A good sales presentation should use as few words as possible. Any word that does not help to make the sale endangers the sale. Therefore, make every word count by using “telegraphic” statements, as there is no time for “letters.” Learn the MAGIC of making your “selling sentences” sell.
—ELMER WHEELER
In the Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle identifies three genres of public language. The first two, forensic and deliberative rhetoric, are as familiar today as they were in his world. Forensic rhetoric is the language of the courts; deliberative rhetoric is the language in which politicians set out their policy proposals and critique those of others, both within and beyond the walls of the Assembly or Parliament or Congress. Forensic rhetoric, Aristotle tells us, deals with past events: What happened and who is to blame? Its underlying purpose is justice. Deliberative rhetoric addresses the future: What should we do? Rather than seeking to condemn or exonerate individuals, it argues for or against different policies and opinions. Its purpose is to help citizens decide which would benefit the community and which harm it. Aristotle says that deliberative rhetoric is more challenging than forensic argument, because the future is unknowable. But it is also more worthy of the statesman because it deals with public issues rather than the actions and affairs of private citizens, and it is less prone to partiality and sharp practice.
At first blush, Aristotle’s third category of rhetoric is altogether less intriguing. He names it epideictic rhetoric. The Greek word suggests display, and it is sometimes called demonstrative rhetoric. This is the public language of a certain kind of formal occasion: a funeral oration (eulogy), for instance, or a speech in praise of a notable individual or institution (encomium, panegyric). Like forensic and deliberative rhetoric, demonstrative speech tries to persuade, but unlike them it does so without making an argument or getting embroiled in controversy. You may regard Pericles as an arrogant prig who has led Athens down the road to ruin, but the day of his funeral is surely not the right moment to bring all that up. Aristotle tells us that demonstrative rhetoric characteristically deals with the present, and that its focus and reason for existence is “the beautiful and admirable.”1 Its subject matter is praise and blame—though in practice praise tends to dominate.
Some kinds of demonstrative rhetoric have fallen out of favor. For reasons we will explore later, we have become so conflicted about the meaning of war that we have more or less abandoned the millennia-old tradition of carving epitaphs and patriotic mottoes into memorials to the fallen. Often the only words visible on modern monuments are the names of the dead, the designers relying instead on the neutral geometries of stone, light, and water to reflect and give body to our grief and gratitude. But other types of formal demonstrative rhetoric survive: the presidential tributes to lost astronauts we heard in chapter 3 are examples, as are those unintentionally hilarious speeches that incumbent US presidents give at the opening of their predecessor’s official library, in which they are obliged to shower compliments on someone who is often a detested political enemy. Then there are commencement addresses, acceptance speeches at the Oscars, remembrances of dead friends and relatives which, whether religious in flavor or not, remain a central part of our funeral rites.
But another very different form of demonstrative rhetoric has taken our world by storm. We wake up to it, eat and drink it all day long, then let it lull us back to sleep. Although it may not have been precisely what Aristotle had in mind when he defined this branch of rhetoric, it fits his definition like a glove. I’m referring, of course, to the language of marketing.
Marketing experts may well raise an eyebrow at the suggestion that marketing is a form of rhetoric, and that its many effects can be summed up by the word persuasion. For instance, in their seminal 1999 survey of the academic field, “How Advertising Works: What Do We Really Know?,”2 Demetrios Vakratsas and Tim Ambler of the London Business School identified what they called “persuasive hierarchy” models of advertising, which posited that consumers become convinced to buy a given product through the specific sequence of cognition (being informed and thinking about the product), followed by affect (consequently feeling good about the product), and finally behavior (going out and buying it). But they also described alternate conceptual models in which affect and behavior come before cognition, or make cognition unnecessary.
In their framework, the concept of persuasion was reserved for those models which prioritize information and cognition. This is perfectly reasonable, but it should be clear by now that I think of persuasion as something that proceeds from cognition (or logos), and affect and experience (which we can compare to ethos and pathos), in any order and proportion. A wordless and purely emotional appeal on a given subject might be more persuasive, under my definition, than a closely argued one. The family resemblance between Vakratsas and Ambler’s schema for advertising and Aristotle’s for rhetoric is itself striking. It might also be objected that advertising and other forms of marketing often achieve their impact in visual and other nonverbal ways. Again though, my definition of rhetoric extends beyond words to images and other sensory effects.
The impact of marketing on political rhetoric has already made a number of appearances in this book. So far, though, we have considered it as an exogenous force, acting upon and modifying the way politicians frame their language and how the media react to it. Now I want to examine the language of marketing from the inside.
* * *
Commercial messaging is not new—proprietary phalluses helpfully point the way to brothels on the excavated streets of Pompeii—but the marketing that surrounds us today is a child of modernity. Mass production, distribution, and communication meant that, for the first time, the same products and services could be offered to large numbers of prospective customers. It made sense for companies to give themselves and their products consistent names and visual liveries, which they could then promote on posters and in newspapers. The naming and designing evolved into the discipline of branding; the billboard and newspaper promotion into modern advertising.
Of course rival companies were also able to brand and advertise their products, so companies began to look for ways of differentiating their offerings to make them more attractive than those of their competitors. A given product could offer the highest quality in its class, or the best value for money, or simply be the cheapest, or it could include innovations or other distinctive features that would be valued by customers in its target market.
To work well, differentiation needed to influence upstream decisions about product design and manufacture as well as downstream judgments about pricing, merchandising, and advertising mix. Large firms—car manufacturers, for example, or makers of mass-market consumer goods—would soon find themselves with whole families of brands and subbrands, all of which needed to be distinguished from one another as well as from their rivals. As technology accelerated product development, and competition drove market segmentation and product diversification, the advertising and PR channels multiplied, and what had begun with a decent trademark, a few handouts, and a bit of training for the sales force became, by the late twentieth century, what modern generals call a three-dimensional battlespace.
