I once heard a quote from famed French composer, Claude Debussy, that “Music is the silence between the notes”, and New York Times best-selling author, John Hart said, “Art, after all, is traditionally displayed against vacancies: paintings on dun walls, sculptures in empty spaces, music in quiet halls.”
Similarly, any athlete or person on any kind of regular work out schedule will understand the value of rest. Rest makes all the effort you put in at other times effective. If all you did physically was to keep going and going, pushing heavier weights and running further, faster, eventually, your body would give in and you'd end up with an injury. Your body needs rest and it's only through that rest that your physical efforts find their full effect.
Perhaps you can think of a time when a rest, a space or a vacancy gave rise to some kind of hard-hitting experience.
There's a communications lesson to be learned from all this. After all, effective communication is as much an art as it is a science and effective communication is as much about knowing when, or more to my point, when NOT to say something.
Have you ever been in a retail store and had an employee hassle you so much that you re-thought the item you were considering purchasing? What you needed in that moment was more space.
Do you receive an overwhelming number of newsletters from an organization that you signed up to hear from? Does it help or hurt their brand when you've heard from them for the fifth time in a week? You need a break.
Have you been posting to your blog every day and find that your readership is weak? Perhaps less frequent posting would allow for greater impact of your messages.
In our media and advertising saturated world, it's unlikely that your audience lives in a vacuum where your messages are the only ones they receive - that's something you just can't control. But you can control the strategic placement of spaces and vacancies around your messages that will allow them to hit home harder than ever before.
These kind of strategic vacancies need to be just as much a part of any advanced marketing plan as the messages you are sending out.
