Poltiical messaging’s secret sauce: “Cluefulness”
A large fraction of political messaging fits a single, underappreciated frame, which for lack of a better name I’ll call cluefulness. The idea is to take the well-established word “clueless”, give it the antonym “clueful”, and note that a huge fraction of political messaging amounts to:
- Showing that one is clueful.
- Accusing opponents of the opposite.
| Categories: Political marketing | 3 Comments |
Seven categories of political messaging
Electoral politics are confusing. Many candidates, issues, events and voter subgroups interact with each other. Reliable data isn’t nearly sufficient for us to confidently tease causal factors apart. So any discussion of political campaign strategy relies, at best, on educated guesses. Here are some of mine.
I believe that voters’ decision factors can largely be divided into seven categories. The six more obvious ones are:
- Caring/Empathy/Concern, aka “Which needs or desires do they most want to address, for whom, and how badly do they seem to want to?”
- Proposals/Policies/Programs/Priorities/Plans/Promises, aka “More precisely, what do they say they want to do for us?”
- Effectiveness/Competence, aka “How good will they be at actually doing it?”
- (Dis)honesty/Corruption, aka “Are they really going to try to do it? Or do they have another agenda instead?”
- Group Identity/Affinity, aka “Are they generally on our team?”
- Behavior/Demeanor/Comportment, aka “Do we even want to team with them?”
In a companion post, I argue for adding a less obvious seventh category:
- Cluefulness/Understanding, aka “Do they even understand what’s going on?”
As generalities, I think this all holds true across different countries and eras, and even describes citizens’ views of non-democratic authoritarian regimes. But the specifics obviously vary by time and place. Read more
| Categories: Political marketing | 2 Comments |
Fear, anger, loathing, shame and disgust
This post is part of a series focused on political persuasion. Others in the series are linked from an introductory overview.
Marketing, persuasion and decision-making have a lot to do with emotions. Often, especially in politics, those emotions are negative.
In discussing that, it is common to focus on one or two particular kinds of emotion. Steve Bannon and Barack Obama both talk about “fear and anger”. I blogged last year about fear, and in a companion to this piece have written about outrage. But in this particular post, let’s acknowledge and partially disambiguate a broad range of negative motivations.
0. One complication arises immediately, in that words describing negative emotions may have multiple important word senses. For example: Read more
| Categories: Marketing theory, Political marketing | 4 Comments |
Accusations of recklessness or insufficient caring
This post is part of a series focused on political persuasion. Others in the series are linked from an introductory overview.
Much political messaging boils down to “They don’t care (enough)”. Indeed, that theme is central to:
- Much fear-oriented messaging, for example in the areas of immigration, national security or economic security.
- Most complaints about selfish or “out-of-touch” elites.
- Much of what could be called “compassionate outrage”.
- Much other political outrage as well.
At the highest level, this is obvious.
- People want their leaders to care about them.
- Negative political messaging often works better than positive claims.
- Therefore, “My opponent doesn’t care about you” is a natural claim to try.
As in so much else, debates about “caring” often hinge on credibility/confidence and/or importance. Read more
| Categories: Marketing theory, Political marketing | 28 Comments |
Patterns of outrage
This post is part of a series focused on political persuasion. Others in the series are linked from an introductory overview.
Present-day politics are commonly governed by negative emotions, such as fear, anger and disgust. So says conventional wisdom, and I agree. Analyzing these surging emotions is difficult, but here’s a framework that I think could help:
A huge fraction of significant modern politics boils down to outrage at patterns of events.
1. My best argument for focusing specifically on outrage is this — political issues sort roughly into three buckets: Read more
| Categories: Hillary Clinton, Marketing theory, Political marketing | 1 Comment |
Patterns of political persuasion
This is the introduction to a multi-post series on political persuasion. Other posts in the series are linked below.
