certain sense of humor, or other preferences that will help you in your communication with them.
It is important to note that while familiarity overlaps with relationship quality, they are not the same thing. For example, you may have a very positive or very negative relationship with someone with whom you are familiar. You may have a coworker with whom you are very familiar—but only because that person is the office bully and regularly targets you with his destructive behaviors. It’s even possible to develop goodwill with someone you only have met once.
Formality: Formality is the degree to which a relationship generally follows “prim and proper” rules of exchange. In this sense, you may have a relationship that is quite strict or structured, one that is relaxed, or one that is somewhere in between. Often formality has an inverse relationship to familiarity in business. That means as familiarity increases, formality decreases and vice versa.
Think about applying for a job. As you make initial contact about a job inquiry with those you do not know (completely unfamiliar), you likely addressed them formally (e.g., as “Mr. Carter” or “Dr. Jamesson”). But when you got hired and started getting to know the individuals by working with them daily, you might have started calling them by their first names, but still communicated somewhat formally. Then, after you worked with them for a longer time, you may have gotten very familiar and very informal, maybe even addressing them casually, “Hey” instead of “Hello,” popping in to ask questions without setting up a meeting, or even sharing jokes or personal stories.
But just because a relationship is familiar does not mean it is always informal. There will be some relationships that will remain formal despite significant familiarity. For instance, you may have a key client in a financial services firm that you still address formally. If you work in fundraising you may still formally address major donors, even though you regularly socialize with them at networking and philanthropic events. Additionally, some relationships may be formal in some contexts but informal in other contexts. For example, you may extend a casual invitation to your boss for a get-together after work, but you would need to write a formal message if you were addressing the year-end financial reports.
To be clear, attending to relational dynamics is not just about communicating formally. In some situations, communicating formally can have detrimental effects. Case in point: Camille is a CPA who runs a small family-owned tax business. She just got an angry phone call from a close friend (and client) who just received notice that he is being audited by the IRS. If Camille responds in a way that sounds formal and unfamiliar, addressing her friend as “Mr. Jacobsen” when calling him back, she is going to communicate an identity of being uncaring and cold, and she may very well lose her client and her friendship.
Relationship Quality: The quality of the existing relationship is a critical component of receiver analysis because it can help guide decisions about how to communicate particular messages. In most basic terms, a relationship can vary along a continuum from negative to positive, as well as vary in intensity. Positive relationships can be weakly or strongly positive and the same goes for negative relationships. Relationships can be characterized in any number of ways. Here are a few:
suspicious ← → trustworthy
unstable ← → stable
new ← → established
contentious ← → cordial
Other relationship considerations are possible, depending upon the context of the communication. The point here is that you need to have a good grasp of your existing relational quality with your receiver. You will have to communicate more carefully with receivers with whom you have a negative relationship than those with whom you have a neutral or positive relationship.
Attribution:
Information for this section was slightly modified from
Business Communication: Five Core Competencies Copyright © 2023 by Kristen Lucas, Jacob D. Rawlins, and Jenna Haugen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.