It may transmit its messages through Snapchat or Pinterest, instant messaging or spectacular live events, but modern marketing still usually relies on persuasive public language to make its case. Like other forms of demonstrative rhetoric, it is an unashamed exercise in advocacy, its purpose generally being to promote the “beautiful and admirable” and to convince its audience that the product or service in question exemplifies those qualities.
We came across Aristotle’s term amplification in chapter 2. It is an essential attribute in demonstrative rhetoric where it almost always means accentuating the positive. If you want to praise someone, Aristotle says, why not build him up by telling your audience how much braver, smarter, kinder, and more modest he is than his contemporaries? Still worried you might sell him short? Compare him to the heroes of history and legend. The point is to choose whatever descriptions and comparisons show your subject in the best possible light. By the same token, if your man has serious rivals, it’s best not to mention them at all; Aristotle suggests that the demonstrative rhetor avoid negative comparisons, criticisms, qualifications, or anything else that might weaken the positive portrayal of their subject. Marketing tends to follow this advice closely. If it mentions rival products at all—and it generally avoids this, especially if it wants to present the given product as a market leader—it is only to emphasize how far they fall short of whatever it is promoting.
It often also seeks to decontextualize its subject. At the supermarket, one packet of food tells us it “contains 0% trans fats,” a second that it is “sugar free,” a third that it is “low sodium.” It all sounds admirably healthy, at least until we remind ourselves that a product that contains no trans fats may still be loaded with sugar, while its sugar-free neighbor may turn out to be pure lard. The trade-offs and compromises involved in nutritional choices are not completely hidden, but they are deemphasized as much as possible. The government insists on the “Nutrition Facts” panel on the package precisely because it knows that left to their own devices, many food manufacturers would omit these awkward facts entirely.
Not all marketing is like this. A firm dealing with a major safety failure, say, may decide to confront the problem explicitly with consumers to rebuild trust. Another may decide that full openness about ingredients, or the dangers of excessive consumption of the product, may itself be a valuable point of differentiation. Companies may embrace social or ecological responsibility in ways that involve messaging that goes beyond, perhaps even acts against, their commercial best interests. Nonetheless, in combination with amplification, decontextualization is the norm in much of the marketing we see, and such regulation as there is—mandatory health warnings on cigarette packets, for instance, or the requirement in the United States that the advertising of prescription drugs be accompanied by suitably gruesome information about side effects—clearly recognizes that.
Urgency has always been an essential element of commercial marketing. Buy this now. Offer ends soon. Click here for more information. Even messaging that appears to be about the distant future—Have you made proper provision for your retirement?—typically concludes with an immediate call to action. Again, there are exceptions: some brand marketing is intended to change perceptions of a given company or product over time—an investment bank trying to repair its reputation in the aftermath of the subprime fiasco, for instance. But there is an impatience about most of the marketing we see and hear that distinguishes it from more stately forms of public language.
That impatience expresses itself in another way. In chapter 2, we noted that orators are generally in more of a hurry than philosophers because they don’t want to lose the attention of their listeners. How much more true is that of the marketer whose contact with the consumer may be fleeting and surrounded by noise and competitive distraction? So the speed with which the message can be delivered is also critical. That argues for brevity. Thus the imperatives of amplification and urgency operate together to dictate an intensification of every aspect of the communication: the choice and number of words on the digital banner ad, the pace of the TV commercial, the sales script in the call center.
Amplification, decontextualization, intensification—exactly the kind of long and ugly Latinate words that George Orwell warned us against. I’ve made marketing sound like a complex industrial refinery which uses these and other -ations to turn raw language into some other more purified and concentrated substance. Although there has always been more creativity to it than that suggests, I believe that this is essentially what it is.
In practice, marketing would prove to be a hit-and-miss affair, long on theory but sometimes short on results. As we shall see, marketers have tended to recycle a handful of unchanging basic ideas in shiny new guises, in the light of new client needs, market conditions, or the opportunities afforded by new categories of data. Nonetheless, given its immense commercial importance, it probably shouldn’t surprise us that its language was the first kind of public discourse to be the subject of large-scale systematic research to discover empirically how it works—and how it could made more persuasive. Most people are aware that modern digital marketing relies heavily on data and analytics, but the theory and practice of scientific marketing began long before that.
Your First Ten Words
In 1937, Prentice-Hall published a book called Tested Sentences That Sell by Elmer Wheeler. It is both a practical primer and a kind of manifesto for what a methodical approach to the language of sales could achieve for both individual salespeople and the companies that employed them. It contains Wheeler’s most famous piece of marketing advice, “DON’T SELL THE STEAK—SELL THE SIZZLE!,” by which he meant that you should always focus on “the BIGGEST selling point in your proposition—the MAIN reasons why your prospects will want to buy.”3 But much of the book focuses on how even small adjustments to language can make a big difference to sales.
In the chapter “Five Little Words That Sold a Million Gallons of Gasoline,” Wheeler recounts what amounts to a childhood marketing epiphany. This is how he begins: “The selling word is always mightier than the price tag. With words we govern people. A million people every week buy gasoline and oil because of certain tested words they hear from the Man at the Pump.”
The young Wheeler is helping at the pumps at his father’s gas station in Rochester, New York, when an unnamed salesman from Standard Oil asks him precisely what he says to sell fuel to motorists:
I had no particular statement, so I told him: “Sometimes I ask people if they want five or ten, other times I just say, ‘how many today?’” The salesman said, “The next motorist who comes in, say this to him: ‘Shall I fill it up?’” I used the sentence, and the motorist told me to fill his tank. I sold fifteen gallons instead of the usual five or ten.
