What is your Resonance Tendency?
Last time, I wrote about a big marketing lesson from a little pita shop in a small town in Denmark. Then we landed on a hard but necessary idea: Don’t be the best. Be their favorite. If you missed it, that’s all here.
Today, we have to ask the next question: How? What does it take to resonate so deeply, others might declare us their favorite?
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"Don’t be the best. Be their favorite."
Maybe hearing that phrase makes you go, "Good, great, grand, wonderful. (No yelling on the bus!)"
(Sorry, I’m an elder millennial who can’t stop quoting old comedies.)
Because yeah, sure, that sounds great, but how do we achieve that?
We start by identifying our natural communication tendency. I believe there are TWO ways we automatically attempt to connect with an audience, whether that audience is 1 person or millions. No matter what topic you explore or what idea you want to own in the market or what offerings you sell, your "resonance tendency" comes through. It's worth identifying it, understanding it, then turning it into a superpower.
The 2 Resonance Tendencies in Action
To better understand the two ways we naturally try to resonate, let's look at two content creators who both talk about the same topic in their work: old music.
The first creator to meet is Cory Arnold. Cory runs the YouTube channel 12tone, which has nearly 800,000 subscribers. The other creator is Owen Cutts, who goes by the stage name “Mr Cutts.” I recently discovered him on Instagram, where he has 640,000 followers.
Again, both creators talk about the same topic (old music), but each tries to resonate with you in a different way, according to their natural communication tendencies.
Let’s start with Cory.
Take 10 seconds to watch the beginning of this video from Cory, where he analyzes the song “Dancing Queen” by ABBA.
(Go ahead. I’ll be here when you get back…)
(Did you watch it? Good. Great.)
What did you notice? Here's what I picked up on...
First, Cory doesn’t show his face. Instead, he sketches his ideas in a notepad, which he films and then narrates. His content is not about him. It’s about the facts he presents.
Second, he shares a ton of facts, as if he's trying to impress you (from a place of good intention) with how much he has researched and learned about the song and the artists behind it. In analyzing "Dancing Queen," Cory starts with detail after detail about the “wave of sound” approach to music, including what it means, where it started, and how ABBA uses it.
He shares fact after fact, jamming tons of information into his video, which he clearly believes is more important to his content than even his own face or person. That’s because Cory is our first communication archetype:
The analyst.
That's Cory's resonance tendency. Maybe it's yours? Consider these common traits to help you decide:
✅ The analyst likes their ideas and content to appear smart, thanks to the facts, practical insights, and useful advice they share. But to resonate even deeper and have a greater impact with their work, the analyst needs more stories, emotions, and original, ownable ideas to complement their naturally grounded, naturally smart approach.
💛 The analyst earns trust via data, predictions, breakdowns (like Cory’s), and pushing their credibility indicators, like the logos of places they’ve worked or clients who have hired them, their job titles or degrees, and their years of experience or how long they’ve been in business.
😡 The analyst is easily frustrated by things feeling “too fluffy” or emotional and people being “too subjective.”
If you’re an analyst, the natural way you try to resonate with others is by sharing value.
You want your ideas to be more valuable, and you want your content to carry it. (This is why I could barely find a picture of Cory online despite his massive YouTube audience. He’s such a classic analyst, he doesn’t even think to show his face or promote his “personal brand” all that much. As an analyst, he wants the value of his ideas to stand alone. That’s enough to resonate with others—according to the analyst.)
NEXT TIME: I’ll write about the 3 types of value your ideas and content could provide.
For now, let’s move to the second communication archetype by examining our second creator: Owen Cutts.
Just like Cory, Owen discusses old music through his content, but he tries to resonate in a very different way.
Here’s an Instagram reel to give you an example. Go ahead and watch. (Maybe don’t take a sip of your drink before you do. You might just do a spit take…)
(Did you watch it? Grand. Wonderful. No yelling on the bus!)
What did you notice? Here's what I saw (or rather, what Owen pelted into my eyeballs...)
First, Owen is hyper-present in his content in a way Cory is not. Owen is visibly on-camera, speaking straight to us, but it’s more than that. He’s letting his personality quirks through in a huge way that Cory does not.
Second, Owen shares distinct opinions on the music too, not just facts about it. It's not an analysis of the song so much as ringing the bell in favor of listening to this song because, come on, how could you not?! Opinion + emotion to combine with his smarts. That's Owen.
Lastly, he brands and serializes his content: Old Music Fridays. There's some emerging IP there, and to look around his platform, you'll notice he often brands other things he creates too.
That’s because Owen is the other archetypical communicator:
The evangelist.
✅ The evangelist likes their ideas and content to appear creative, thanks to clever angles, personal perspective, and originality. But to resonate even deeper and have a greater impact with their work, the evangelist needs more grounding devices like concrete advice, visual frameworks, and other insightful ideas, borrowing from the communication approach of the analyst, much like the analyst should borrow from the evangelist.
💛 The evangelist earns trust via stories, inspiration, humor, charm, and personal connection. Whereas the analyst points to what they know and what they've achieved, the evangelist uses who they are and how you feel.
😡 The evangelist is easily frustrated by people showing a lack of empathy or forgetting the “humanity” of it all.
If you’re an evangelist, the natural way you try to resonate with others is through your originality.
You want your ideas to be appear more original, and you want your content to convey that.
This is how I began my career. Much like Owen, I pushed emotion, stories, and opinions, but when it was time to teach people something of concrete value, I would often pivot to generic insights or lists of tips—commodity expertise. I could make a more emotional case for those ideas than others. I could deliver original experiences and create memorable content to carry those ideas. But the ideas themselves were still less insightful than they should have been, because I was so focused on the originality. Because I'm a natural evangelist.
Over time, I got better at developing my ideas to be stronger and higher-impact by finding deeper insights and using things like methodology and frameworks to teach them—in fact, next time I write to you, I'll share my proudest achievement in that arena. For now, just know: as an evangelist, I had to work extra hard to develop more insightful concepts and visual frameworks, and I had to remind myself to do so or risk being a fun experience from the stage ... which didn't affect any real change in people after my talks.
NEXT TIME: I’ll write about the 3 types of originality an idea can exhibit. Understanding those, along with the 3 types of value, allows us to build a visual framework we can use to diagnose any idea or piece of content—a framework that Jay in 2018 sorely lacked, as he ran around the world in pure evangelist mode.
For now, it’s important to recognize: We all have natural tendencies to how we communicate, natural ways we try to differentiate from peers or competitors and resonate with our audiences. When you understand the goal is to become their favorite and you start to prioritize resonance over reach to achieve that, it can feel rather daunting or even vague.
So let’s ground this in a simple starting point to make it easy:
Which archetype are you?
Are you an analyst like Cory? Are you an evangelist like Owen?
We all have elements of both, but if you had to pick, which approach to communication feels more natural to you? Do you naturally try to resonate through the value you provide or the originality of your work? Are you stuck doing a bit of both? Have you turned either into a superpower? Why not?
Both Cory and Own talk about the same topic, but they each resonate very differently.
That’s your starting point too. There are two ways we might naturally try to resonate. Which are you? Identify it. Understand it. Turn it into your strength. Then, you can borrow from the other type to resonate deeper than ever before—so deeply, others just might declare, "You're my favorite."
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NEXT TIME: I’ll share the 3 types of value and 3 types of originality. Then we'll put it all together into a visual framework we can use, the Ide Impact Matrix, which has been greatly improved since the last time I've written about it. That's how ideas get stronger, after all: you observe and feel things, ask questions, and investigate. As you go, you validate those ideas by putting them in front of others.
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