Because the way to win is to grab, hold, and convince
Call upon words and phrases to zoom your argument from flabby and ho-hum dull to captivating and compelling.
In this chapter, you’ll discover how the pros present things not as they are, but as they want them to be perceived.
“You’ll need a basic black dress that will always get you out of a what-to-wear jam. Jazz it up with a glittery necklace, glitzy shoes, and a gold belt, and you’re off and ready for the party.” It was a fashion editor’s advice for young women heading off for their first year of college.
How can you power up a phrase, a sentence, or a paragraph to make it so seductive and so powerful that it reaches, grabs, holds, and convinces?
How can you power up words to slam-dunk a point?
How can you power up your portable points to make them more intriguing, memorable, and easily understood?
It’s easy. Abandon the anemic, the rote, the stilted, and the stuffy. Power-uppers jazz up your basic plain-wrap argument.
“THE COMPANIES THAT SUCCEED WILL BE THE ONES THAT MAKE THEIR IDEAS REAL…THAT EMPLOY GREAT METAPHORS AND ANALOGIES TO DEFINE THEIR BUSINESSES AND TELL THEIR STORIES.”
—SCOTT MCNEALY, COFOUNDER OF SUN MICROSYSTEMS
Ideas become explosive when you call upon the awesome power of analogies.
Microsoft monopolized the Internet browser market by bundling its browser with its Windows operating system—a market in which it already had a monopoly. With that allegation, the Department of Justice demanded that Microsoft bundle two browsers, its own and Netscape’s, or none at all. Bill Gates’s powerful analogy compared the demand to “requiring Coke to ship two cans of Pepsi with every six-pack.”
It’s not a beautiful city and the traffic is terrible. The air is thick with humidity and mosquitoes. But Houston is a city built on a swamp. A local marketing firm launched an on-line campaign seeking ways to promote Houston without resorting to catchphrases that really didn’t say much. A sampling of some that were used and then soon abandoned: “Houston Proud”; “Houston’s Hot”; “Space City. A Space of Infinite Possibilities.”
It was an analogy submitted by a local that captured national attention: “If Houston were a dog, she’d be a mutt with three legs, one bad eye, fleas the size of CornNuts, and buckteeth. Despite all that, she’d be the best dog you’d ever know.”
Intensifiers are descriptive words that create visual images—attention-garnering snapshots that pique interest, making listeners and readers want to learn more.
O.J. Simpson’s defense witnesses used a memorable phrase that damaged the prosecution. The witness, a DNA expert, called the Los Angeles Police Department’s lab a “cesspool of contamination.” Anyone who has ever been near a cesspool readily recalls the sensory, nose-pinching experience.
Intensifiers cause the other person to recall an experience of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, pain, or pleasure. The television show Law & Order pitches that its plotlines have been “ripped from the headlines.”
Convincing guys they need cleanser and moisturizer as much as women is a challenge. A men’s skincare company met the challenge by coaching department store salespeople that men relate to sports and cars. So instead of using words such as cleanser and moisturizer, they should use words such as tackle acne.
Retire the lame and overworked. Trash the trite. Make what’s old seem fresh.
Today you can buy “genuine” draft beer (“Miller Genuine Draft”), cars (“Genuine Chevrolet”), and underwear (“Genuine Jockey”). Even rhythm and blues artist Elgin Lumpkin has—if you’ll excuse the pun—gotten into the act. To show that he’s the real thing, Elgin has trademarked a new name: Ginuwine.
Where do you find words that snap and sparkle? Take a look at billboard and magazine ads. Which words grab you? Which words make you want to learn more? Which words make you smile?
Logic can be dull. Look how numbing, dry statistics can become grabbers—attention-getters that are understood, dramatic, and remembered.
Enough Cracker Jack has been sold to stretch end-to-end more than 63 times around the world.—Cracker Jack package
Tootsie Roll makes enough candy each year to stretch from the Earth to the Moon and back.—Associated Press
The 9.0 quake that hit Japan was powerful enough to have shifted the earth and “shoved the island nation one parking space to the east.”—Time Magazine
When Mercedes-Benz introduced its new “super-luxury” Maybach automobile, Car and Driver dramatized its sky-high sticker price: For the price of our test car, you can buy 22 Toyota Corollas.1
Here’s how Newsweek brought home what Bill Gates’s wealth meant in everyday terms: Gates could buy each household in the United States a new 27-inch color television or put a new Honda Accord LX in the garage of each Washington State household. The Wall Street Journal calculated that if Gates paid the same percentage of his net worth for a movie ticket that the average Joe pays, the ticket would cost him $19 million.