What a surefire method of getting tanks filled up! The sentence worked, and has been working successfully now for twenty years.4
More than half a century before behavioral economics gained traction, Elmer Wheeler had discovered the essential principle of “nudge”—the use of subliminal cues to prompt individuals or groups to a desired response.
Wheeler spent years developing his ideas and employing them to help companies solve practical sales and marketing challenges. In due course, he founded the Wheeler Word Laboratory with the intention of researching the most effective selling language at scale. He claims in his book to have analyzed more than 100,000 sales words and techniques and to have tested them on no fewer than 19 million people. Both numbers sound like wild overstatements—Tested Sentences practices what it preaches about amplification—but it’s clear that Wheeler had understood more than eighty years ago that what we now call “big data” could play a central role in optimizing marketing messages to the public. He quotes Sherlock Holmes—“While individuals may be insoluble puzzles, in the aggregate they become mathematical certainties”—and goes on to explain: “This statement means that you can never foretell how one person will react to a given selling sentence, but that you can say with scientific accuracy what the average will do.”5
So what did all this data tell Elmer Wheeler about persuasive language? One of his most important findings is about that need for urgency:
People form “snap judgments.” They make up their opinions about you in the first ten seconds, and this affects their entire attitude toward what you have to sell them. Give them a brief “telegram” in these first ten seconds so that their opinion will be in your favor. Make the wires “sing”—so you will be given a chance to “follow-up.”6
By “telegram,” he means the shortest possible form of words to express your message. In the quotation at the start of this chapter, Wheeler distinguishes between letters, meaning normal prose or spoken English, and telegrams, by which he means compressed language that immediately reveals the unique selling proposition of the product in question. Whether it’s the salesman, Mom and Dad, or the preacher, and whatever it is that they’re selling, their “first ten words are more important than [their] next ten thousand!”
The unblinking focus on the “sizzle” implies decontextualization—a spotlight is shone on the core selling point, and everything else, including any awkward drawbacks or limitations, remains in shadow—but Wheeler says he is utterly against deliberate hoodwinking. Better to play it straight and use his methods to make the best of what you’ve got. In fact, Tested Sentences is anything but cynical in tone; Wheeler has the innocent fervor of an inventor who has stumbled on a new technology that will benefit the whole of humanity, in this case by bringing great products and happy consumers together more effectively than ever before.
He also has some clear advice about argument. “Never disagree with a customer who offers an objection”: “If the customer says, ‘It looks heavy to me,’ don’t say, ‘Heavy? Of course not.’ Instead say, ‘It does LOOK heavy, but feel how light it is.’ Seem to agree, but bring the prospect diplomatically around to your way of thinking.”7
This section titled “Win Decisions—Not Arguments” shows just how radically this approach to language diverges from the way we normally think about debate. Whereas philosophical dialectic and deliberative rhetoric both strive to get to the bottom of arguments, all a salesperson following Elmer Wheeler’s advice has to do is to get the prospect to focus on the “excellence and beauty” of the product, and the objections will disappear from view. We can see the advantages of this approach in simplicity and impact. And the decision to sidestep the whole painful process of adversarial dialectic allows speakers much greater freedom about what to say and how to say it. They achieve maximum persuasiveness not by honing complex arguments but by empirically testing many different possible messages with customers, and using the results to select the most promising one and optimize its expression.
We might not worry too much about this approach if the issue is nothing more serious than which vacuum cleaner to buy. But suppose someone started applying it to philosophy or politics?
Two and a half thousand years before Tested Sentences, Plato claimed that a group of people were doing just that in Athens. His concern was about the itinerant teachers of rhetoric and philosophy known as Sophists. In the Gorgias, he presents Socrates running witty circles around one of the celebrity Sophists. Socrates argues that whereas dialectical philosophy tries to reach true understanding of the questions it considers, rhetoric—or at least the Sophist Gorgias’ version of rhetoric—merely tries to “flatter” its listeners:
[Rhetoric] seems to me, Gorgias, not to be a valid discipline among the arts at all, just a matter of having the craftiness and the nerve to pull a fast one on the public. If you want to give it a name, I’d call it a form of flattery. Flattery comes in many shapes and sizes—one of them is cookery, which may seem like an art to some but which as far as I’m concerned is nothing more than a knack or routine. I say that rhetoric is just another form of flattery … And if you ask me what sort of flattery, I’d say it’s a sham version of a certain kind of politics.8
For Socrates, cookery is a “knack” rather than an art because all it requires is learning what ingredients or preparations people like. According to him, Gorgias does the same with words. The noun Plato has Socrates use for “knack,” empeiria, is the word that gives us empirical: he is accusing the Sophist of using trial and error to establish what people want to hear, and then of serving it up to them, regardless of whether it is true or insightful. Plato has had a premonition of the systematic use of data to optimize language—and he has immediately realized the threat to proper, old-fashioned argument.
Despite his rival’s disobliging portrait of him, however, Gorgias amassed enough of a fortune from his rhetoric classes to have had a gold statue of himself put up in a temple and is said to have lived peacefully and prosperously to the improbable age of 108. It was not him but the straight-talking Socrates who ended up in the dock.
A Few Key Takeaways
Today Gorgias’ approach increasingly holds sway, not just in retail marketing but also in realms of public language that until relatively recently were considered too serious for anything other than evidence-based dialectical argument. A good example is that centerpiece of modern political, corporate, and institutional life—the strategy presentation.
Much of this book is about how policy is discussed and debated once it’s been formulated. Over the next few pages, we’ll look at how the sausage is made—in other words, how the proposals that may eventually become policy are developed, shared, and refined inside government departments, companies, and every other kind of organization before the moment of completion and adoption. And to help us, we’re going to dip into another how-to guide.
