A recent episode of NPR's Planet Money started in a very interesting way. They were discussing home prices over the past decade, a common enough topic, but this week they chose to present the rise and fall of the market as music. So this:

became this:

As a life-long singer, this struck me as a great way to present the information. It was novel, first of all, and I was able to quickly pick up on information that would have taken much longer to read on a printed chart. Part of that is because of my training, granted, but it still reveals an important issue: many of your prospects are probably auditory learners.

Recent studies suggest 20-30% of adults learn better by listening to information than by reading it. I suspect this is one of the reasons podcasts and audiobooks have become so popular; advances in technology have made it easier for auditory learners to get large quantities of spoken-word education. In the pre-iPod era, many people had limited access to that level of resource after graduation.

Now obviously most of your technical information will not convert easily to song. Or at least not one anyone would want to listen to. But you can tell a lot of your product's story using video, which will usually include an audio track.

You may already be doing this, after a fashion. Consider, for example, a video demonstrating maintenance for concrete saws; one of the key diagnostic tools is the sound the blade makes on the concrete. Rather than try to explain the difference in sounds, this video can play the actual sound, explaining what each one means and how to address it.

As another example, imagine a video about staining concrete. Color layering could be explained by having a single tone or instrument represent each color, with the combined chord representing the final result. Variations in volume could represent color intensity, demonstrating how changing relative levels of individual components impacts the final product, or different rhythms representing various brush techniques.

You can see - hear? - how excited I am about this idea.