What Makes You Re-Mark-Able?
07 Jul 2026
Published in: Member News
How we Encounter, Connect, Engage and Entertain our audiences in order to stand out, grab attention, hold interest and communicate our messages and stories in Remarkable ways!
What Makes You Re-Mark-Able?
Today, we are bombarded by information. Everything, and I mean EVERY little thing, is fighting a desperate and uphill battle for our attention. Phones, tablets, screaming children, screaming adults (who often have a strange orange tint to them… funny how that happens… ), unskippable adverts, life hacks from TikTok, DIY tips on Reels, the latest fashions on Shorts… anything and everything wants us to LOOK AT ME NOW!
None of this is to mention all of the things buzzing, binging and flashing at us in Meatspace (a.k.a the Real World), and as AI advances, our Silicon Valley overlords develop greater strategies at reducing our attention spans, and as the incredibly clever people who used to be known as the Mad Men get ever sharper at brandishing their knives against our eyeballs (sorry for the graphic image), it really leads to one, big, honking question:
How do you stand out?
Or, as we have taken to asking:
What Makes Us Re-Mark-Able?
Because, let’s be honest, we all want to stand out and grab attention. We all want to make sure we are seen, heard, and that people pay attention to us. What we have to say, sell or communicate is important, dang it, and people SHOULD listen, and they SHOULD pay attention, and they SHOULD remember our message… but do they? Do they heck.
Even if you can yank people’s sticky eyeballs (what is it with the graphic eyeball imagery today? Once again, sorry…) away from their shiny space-age rectangular prison, what good is it if they don’t remember you? You must stand out AND be memorable: You must be remarkable and Re-Mark-Able. As magicians, mind-readers and all-round impossible mystery artists, we have to fight almost on a daily basis to be Re-Mark-Able.
We have to stand out, be heard, get people to engage with us, join in, listen to our stories, and remember us hours, days, weeks, months and even years into the future.
Whatever room we face, whether it be a crowded and dense networking event where the hors-d'oeuvres are one stiff drink from being thrown across the room, to a large dining suite where the CEO has just announced redundancies might have to be coming after Christmas (yes, we really have performed gigs after that announcement… you try being happy go-lucky when your audience are worrying about how to feed their family after January…), we really have to be on top of our game when it comes to standing out from the competition, grabbing and holding attention, getting our message across and making sure people remember who we are.
There are a few things we go through before every gig to make sure we leave the room having hit upon each of those points. We break them down into four categories, and these are some of the questions you should ask too:
Encounter
How do we encounter people in their world? How do we introduce ourselves to them? How do we bridge the gap between us and them, and then how do we build bridges we can go back to? What are they looking for from the event?
Connect
How do we connect to people on their level? What is something human we both share? What are the feelings, situations, aims, goals, emotions and stories we are here to tell? How do we listen to and understand them on their terms?
Engage
How do we engage people with our message? What can we do to keep them focused on the present? What ideas, stories, moments of interest and interaction do we have in our toolkit that keeps people engaged?
Entertain*
How do we keep people smiling, laughing and enjoying themselves? How do we make sure they leave our interaction feeling lighter, more energised, fresher and more alive?How do we make people feel like they’ve witnessed something impossible?
*Two caveats here: 1) Entertainment doesn’t always have to be about joy and laughter, people can find anything and everything entertaining, otherwise heartbreaking dramas or vapid, soulless celebrity telly wouldn’t exist. For us, we want to bring joy, mischief, and a sense of mystery to everything that we do. 2) It might be that Entertain isn’t your end goal, it might be Educate or Enlighten or Inspire or Enrichen or anything else that you might want to leave your specific audience feeling.
What Questions Are You Asking Yourself?
Every time we go into a performance, presentation, demonstration, pitch or even a quick chat with potential bookers, we run through our aims and intents: Encounter, Connect, Engage and Entertain. If we do our job, answering these questions as we interact with our audience, we increase the chances of being Re-Mark-Able.
Note that the first two levels are all about them. We all have to be willing to meet people on their level and understand what they want before we even start to think about our own intent and aims. It’s no good building a bridge when only one side is interested in the construction.
We also must be focused on connection. Real, messy, chaotic, authentic human connection. Even as magicians, who work with deception for a living and show illusions for fun, we have to be driven by what is at the core of each of our lives: connecting with other people. It could be examples from our real lives, the emotions we are all experiencing, the room we’re sharing or cultural touchstones, but we focus on human connection above all else.
It is only when we lower our masks, peel open our aching chests, and take the risk of showing people our fleshy, beating, beautifully tender hearts… That is when we might just start leaving an impression on other people.
So, when we have met people on their level and connected with them as real people, that is when we can bring them in and focus on our message: what do we want them to remark about us? What are those special moments that will stand out to them? What can only we bring to this event, this very moment, that no one else can?
Finally, after all of that, do we focus on entertainment.For us, that’s the beauty of magic, mind-reading and mirth: Creating a buzz of excitement, an atmosphere of wonder, a time away from the dull and drab world of reality, and allowing people to step into our magical fantasy world where anything could happen.
How Are You Uniquely Re-Mark-Able?
If you start answering these questions for yourselves, we can’t guarantee you’ll be Re-Mark-Able, but we can guarantee you’ll be much more likely to be listened to, get your message across, stand out from the crowd and that people will remember you for your skill at Encountering, Connecting, Engaging and Entertaining.
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