Are you “terrified of speaking in front of a group”? Or “simply looking to polish your skills”? Either way, Nancy Duarte’s HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations is here to help. The front jacket is itself a model PowerPoint slide: Beneath the title are three things the book promises to help you do arranged in three punchy bullets: “Inspire action, Engage the audience, Sell your ideas.” When we see that Aristotelian triad, we know we’re on familiar turf. This is a book about rhetoric—and a state-of-the-art one at that.
Nancy Duarte begins by making the case, contra Socrates, that persuasion is indeed an art—and one that repays real effort:
We work in a first-draft culture. Type an e-mail. Send. Write a blog entry. Post. Whip up some slides. Speak.
But it’s in crafting and recrafting—in iteration and rehearsal—that excellence emerges.
Why worry about being an excellent communicator when you have so many other pressing things to do? Because it will help you get those things done.
So, as you conceive, visualize, and present your message, don’t skimp on preparation, even if you’re giving a short talk. It actually takes more careful planning to distill your ideas into a few key takeaways than it does to create an hour-long presentation … And gather lots of feedback so you’ll be all the more effective when you start the process again.9
We see at once how close this is to Elmer Wheeler’s approach. The goal now is not the sale of some external object or service but the selling of “a few key takeaways”—in other words, the promotion of some of the important ideas in the presentation itself. But the method is very similar. At its heart is recursive empirical optimization: “crafting and recrafting” are required as the presentation is being prepared, but once it is delivered, the speaker should solicit “feedback” and build that into the next presentation.
Amplification is the thread that runs through the book. “Amplify Your Message Through Contrast” we are told early on, because “a skilled communicator captures an audience’s interest by creating tension between contrasting elements—and then provides relief by resolving that tension.” The author adds a handy list of paired contrasts—past/future, stagnation/growth, need/fulfillment, etc. Amplification can make a point more memorable as well as more dramatic, so if possible, facts should be attention grabbing: “If statistics are shocking, don’t glide over them—amplify them.” Where possible, heighten the language:
If you say your presentation is about “the Florida wetlands,” that’s also just a topic. Add your point of view and what’s at stake. For instance: “We need to restrict commercial and residential development in Florida’s wetlands, because we’re destroying the fragile ecosystem there and killing off endangered species.”10
People, Nancy Duarte tells us, “will move away from pain and toward pleasure,” so you should “prod them” with words like “destroying” and “killing” so “they feel uncomfortable staying in their current position.”
Another chapter deals with sound bites. Because of their power and memorability, it’s essential to “embed well-crafted sound bites into every talk”—though it’s also important not to deliver them “with a lot of fanfare,” because they should appear “spontaneous.” She gives us the example of Steve Jobs using rhythmic repetition to drive one such formulation home. Jobs was holding an emergency press conference to deal with a problem with the iPhone 4—some consumers were finding that if they held it in a certain way, the antenna didn’t work. The message he wanted to convey, however, was not about the practicalities of the problem but Apple’s relationship with its customers:
Jobs repeated the phrase “We want to make all our users happy” several times during his talk. Midway through, Jobs flashed a slide showing the antenna issue affected only a fraction of users. Soon, a message appeared at the bottom: “We care about every user.” A few slides later: “We love our users.” Then “We love our users” appeared again on the next slide. And the next. And the next. “We love our users, we love them,” Jobs concluded. “We do this [provide a free phone case that will solve the problem] because we love our users.” That “love” was the message the press took away from his piece of “crisis communication.”11
Duarte doesn’t ignore dialectic—she advises careful research to identify any “logical arguments” that could be used by members of your audience to resist the case you are making—but emphasizes throughout the need to “balance analytical and emotional appeal” and to “add emotional texture.” And the central idea of the book is about “STORY”: “Use storytelling principles and structure to engage your audience”—from the beginning, to set up whatever challenge or tension your presentation is intended to resolve, to the end, “where you describe how blissful their world will be when they adopt your ideas.”12 We are left with the impression that in most situations story is safer and more effective than argument. PowerPoint itself, with its deck of separate slides that can be arranged in any number of different orders, encourages impressionistic storytelling rather than structured reasoning.
The HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations is a thoughtful piece of work by someone who seems familiar with Aristotelian as well as contemporary ideas about how best to persuade an audience. But that last mention of the “blissful” world to which speakers must beckon their audience emphasizes just how far we are from the world of deliberative rhetoric. Like the language of marketing, like other forms of demonstrative rhetoric, the aim of Persuasive Presentations is the beautiful and the pleasurable. Conclusions are reached not through dialectical argument but as the punch line to an emotionally satisfying narrative. Elmer Wheeler told us to “win decisions—not arguments”; now, again, instead of offering our audience a series of logically connected propositions that can be tested and challenged, Nancy Duarte advises us to guide them smoothly through a dramatic and compelling story to a predetermined mood state; to present choices that in reality are painful or finely balanced as inevitable, obvious even; to reduce interest and relationships to elementary human instincts and those primal opposites: need/fulfillment, sacrifice/reward, stagnation/growth.
To a large degree, policy formulation has moved from portrait to landscape, from prose to bullet point and graphic, from argument to story. If this is the way that policy is made, is it any wonder that a similar shift has taken place in the way it is then communicated? We love our users, we love them. It wouldn’t be right to ask them to think too hard.
