In an age of information overload and a shortage of attention, reaching the reader who matters to you – for example, a potential client – with a given piece of content has become especially difficult. Many people feel overstimulated and select the content they will devote their attention to with great care and caution. Which of the DISC styles does this most often?
Style C, of course!
How does Style C absorb content?
Style C searches the internet for specific information that interests them. They use advanced techniques to find content on a particular topic. They don’t „get lost” along the way and don’t stray onto articles only loosely related to the subject they care about. They’re interested in professional, substantive articles written by experts, rich in data with clearly marked sources. Among infographics, they’ll tolerate charts and tables.
From content creators, they expect reliability – and an exhaustive treatment of the topic. Content creators often outsource the writing of particular pieces to copywriters who regard themselves as all-rounders. From the standpoint of reaching Style C, this is a highly risky move. Style C will be the first to sense an author’s superficial grasp of a topic and their actual ignorance of a given field. They may even take it as a personal affront and, as a result, decide, for instance, to stop paying for a medium’s electronic subscription. They’ll unsubscribe from the YouTube channel. If they use Facebook (which happens occasionally) or Instagram (which happens very rarely), they’ll delete the article’s author from the accounts they follow.
Online, Style C expects respect. Formal phrasing such as „Dear Sir/Madam” and „Yours sincerely” is perfectly fine. Style C, however, will react allergically to phrasing like „Dearest ones,” „Friends,” and the like. They dislike over-familiarity with people they don’t know personally.
Style C is the most attuned of all the styles to manipulation, which doesn’t mean they’re entirely immune to it. But once they’ve exposed a manipulation, they’ll write off whoever used it completely.
Style C analyses every element of an offer printed in the fine print. If they don’t understand something, or – more often – if they spot a contradiction in the information provided, they may feel so offended that they’ll personally write to the medium’s editor-in-chief with a letter pointing out every one of the publication’s errors.
Winning Style C as a loyal reader and client might therefore seem, at first glance, exceptionally difficult. It isn’t. Style C is a demanding reader who can’t stand so-called bluffing and improvisation. Because they treat others seriously, they also expect to be treated seriously.
The recipe for gaining a loyal reader and client in Style C is to consistently deliver high-quality, substantive content. This gives us a chance to build, in the eyes of Style C, an image as a substantive, serious, and trustworthy content provider – even an expert. That is the guarantee of Style C’s trust, which can, as a result, turn them into our most loyal client.
Style C will happily read a substantive analysis of the economic or social situation. They won’t tolerate articles with errors – of any kind they’re able to catch: logical, linguistic, or spelling. They abandon media whose content is prepared sloppily and marred by mistakes.
They’ll approach interviews cautiously. They value substantive, measured journalism. They won’t allow colloquialisms – and above all vulgarities – in formal language (and therefore in the language of the media, including online media). Coarse, streetwise language repels them just as much as infantilism and rudeness.
When preparing a newsletter addressed to Style C, take care that it’s substantive and comes out on a regular schedule. Style C will readily give up a newsletter that doesn’t deliver important content or that appears irregularly.
If you’re creating content based on, say, an interview with a Style C individual, you must be perfectly prepared on the substance.
On YouTube, Style C will watch talks by academics, vlogs run by institutions, and people recognised as experts in their field.
A Style C individual taking up a new activity – learning to ride a horse, for example – will look for articles and videos that are practically instructional. They’ll take the same approach to learning foreign languages, painting, or writing a novel. As they delve into a new discipline, Style C will ask their mentors questions that – unless the mentors are Style C themselves – wouldn’t even have crossed their minds. Having learned the principles of constructing a novel, they’ll take various literary works apart piece by piece, drawing up their own schematics of them, which they’ll then share with other students and experts – sometimes practically sending the latter into a panic, just as they do by asking probing questions the experts themselves would often never have thought of.
Relishing the first signs of internalising new knowledge, Style C individuals will delight in testing it on anything they possibly can, seeking confirmation from experts that their actions are correct – experts who, in this situation, won’t always feel comfortable, especially if they represent Style I or Style D.
Even so, despite the discomfort of experts representing Styles I and D, it’s fair to say that it’s thanks to styles like C that the internet hasn’t gone completely brainless yet (and, by the way: have you, dear reader, seen the American film „Idiocracy”? If not, you absolutely must! It’s partly thanks to Style C that we’re not yet living in the dystopia depicted in that rather campy film!).
To sum up, writing for the needs and expectations of Style C doesn’t seem particularly difficult, provided that you:
- give them time – including time to test your content and deem it substantive,
- avoid coarse, streetwise language, diminutives, and forms that imply great intimacy or over-familiarity.