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
Telling multiple stories
Much of this blog gives advice about how to tell a story. But that’s actually an oversimplification. In fact, you’re almost always in the situation where you want to tell multiple stories at once. The main messages of this post are:
- Figure out which stories you are telling (the complete list, if you please).
- Make sure that you’re telling each of them well.
Reasons the multiple-stories situation is so common include:
- Products are, unavoidably, positioned along many attributes each. If you’re trying to get a prospect or influencer to think well of a product, you may need to address multiple important concerns.
- A product release typically introduces multiple new features in a product.
- People only pay attention to you sporadically. Thus:
- When you’re pitching them about something new, you generally also should reinforce the belief that your product in fact has been great all along, because your historical greatness may not be at the top of their minds.
- Similarly, they may need to be reminded — i.e. informed — of your evidence for company momentum.
- Customer momentum stories typically include quotes as to why the customers so liked your product. Product feature stories often include customer momentum validation.
- The layered messaging model inherently calls for several linked stories. What’s more, there are several kinds of support on its bottom tier, and you may not restrict yourself to just one.
The first way to deal with all this is via modularization. In some cases, that’s easy. (E.g. websites can make different points on different pages.) Sometimes it’s harder, but worth doing anyway. E.g., in my recent post on influencer pitches, I said: Read more
| Categories: Layered messaging models, Marketing communications | 31 Comments |
The core of strategy
This blog is based on two precepts that also guide my consulting:
- In enterprise software and similar businesses, messaging is the core of strategy.
- Messages must be robust enough to withstand deliberate competitive attack.
Let’s spell that out.
Messaging is the core of strategy
The enterprise software business, in simplest terms, is about the building, marketing and selling of software. Messaging is central to all of those activities! In particular:
- Selling boils down to two main processes, one of which is delivering sales messages. (The other, of course, is managing prospect relationships.)
- Marketing is mainly about developing and delivering messages. (Most of the rest is lead generation.)
- Development’s job is to make great sales and marketing messages be true.
If we add another level of complexity, the story changes only a little. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Marketing communications, Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 4 Comments |
Faith, hope, and clarity
Some principles of enterprise IT messaging.
0. Decision makers are motivated by two emotions above all — fear and greed. In the case of enterprise IT, that equates roughly to saying they want to buy stuff that:
- Is safe.
- Will confer benefits.
1. For a marketing message to succeed, whatever its goals are, the “confer benefits” part of the story needs to be:
- Compelling
- Believed
2. The “safe” part needs to be believed too. Rational belief in the safety of doing business with you is good. Blind faith is even better, but usually is enjoyed only by the most established of vendors.
In some cases, that may be the greatest competitive strength they have.
3. To be believed, enterprise IT messaging generally needs to be:
- Credible
- Clear
A certain amount of exaggeration is expected, and easily shrugged off. It’s also possible to get away with a certain amount of vagueness, whether in a fear/safety story or when pitching something as new/innovative/exciting. But don’t overdo either.
One common way to overdo your exaggeration — make an obviously false claim of uniqueness.
4. Please note: Deficiencies in the consistency of your messages can undermine credibility and clarity alike.
5. Messaging can become distorted in many ways, both accidental and deliberate. For example: Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Layered messaging models, Marketing communications, Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 3 Comments |
Messaging and positioning
To a first approximation, messaging is the expression of positioning; and the way you know whether positioning is good is whether good messaging naturally flows from it. So it’s natural to conflate the two. But let’s focus for once on positioning itself.
I think positioning boils down to:
- Product category, even though product categorizations are never precise.
- Orientation, along multiple attributes.* Hence positionings are more complex than vendors commonly realize.
- (Optionally, but it’s a common option) Target customer group.
When positioning is framed that way, we can say that the primary goals of messaging are to communicate, emphasize or try to change aspects of your positioning.
*I used to say “dimensions” instead of “attributes” — but most likely the attributes aren’t all orthogonal to each other and also aren’t each measured on a continuous scale.
The modern concept of “positioning” was formulated and popularized by Jack Trout, starting in the 1960s, and can be stated as (filling) a “location in the customer’s mind”. In practice, a Trout positioning combines a product category with a single-attribute orientation such as “safe”, “powerful”, or “fun”. But I think that’s too simple for B2B or technology contexts.
I like the Geoffrey Moore formulation better, in which he offers a positioning template:
For (target customers)
Who (have the following problem)
Our product is a (describe the product or solution)
That provides (cite the breakthrough capability).
Unlike (reference competition)
Our product/solution (describe the key point of competitive differentiation)
But while those are all good questions — compare them to my own strategy worksheet — Moore’s version is flawed too; in conflating positioning and messaging, he oversimplifies them both. Read more