It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear
Politicians are instinctive marketers and, given the competitive pressures they face, are always on the lookout for any innovation that might give them an edge in getting their message out. Crisp phrases intended to make headlines and help voters make sense of complex policy positions have been a feature of political communications since the early days of the mass media. Take William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” immediately became a universal shorthand for opposition to the gold standard. Or “He kept us out of war,” the central proposition of Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 presidential campaign. Both parties in that election used such aggressive marketing that the following year Congress for the first time considered the regulation of political advertising.13
In 1930 Advertising Age was able to claim that “a political campaign is largely an advertising campaign,” and by 1940 the columnist Dorothy Thompson was on CBS radio criticizing the infiltration of American politics by ad men intent on making a “hard sell”: “The idea is first to create the fear, and then to offer a branded antidote.”14 Thompson told her listeners that she would be voting for FDR because, unlike his Republican opponents, he had no advertising gurus helping him.
But Elmer Wheeler praised “Salesman Roosevelt” for using “word magic” during the 1936 campaign to gain the voters’ confidence. He quoted a vintage Roosevelt passage:
Four years ago the White House was like an emergency hospital. Businessmen came to me with headaches and backaches. No one knew how they suffered, except old Doc Roosevelt.
They wanted a quick hypodermic to relieve the immediate pain, and a quick cure. I gave them both. They got action. In fact, we cured them so quickly and efficiently that now these same people are back, throwing their crutches into the doctor’s face.15
Roosevelt, Wheeler concluded, “knows that some words sell people and others do not, and he makes certain that he uses only language tested to stamp itself on the mind of his prospect directly and instantly, and to remain there forever.”
In the decades after World War II, political marketing became more systematic and endemic. Advertising agencies were hired to offer strategic advice about messaging long before the time came to devise TV spots and posters. Increasingly, people from advertising and marketing backgrounds were chosen as full-time staff members by presidents and other political leaders: No fewer than five members of the Nixon White House team, including his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, came from J. Walter Thompson. Meanwhile, political marketing became a campaign issue itself. At the Democratic convention in 1956, Adlai Stevenson claimed that the Republicans were about to unleash every trick in the marketing book: “The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal—that you can gather voters like box tops—is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.”16 He neglected to mention that the Democrats had just signed up a Madison Avenue advertising agency of their own.
By the second half of the twentieth century, political marketers could draw on a rapidly growing body of theory and practical experience about the different needs and activities that made up the emerging discipline of marketing: market research, marketing strategy, brand marketing and positioning, direct marketing and customer relationship management, advertising, public relations, and corporate communications.
Ideas that had been developed at the start of the century in the fields of psychology and ethology had been rapidly applied to commercial and corporate problems. For instance, Edward Bernays, a critical figure in the development of modern public relations, borrowed concepts from psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud was his uncle) and Ivan Pavlov’s theories about conditioning in animals and humans to create his own thesis about crowd behavior and how a commercial organization—or a government—could “engineer consent”17 across a modern industrial society like the United States.
Theorists in other branches of marketing also absorbed ideas and experimental findings from across the social sciences. Even in the early days, as we’ve seen in the case of Elmer Wheeler, they had a strong instinct that the deepest insights relied on a combination of high-level conceptual pattern recognition, potent case studies, and vast quantities of statistical data: big ideas, compelling human stories, and that alluring promise from the world’s greatest detective of “mathematical certainty.”
In due course, marketing would absorb many additional techniques and theories from the emerging disciplines of social psychology and social anthropology. These disciplines also claimed to base their theories on empirical evidence, but the nature of this evidence varied: the bias of the anthropologists was for long-term observational studies of relatively small groups of people (this would lead to the marketing category of ethnographic fieldwork, in which researchers are immersed in the lives of consumers), while—especially in the growing overlap between social psychology and economics—the psychologists would often rely more on large-scale quantitative research and statistical analysis. None of these could claim to be exact sciences; the judgment and “feel” of the researchers in interpreting the data was still held to be critical. But together they added depth and range to the insights the marketers could offer their clients.
To almost any democratic politician, it was an irresistible package. And so, slowly but inexorably, political marketing began to move upstream. Instead of being brought in at the end of the process, to plan advertising campaigns to message preexisting policies and personalities, marketers started to be invited into much earlier conversations about political strategy and even into the sacred realms of policy formulation. Now surveys, focus groups, and other forms of market research would be used to help decide what the political agenda of a given party should be, rather than merely how that agenda should be sold.
Political leaders had relied on pollsters for decades to help them track the public mood, but the polls and the insights they offered were inevitably retrospective—they reported what the public was saying, or who it might vote for, last week or last month. The new marketing professionals claimed that they could build audience models that were sufficiently deep and sophisticated to be predictive. This is what this group really cares about—announce that policy in that way and this is how they will react. In practice, reality would often stubbornly refuse to conform to the research, and the public would reject policies and candidates the data said they should embrace. But there were successes too—and the prospect of being able to test and fine-tune political ideas and messages in a marketing lab before letting them out into the world was too tantalizing for many politicians to ignore.
One of the techniques the new generation of political marketers introduced was segmentation. Shopkeepers and manufacturers have known since way back when that it often makes sense to divide prospective customers into different groups and to tailor the products you offer them accordingly: men and women, young and old, rich and poor, and so on. These high-level human differences remained important, but in the 1950s, marketing experts began to develop a more sophisticated doctrine. Here is Wendell R. Smith writing in the Journal of Marketing in 1956: “Market segmentation involves viewing a heterogeneous market as a number of smaller homogeneous markets in response to differing preferences, attributable to the desires of consumers for more precise satisfaction of their varying wants.”18
In theory, a marketer could divide a population into discrete groups of similar customers and target each with relevant products—and relevant messages about those products. No longer was it necessary to restrict these groups to traditional categories like age or gender. The marketer could study the data and create entirely new segments based on shared interest, attitude, or lifestyle: sporty singles, upwardly mobile families, thrifty savers. Unlike simple demographic categories, these new segments were imputed rather than real, and as a result they could feel artificial or tendentious. But they also could bring an audience to life and inspire great work not just from advertising creatives but from product teams and even company executives as well.
