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 | 26 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
We’ve been fixing
After a nasty bit of hacking — plus over 5000 spam comments that made it past Akismet — I think we’re back in business. PLEASE tell me if you detect any further problems with this blog. There’s an email address at the Contact link; also, I’m CurtMonash on Twitter and Facebook alike.
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Customer-funded development — structuring a deal
This is the second post of a short series about what I think is an underused business model among software entrepreneurs, namely sponsored (i.e. customer-funded) development. Key points of the first post included:
- If you have an invention you can’t fund yourself, having your first customer(s) pay for development may be the key to realizing your dreams.
- Likely prospects are companies that:
- Are sufficiently hard-core technically to value your bleeding-edge ideas …
- … and to be willing to invest in projects with obviously high risks of failure.
- Are sufficiently limited technically to believe that your team is significantly stronger than what they could hire and deploy themselves.
This post covers the nitty-gritty of sponsored-development deal-making.
As per the previous post in this series, suppose you are fortunate enough to identify the right customer for a sponsored-development relationship. Then the deal process is likely* to go something like this:
- You start as you would in any other unproven-vendor sales cycle.
- You politely turn down the inevitable offer to simply hire you and your team onto their payroll. 🙂
- You explain that you have to keep the intellectual property yourself. This is crucial. If they don’t firmly agree, walk away from the sales cycle at that point.
- You ascertain whether there’s really a deal to be done. This is harder than it is in other kinds of sales cycle.
- You get to the neighborhood of “Yes”.
- You politely reject the first offer they make to fund you, because one of terms will be that, if all goes well, they can buy your company at a price in the range of 3-5X what they will be investing. That’s not nearly enough upside for you.
- You do a win-win deal.
*Actually, the deal process is likely to fail. Most deal processes do. But if it does succeed, it’s likely to look like what I just outlined.
Two of the bullets above allude to challenges in agreeing on deal terms. The first concerns IP ownership. The structure you should insist on is: Read more