Politics, we keep hearing, is partisan, emotional, “tribal” and generally devoid of rationality, with voters who are essentially impossible to persuade. There’s much truth to that — but it can’t be the whole story! Election outcomes are not all foreordained. Campaigning and other political persuasion do actually influence political outcomes.
How does this influence work? While a complete exposition is obviously beyond the scope of this blog, I think we can cover substantial ground. Read more
Modifying beliefs
I assert:
- Even if it’s hard to completely change somebody’s beliefs …
- … it is often easier to modify them in some way …
- … especially by weakening or strengthening those convictions.
Indeed, there are at least two major ways to change the strength of people’s ongoing beliefs, namely by influencing:
- How sure people are that their belief is accurate — i.e., the confidence they hold in it.
- How sure they are that, even if accurate, their belief should contribute much to their decision making — i.e., the importance they ascribe to it.
I think this framework has considerable explanatory power.
| Categories: Marketing theory, Political marketing, Technology marketing | 6 Comments |
Five categories of persuasion
For multiple reasons, it is hard to change people’s minds. In particular:
- Nobody likes to admit — even to themselves — that they were wrong.
- Once a decision is made, it can be genuinely costly to change.
- Many views — especially political ones — are “tribal”. You believe what you believe because that’s what group membership requires you to believe.
- Analyzing things can be difficult and stressful. People like to make up their minds, resolve the uncertainty, and move on.
Yet tremendous resources are devoted to persuasion, meant to change or confirm people’s beliefs as the case may be. That’s the essence of such activities as marketing, religion, education, and political campaigns — not to mention blogging. I.e. — despite the difficulties, persuasion is widely (and of course correctly) believed to be possible. Let’s explore how that works.
Most persuasion and mind-changing, I believe, fits into five overlapping categories, which may be summarized as:
- Influencing people’s first impressions of or initial beliefs about a subject.
- Persuading somebody to narrow or otherwise change the scope of an ongoing belief.
- Influencing somebody’s level of confidence in an ongoing belief.
- Influencing the importance somebody ascribes to an ongoing belief.
- Actually changing somebody’s mind about something.
The first two are discussed below. The next two are discussed in a companion post. I’m still trying to figure out how the last one works. 🙂 Read more
Stoking a fear and promising a fix
I’ve been insistent that everybody needs to pay attention to politics now, which is being conducted with greater cynicism than technology marketing ever could be. But in this particular post, political and technology marketing (among other kinds) are compared on a more even basis.
Donald Trump:
- Articulated voters’ fears.
- Stoked those fears relentlessly.
- Claimed that he “alone” could fix things.
- Won the US presidency.
This is actually a time-honored pattern, pursued by (among others):
- Many other demagogues and authoritarian leaders.
- IBM in its industry-dominant heyday.
- Consumer marketing companies over many decades.
- Several of the world’s great religions.
While fear-and-fix is a powerful strategy, it’s not easy to pull off, because it involves establishing both sides of a partial contradiction:
- There is a terrible danger that is very hard to prevent.
- I can in fact prevent it.
Approaches to resolving this paradox typically fall into one or more of three buckets:
- Overstating (or entirely fabricating) the danger.
- Overstating (or entirely fabricating) the fix.
- Understating (or just downplaying) the costs of the solution.
Let’s consider some examples. Read more
| Categories: Political marketing, Technology marketing | 2 Comments |
Donald Trump’s politics in one song
Donald Trump’s favorite musical is said to be Evita, the story of the fascist/populist couple Juan and Eva Peron, who guided Argentina from status as a rich country to being pretty much of a third-world wreck.* Isaac Butler wrote about that back in November, but he missed a key point. More precisely, he missed a key song, whose lyrics I shall copy below. (I think this is one of the rare cases in which printing a song’s entire lyrics is clearly fair use.) Emphasis added.
*In real life, Juan Peron was vastly more influential on his country than his second wife Eva, not least because he lived much longer. But the musical portrays them as more equal partners, giving her great credit for his original ascension to power.
Art of the Possible Read more
| Categories: Political marketing | 13 Comments |