If you could segment customers, then why not voters? In due course, political campaign managers and even the candidates themselves would be poring over segmentation models with the eagerness of the hungriest sales director. During the 1996 US presidential election, for instance, both the Clinton and the Dole camps decided to focus on a segment known as the soccer moms. The term literally meant mothers who drove their children to soccer matches, but it suggested suburban wives and mothers who were active in their communities, had hectic lives to juggle, and were ambitious for their families. Finally—and crucially for the parties—soccer moms cared about the issues but were political moderates who could be persuaded to vote either Democratic or Republican.
Soccer moms became so salient that the American Dialect Society voted it the Word of the Year.19 But although newspapers and TV companies found it very easy to locate and interview sample soccer moms, they were never a concrete category—like African Americans or the under-5s—but a concept constructed from a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data and intuition. Nonetheless, the concept had a crispness and humanity that a more precise but less resonant segmentation (“middle-class female moderates,” say) lacked, and the parties knew they could use it as a creative touchstone for everything from political advertising to policy selection. In the event, insofar as they existed at all, the soccer moms made their own decisive choice in favor, not of the saturnine, ill-at-ease Robert Dole but the altogether more empathetic William Jefferson Clinton.
Deep understanding of qualitative and quantitative research and other marketing techniques would soon become a prerequisite for anyone wanting to present themselves as a political consultant or manager. In America, the Republicans held a lead in the field through most of the 1990s and early 2000s, but then Barack Obama’s campaign team took segmentation and audience targeting to a new level. According to Ken Strasma, a Democratic political consultant with a firm tellingly named Strategic Telemetry, while some customers might still be looking for a “silver bullet” and want to know “is it cat owners or bourbon drinkers or some nice buzz phrase like that?” the truth depends on “the interactions between hundreds of different data points—it’s rare that you see one single indicator pop.”20 Within a decade, categories like soccer moms had become old hat, too imprecise for the microtargeting of messages, too broad to be of much predictive use. So the Obama team abandoned the comfort blanket of the “nice” phrases, and set off instead in pursuit of those myriad numerical intersections. The hope was that data science could lead them toward the Holy Grail of contemporary marketing—messaging fine-tuned not for a million people, or a thousand or a hundred, but an individual.
Like earlier advances in political messaging, the new marketing techniques made their way across the Atlantic. By the mid-’90s, Tony Blair was open to what was then state-of-the-art audience insight advice from Philip Gould and other professionals. And, as we’ve seen, when David Cameron walked into No. 10 after the 2010 general election, he brought with him Steve Hilton, a political strategist who’d shown an interest and aptitude for marketing throughout the course of his career and who was now fizzing with ideas about how to use digital technology, social psychology, and behavioral economics, not just to gain unprecedented understanding of the electorate and to use that knowledge in policy formulation, but also to form a closer relationship with them. The new breed of political marketing experts shared Elmer Wheeler’s dream of a potent persuasiveness based on empirical analysis and conceptual deconstruction of public attitudes and aspirations. Now they believed they had the technology and the know-how to make that dream come true.
Of all contemporary practitioners in this field, perhaps the one who has concentrated most closely on how to engineer the most effective political language down to individual words and phrases is the American political and business consultant Frank Luntz. The author of Words That Work and numerous other books aimed at politicians and business leaders, his contention has been, like Wheeler’s, that successful public language need not be left up to chance or individual instinct but can be arrived at by exhaustive and recursive testing with audiences. Here he is, writing in The Huffington Post: “Words matter. The most powerful words have helped launch social movements and cultural revolutions. The most effective words have instigated great change in public policy. The right words at the right time can literally change history.”
On the basis of his research, Frank Luntz goes on to offer eleven key words and phrases that politicians and other leaders should use in 2011. Most are disarmingly simple. Imagine remains a very powerful word, apparently—so too, unsurprisingly, does integrity, especially in the phrase uncompromising integrity. He also strongly recommends the phrase I get it: “This explains not only a complete understanding of the situation but also a willingness to solve or resolve [it]. It’s short, sweet and effective—and too few leaders use it.”21
Frank Luntz recommends I get it not through instinct but because he has seen and measured audiences reacting to it. One of his techniques is the Instant Response Focus Group, in which a selected group of respondents listen to a speaker or some other stimulus and use handsets to continuously dial in their reactions, which are blended to create a moving graph that advances in real time. Luntz has often used this technology—which bears a strong family resemblance to one of Elmer Wheeler’s 1930s inventions, the splendidly named “psychogalvanometer”—to help broadcasters rank the eloquence of different politicians. In 2005, we used both man and machine on the BBC Newsnight program to observe how a particular group of voters responded to the Tory MPs who were then vying to become party leader. The politician who scored best on the handsets that night was David Cameron, who indeed went on to lead his party; it has sometimes been suggested that he owed that victory in part to his very visible success with the Instant Response Focus Group.22
For Luntz, finding the right words is a challenge in behavioral science. Because human beings are significantly driven by emotions rather than intellect, one way of expressing a given policy or political thought may be strikingly more persuasive and emotionally acceptable than another. Speakers who fail to carefully test wording in advance may find that their audience reacts in ways radically different from what they intended. Better to do the research first and find out what works best by systematic trial and error. Luntz’s company motto is: “It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.”
