I think the answer to your question is it depends.

For marketing materials — brochures, blogs, web, DM pieces, chunking makes sense. Today’s buyers want to cut to the chase.

But I do believe we need to follow up with additional pieces that provide more detail and description.

I guess I think of it as a 1-2 punch.

Get their interest with the short stuff and let the details make the sale.

Drew

The answer is, “give ‘em what they want.” For one, you need to know who you’re writing to. I imagine research, learning about the demographics, psychographics, and what Forrester Research calls “Technographics,” solves a part of that question.

But on another level, you let them make those choices.

In my report, “The Death of The Salesletter,” I talk about technology allowing the reader to specifically choose what format they prefer — long or short, video or written, factual or emotional, etc.

Agreed, we’re not there yet. But we’re much better off today, and have the tools and data to be a lot more targeted with our copy.

Perhaps we’re so deluged with messages that the best we can do is skim the short-form and save the long-form for reading time in the bathroom :=)

I don’t think that chunking is the mark of a lazy intelligence.

I believe it’s due in part to the overwhelming insurgence of marketing messages and in interruption marketing, coupled with the rise of media and divergence into varying formats — namely, with the Internet.

Because of its conversational nature and multifarious choices (in messages, applications, and formats), today the Internet interrupts the reader in more ways than conventional media.

But then, it’s a chicken-egg dilemma.

Did the media create an ADD pandemic? Or are we becoming more attention-deficient, pushing for the need for chunking? I think it’s accumulative on both fronts — as one feeds the other.

In today’s video-game, fax-email-microwave world, we are not only catering to attention deficiency. We are also seeding it, feeding it and serving it, making it grow and demand for more.

The lines that used to separate the four basic personality styles, defined by psychologists (e.g., analyticals, drivers, amiables and expressives), were once gray. They are based on an individual’s level of responsiveness and assertiveness.

Those lines were around since 400 B.C., when Hippocrates, in “Air, Water And Places,” dubbed these personality types as Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric and Melancholic.

But what we’re seeing is akin to a science experiment: the more we bombard a hungry crowd with different types of food, the more the crowd separates into groups of people who prefer one type of food over another.

Similarly, as we bombard society with more media, more messages and more choices (giving them more control than ever before), those gray lines are getting darker and darker, it seems.

So chunking serves two of these types (the low responsives, namely the driver and analytical types). Therefore, 50% of the population are chunk-oriented, while the other 50% are not and perfer long-form.

That’s why, in my estimation, chunking should be an alternative — not a replacement. In fact, offering chunks is not the real phenomenon occurring, here. It’s offering choices. As a result, what we are seeing is a growing polarization, and a growth in much more distinct groups of people who prefer one type over another.