Wednesday evening was the first “proper” meeting of our Re-Imagining Capitalism seminar, during which we tackled the sticky topic of communication strategy from the comfort of the Dean’s stylish, new meeting room in Kroon Hall .
Most of the preparatory materials assigned for the class had a strategic rather than academic bent. Our goal here, which we stated at the outset of the 3-hour discussion, was to really explore the details of what makes communication effective. How can communication strategies be leveraged not only to transmit ideas, but also to incite action? If we truly believe that our economic system is in need of reform and we’d like to communicate that message, then we need to know:
1. How to structure the message content
2. What medium or method of delivery to use
3. How to penetrate ideological barriers
4. How to reach the broadest or most appropriate audience
Putting strictly economics-related questions aside, we focused on how to engineer effective, targeted, and hopefully “viral” communication regardless of its content. We watched a few YouTube clips to get us warmed up for the discussion, and to give us some concrete material for testing out the hypotheses presented in our readings:
“The Crying Indian”
Launched by Keep America Beautiful on Earth Day, 1971
An insidious video, since the “Indian” isn’t even Native American, and the video was a targeted guilt-trip funded by litter-producing industries. But an enduring classic nonetheless – extremely successful in propagating its anti-littering message. Dean Speth said he recalled the ad’s original appearance, and that though anyone would likely see it as hokey now, it managed to be convincingly touching back then.
“Coal”
by freeloveforum
Hilarious. But though it’s extremely effective at entertaining and galvanizing a target audience of us sustainability-oriented folk, this isn’t a video that’s likely to reach far beyond our circle. It perverts an existing conservative public service announcement “frame”, and turns it into a biting commentary. But to find it funny, you have to be able to draw a parallel to existing “Clean Coal” messaging… and more fundamentally, understand why coal is “bad” to begin with.
“Yes We Can”
Barack Obama Music Video
by will.i.am, February 2008
A tribute to the unprecedented cyber-grassroots effectiveness of the Obama Campaign – perhaps there’s something to mimic there… This video, again, does a great job of mobilizing and inspiring an existing base of supporters. It appeals to progressives, who already buy into the assumptions that a multi-cultural world of equal opportunity is a great idea, but not necessarily to our gun-toting brethren in the boondocks. Oops, was that an offensive way to put it?
“Body Bags”
TV Ad produced by TheTruth.com
The Truth was widely viewed as an effective anti-smoking campaign. Whether it had large-scale impact on the apparent decline in smoking, the individual “Truth” campaign ads were usually at least somewhat shocking – one of the key features of “sticky” messaging, as we learned from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick.
Here’s an overview of some of the major points raised in our ensuing discussion – as I saw them – my classmates can feel free to comment and elaborate:
We probably devoted the most time to discussing the issue of “framing” which is wonderfully laid out in George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant . He points out that any form of communication is embedded in a frame of reference. Conservatives and progressives have their own mental frames that inform how they use language. For example, using the phrase “tax relief” automatically implies that taxes are some kind of painful affliction. Therefore, when progressives adopt that phrase, they’re automatically falling into the conservative frame, thereby shooting themselves in the foot, so to speak. We also discussed the implications of Lakoff’s proposal that conservatives and progressives operate with worldviews that parallel two distinct family models: the strict patriarchal family and the nurturing family.
Here are a few spin-off points that were made during our discussion of Lakoff and the importance of “framing” communication:
- Some frames appear to be “stronger” than others – particularly in terms of the inverses they imply. For example, if you’re not “Pro-Life” that must mean you’re… “Pro-Death”? Not too appealing.
- The importance of developing a common rhetorical framework – a linguistic ideology of sorts that we could use to start positively encoding the messages we ultimately craft. “Moving toward the Real Wealth economy” was a phrase most of us really liked (courtesy of George). The opposite of “Real Wealth,” which would be “Fake Wealth.” seems to accurately describe the piles of loot that have suddenly vanished into thin air along with the collapse of the financial sector. That’s obviously not the kind of wealth anyone wants. This could be an effective use of inverse framing.