Often, according to Luntz, the answer is the use of strong, simple English; like George Orwell and Nancy Duarte, he argues that jargon and technocratic language are always mistakes. And like Elmer Wheeler, he believes that the authenticity of the speaker and the integrity of what is said is key; he sees his methodology not as a dark art to help unscrupulous speakers mislead and bamboozle audiences, but as a means for politicians and CEOs to secure a bond of credibility and empathy between them and their listeners.
Although clarity is important, the intensity of a given expression is critical for Frank Luntz. As a pollster to Newt Gingrich in the mid-’90s during the Contract with America period, Luntz strongly promoted the term “death tax,” which had been coined by the conservative activist James L. Martin, as more memorable—and more emotive—than “inheritance tax.” His recommendation was based not on gut instinct but on systematic testing in which audience reactions to the rival terms “death tax” and “inheritance tax” were measured side by side. The death tax may have been an influence on Sarah Palin’s death panels a decade and a half later.
Sometimes, however, it’s important to let the air out of the balloon rather than to pump it up. It was Frank Luntz who advised George W. Bush’s administration not to talk about “global warming” but the more neutral-sounding “climate change”: adjust the words even by millimeters and you change the terms of the argument, and without many people noticing. The compressed, cunningly turned political language that has featured repeatedly in this book is the product of many different trends and forces. We can also see it as the culmination of a new discipline—the optimization of language by methodical empirical testing, which was invented in the last century to help sell commercial products and services, but which is now routinely applied to political rhetoric by specialists like Frank Luntz.
Neither he nor other practitioners would accept that their techniques necessarily privilege empathy and impact at the expense of systematic argument and explanation, but given the brutal reality of politics and modern media, that is often the result. Despite Plato’s best efforts, it is Gorgias rather than Socrates who is currently winning the argument. No longer restricted to the Athenian marketplace, today’s busy Sophist divides his schedule among Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley, Washington, London, and the world’s other power centers.
But the technology that is now driving marketing makes even Frank Luntz’s wired focus groups look old-fashioned. Today a growing number of chief marketing officers sport a computer science degree and expect the majority of their decisions to be data driven. Data scientists use machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, as well as more traditional statistical analysis to sift through server farms full of information, looking for patterns of consumer behavior that can be used to predict future actions and preferences. Testing different marketing messages and executions on digital platforms no longer requires questionnaires or interviews: it is now done and assessed in real time on a small percentage of the user base. And once again it turns out that seemingly microscopic changes of expression—the exact wording used to encourage a consumer to buy, even the color or font size in which the appeal is made—can significantly affect the outcome.
A/B and multivariate testing—in which multiple variants of a digital site are shown to different groups of users and the results compared—were inevitably adopted by the politicians and their marketing specialists. Dan Siroker, a former engineer at Google Chrome, was director of analytics for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. There Siroker used A/B testing and other types of Web optimization to significantly increase the percentage of visitors to the Obama site who became subscribers (by submitting their e-mail addresses). This in turn led to a big jump in campaign contributions. Siroker later cofounded the tech company Optimizely, whose software has been used in the 2016 election cycle by the campaigns of Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton among others.
The testing is still often employed to optimize the broader user experience of a given site, determining whether it is better to have a video or a still image in the background, or how large and what color an “I agree” or “Contribute” button should be. But some candidates also test which “headlines,” in other words, which campaign messages or promises, resonate most with users and make them most likely to subscribe or donate. Sometimes rival ways of expressing an actual political message are tested alongside each other. It is not clear how far these automated tests influence the broader rhetoric of the candidates—but it’s hard to believe they have no impact at all.
Candidates no longer have to wait for the results of traditional opinion polls, retrospective research, and educated guesswork to gauge public reaction to their campaigns. Real-time sentiment analysis, based on data from social media and Web searches, can show immediate and evolving reaction to a product launch or a presidential debate or anything else. It’s like Frank Luntz’s Instant Response Focus Group, but in this case the focus group is the entire digital universe.
Meanwhile, social media is at hand to perform a kind of informal linguistic optimization. Sarah Palin could have hired Frank Luntz to help her find the best possible phrase to attack Obamacare, but she didn’t need to. The Internet and platforms like Twitter and Facebook have turned the whole of online humanity into a vast laboratory of political language. A commentator or political player can put out dozens of sentences and phrases a day. Most sink without trace, but every so often one of them is so eye-catching or thought-provoking or funny that within minutes it is being reposted and retweeted across an ever-widening pool of people.
And, as we’ve discussed, newspapers and conventional broadcasters watch these platforms—especially Twitter—obsessively, and a tweet or posting can cross over and be further amplified through traditional media channels. There is a kind of Darwinian natural selection of words and phrases going on, and by definition, the only kind of language that emerges from this process is language that works. We hear it, we get it, we pass it on.
The art of persuasion, once the grandest of the humanities and accessible at its highest level only to those of genius—a Demosthenes or a Cicero, a Lincoln or a Churchill—is acquiring many of the attributes of a computational science. Rhetoric not as art but as algorithm.
A Question of Judgment
By now it sounds as if all the cards are stacked against the public. If the language of marketing becomes a decisive influence on the other forms of public language, and if Sherlock Holmes is correct that our collective response to it will approach “mathematical certainties,” are we doomed to become like Pavlov’s dogs, salivating on cue? Or is there some way we can keep our critical distance and make up our own minds on the matter in question?
To answer that, let’s begin with traditional commercial marketing. Why, given the persuasiveness of all the commercial messaging, don’t we just buy every single product available? A professor of marketing might begin by offering two answers. The first is competition. Every marketing message has to compete with rivals. You see an advertisement for a car and you’re convinced that the best sports coupe in the world is a BMW. But a few seconds later you are confronted with an ad for a Mercedes coupe, then an Audi. Each makes different claims and, more important, evokes a different ambience: the Mercedes suggests increased success in life, perhaps, while the BMW might flatter your image of yourself as a skilled driver, and as for the Audi—well, maybe precisely by not being either a Mercedes or a BMW, it seems to confer on you an individualism and lack of conformity (at least compared to other buyers of expensive German cars).
The second is empirical feedback. When we consume products or use services, we are able to put marketing promises to the test. A movie studio may claim in its marketing materials that a given film is the funniest ever made, but if the opening-night audiences discover there isn’t a laugh in it, by the following morning the grim truth will be there for all to see on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. Many products are what economists call information goods—you can assess the quality of the product only after consuming it—but if shoppers are unhappy with the product they bought, they won’t come back for more, and they may well tell their friends to avoid it as well.
Both competition and empirical feedback depend on the human ability to subject consumer choices—and rhetorical claims—to a process of critical discrimination and to make an assessment, in the light of both the immediately available information and broader life experience, of which is the best or the most credible. The Greeks called this faculty phronesis, a form of practical wisdom or judgment that they distinguished from sophia, the wisdom they associated with scientific and abstract knowledge. Cicero called it prudentia in Latin, and the English word prudence is an apt term for it.
It is prudence that arms us against unwarranted marketing claims, by allowing us to perform a sense check on anything that sounds too good to be true, and the same goes for any other kind of persuasion. In mature and well-functioning political and rhetorical environments, awareness of the public’s capacity for prudence encourages politicians who otherwise might be tempted to promise the earth to show some restraint.
But how strong a faculty is it? This was a point of contention in the classical world and remains so to this day. Many ancient observers emphasized the fallibility of phronesis and the consequent vulnerability of the people to unscrupulous or misguided persuasion. For those who had witnessed the disintegration of political institutions and civil order, this inherent weakness in practical judgment was enough justification to reject the merits of democracy. Thucydides describes how one day the firebrand Cleon, “the most violent of the citizens,” convinced the Athenian Assembly to respond to a revolt in Mytilene, the capital of the island of Lesbos, by dispatching a trireme to slaughter the population.23 Within twenty-four hours, Diodotus had persuaded the Assembly to reverse its decision and send a second trireme to catch the first. Rival orators, racing ships, the crowd tipping first this way, then that, the fate of every soul on Mytilene hanging in the balance. That, Thucydides seems to say, is democracy for you.
This pessimism about the people’s practical wisdom was not limited to the classical period. Thomas Hobbes, who had translated both Thucydides’ History and Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, and who had seen bitter religious and political differences pull England apart in the first half of the seventeenth century, came to believe that the private judgment of most individuals was so weak and changeable that they could add nothing useful to public discussion or decision-making. “What can a large number of debaters contribute to policy with their inept views but a nuisance?” Hobbes asked.
So where do attitudes toward practical judgment stand today? This issue is closely related to how we feel about rhetoric. If you have faith in the ability of the general public to apply common sense and powers of discrimination to what they are told by politicians, you’re unlikely to believe that marketing-speak will conquer all or that the task of repairing our public language is hopeless. The famous dictum attributed to Abraham Lincoln (though there is no evidence that he actually said it) expresses this attitude neatly: “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” There is a correlation between critical faith in the practical wisdom of the public and a wider belief in the benefits of democracy. Trial by jury, so central to the justice system throughout the English-speaking world, also presupposes a belief in people’s faculty of prudence.
But if you regard the average citizen as gullible and unreflective, then, like Plato and Hobbes, you may believe that it is possible for the politician and the marketing guru to fool all the people all the time, or at least so many of them that it doesn’t matter. At present, the indications of pessimism about practical wisdom are multiplying.
The fear of dumbing down in all its manifold guises is essentially a fear that others less wise or less educated than yourself will, left to their own devices, prove unable or unwilling to ask the right questions or make the right cultural choices. Calls for censorship, of which we will hear more later, almost always betray a lack of faith in the ability—not, of course, of the would-be censor but of the general public—to discriminate between worthwhile and meretricious or destructive ideas or opinions. And—pace Frank Luntz and many others—the urge to simplify, not to trust the audience with the complexity and ambiguity with which politicians and policy makers have to deal every day, is also a marker of disbelief in prudence.
You can believe in a universal faculty of practical judgment and still take the view that our rhetoric has taken a wrong turning. But unless you believe in human prudence, nothing will convince you that there is a way back from here. When we come to consider remedies, this question of how far we are prepared to trust our fellow citizens will become central.
* * *
Over the past four chapters, we’ve explored the causes of the crisis that has overtaken our public language. First, the changing character of Western politics, with previous affiliations based on class and other forms of traditional group identity giving way, especially after the end of the Cold War, to a more complex and uncertain landscape in which political leaders struggle for definition and differentiation. Second, the widening gap between the worldview and language of the experts who make modern policy and those of the public. Third, the impact of digital technology, and the disruption and competition it has brought, on journalists and politicians alike. Fourth, the battle between rationalists and authenticists about what constitutes good public language, a battle that has dragged on without resolution for more than two centuries and that still continues to confuse and distort the discussion of rhetoric.
Finally, we have charted the way the language associated with sales and marketing has come to shape and color public language as a whole and, at least in part, to replace traditional deliberative rhetoric. The effect has been to give political language some of the brevity, intensity, and urgency we associate with the best marketing but at the same time to strip it of explanatory and argumentative power. And against this and the many other pressures on public language, we have introduced the fragile notion that human beings are blessed with an innate faculty of prudence that we can use to decide whom and what to believe.
Over the coming pages, we’ll examine what a failing public language means for the discussion of the most important—and contentious—issues of our time. Those issues include the decision to go to war and the boundaries of tolerance and freedom of speech. But let’s begin with science and society.