- It was also noted that the conservative movement has spent millions of dollars funding the development of unified rhetoric and framing, whereas the progressive movement still uses rhetoric that’s splintered along the lines of various individual causes – environment, human rights, etc. This is something to remedy, and something that we should keep in mind.
- The idea of neutral frameworks or common ground. Is the use of pointedly neutral frameworks a good way to reach broad groups? It seems that respect for capitalism/free market economics is a potential neutral framework in the United States. A call to service – couched in terms of moral responsibility – is another fairly neutral framework.
- A point that came up several times in our discussion is the importance of the audience we’re hoping to target. Since our end-goal is to engineer broad social change in the organizational structure of our economy, we obviously need to reach a wide group of people. However is this best done all at once by targeting “the masses”? Or is it best to craft several tailored messages and disseminate them to different target groups? Perhaps it’s best to first mobilize a base of like-minded thinkers – i.e. focus on unifying progressives towards a common goal.
- Someone observed that we would all likely feel discomfort at communicating using the conservative rhetoric. Would using alternative frameworks just to push our point, regardless of how valid, be deceptive and manipulative? That’s another question.
Quite related to Lakoff’s were the points made in Jonathan Haidt’s talk on moral psychology, which we also watched in preparation for the class. Haidt describes a potential socio-biological reason why progressives and conservatives differ so significantly. For a complete overview, watch the talk – it’s under 20 minutes long and pretty illuminating.
These fundamental barriers that we face in communicating with large groups of people then intersect with more the basic problems of human attention span and memory. Chip and Dan Heath, in what is sure to become a marketing industry classic, picked up on terminology coined by Malcom Gladwell in The Tipping Point and came up with the six characteristics of a “sticky” message. Meaning, a message that is easily understood, remembered, and further transmitted. The six features that win out over our natural attention deficits are:
* Simple — find the core of any idea
* Unexpected — grab people's attention by surprising them
* Concrete — make sure an idea can be grasped and remembered later
* Credible — give an idea believability
* Emotion — help people see the importance of an idea
* Stories — empower people to use an idea through narrative
We didn’t discuss these points too extensively, because they seem pretty un-contentious. But we did make note of a couple of interesting examples that came up in both the Gladwell and Heath excerpts, and made a note to “file away” their advice for later use – once we’re actually doing some communicating.
Finally, we took a quick look at an excerpt from Michael Strangelove’s The Empire of Mind to briefly touch on our potential medium of communication. It seems that the Internet is today’s forum for reaching masses par excellence. We discussed whether it’s the appropriate medium for us, loosely concluding that it probably is. We also observed that the internet is a “scale-free” network, which means that if you hit the right nodes of traffic, you have instant access to millions. This kind of communicative power is unprecedented in history, but the sheer volume of online chatter can drown out any messages of “actual importance.” That’s why identifying the right nodes could be crucial. We briefly discussed writing an internet tracking program to determine where key nodes for our group might be found.
In conclusion: we are hoping to go about the communication of our ideas as strategically as possible, and we’re not ashamed to admit it. If it’s not exactly a revolution that we’re hoping to start, then at least something close to it. Let’s see how successful our attempts ultimately prove.
The readings for this class:
* Gladwell, Malcom. The Tipping Point. Chapter 3 – “The Stickiness Factor” (~50 pages)
* Haidt, Jonathan: The real difference between liberals and conservatives. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html
* Hazen, Don. Don’t Think of an Elephant! Framing 101: How to Take Back Public Discourse pp. 3 – 34
* Heath, Chip and Heath, Dan. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die: “Introduction: What Sticks?” (21 pages)
* Strangelove, Michael. The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement Chapter 7 : “Utopic Capitalism, Global Resistance, and the New Public Sphere.” pp. 199 – 217
Another couple of video gems:
John McCain Parody:
John.he.is
Competitive Enterprise Institute
“We Call it Life”
This video is for real – not a parody.
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