The American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations dramatically demonstrated the difference in compensation between CEOs and ordinary working folks: If you’re a hot-dog vendor at Disneyland making minimum wage, you’d have to work 17,852 years to equal Disney’s Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner’s then–compensation package. An employee of Coca-Cola who earns $35,000 a year would have to work 207 years to earn as much as Roberto Goizueta, its late CEO.
Here’s how to take the “rocky” out of rocky road….
A new law client explained that she scouts the fashion capitals of Europe in search of women’s handbags, which—with the exception of the designers’ names and logos—she faithfully reproduces in China for mass distribution. My mistake was asking a question that began “When you copy these originals….” She cut me off in mid-sentence with a smile and a wink: “I don’t think of myself as copying or knocking off someone else’s designs. I merely reinterpret what they have done.”
As an ensign on the U.S.S. Helena, I could either dine in the officers’ wardroom or eat in the enlisted personnel’s mess hall. I almost always headed to the wardroom. Sunday morning breakfast was the exception. The wardroom served the tired, trite, and true: bacon and eggs; pancakes and eggs; grits and eggs. But the mess hall served up what was a Sunday morning tradition: fried chicken and eggs, breakfast a mega-leap beyond the wardroom’s Denny’s-type fare.
I looked forward to my Sunday morning fried chicken and eggs. Until it happened. The big turnoff. One Sunday, I heard a food server yelling to a cook, “We need more mother and daughter.” To this day, I still don’t have an appetite for the combination dish of fried chicken and eggs.
Store windows were shattered. Kids and adults were grabbing stereos, athletic shoes, and anything else they could carry, cart, or haul. There was rioting in a Los Angeles neighborhood, and people who would normally never dream of stealing were stealing like crazy.
One teenager cradling a cardboard box in his arms was ambushed by an in-your-face reporter: “What are you stealing?” The thief snapped, “I’m not stealing!! I’m looting.”
Steal. Loot. Just words?
Steal is a harsh-sounding word. From its tone, you know someone is up to no good. But loot has a softer sound. Its tone is gentle. Melodic. Suggestive of conduct more mischievous than criminal. Maybe that’s why “lying” is bad but “fudging” about the truth is, well, less bad.
Dumps on the outskirts of cities are now called “landfills.” The word landfill creates an image of filling the land rather than dumping things onto it.
It’s tough to get federal appropriation money to protect yucky “swamps.” So how do you go about saving swamps? By calling them “wetlands.”
Pornography is soft-pedaled as “adult entertainment.” Strippers as “exotic dancers.” Wanting to appeal to conservative investors, casino operators have transformed Las Vegas from a town that “gambles” to one that “games.”
“Used” can be turned into chichi. Goodwill “the thrift shop” is trying to convince us that it’s now Goodwill “the fashion store.” Goodwill stores are becoming a destination of choice, rather than one of need, by playing down “cheap” and playing up “vintage” by advertising worn jeans as “broken-in jeans”; shrunken T-shirts as “retro shirts”; beat-up leather jackets as “distressed leather jackets.”
Comedian Dennis Miller argues that opponents of capital punishment would be less resistant if we relabeled the death penalty a “life relinquishment program.”
Bankers don’t tell their shareholders they made “bad loans.” They just have “nonperforming assets.”
A shop down the street advertises a box spring and mattress set as a “sleep system.”
My friend Jim is overweight. Obese, if you want to be clinical. Fat, if you call ’em as you see ’em. But Jim calls himself neither. Instead he’s a “champion in the war against anorexia.” Too stubborn to go on a diet, Jim’s doctor has put him on a “food program.”
At a seminar, salespeople were taught that “customers are terrified of sales jargon…so say ‘visit’ instead of ‘appointment.’ ‘Paperwork’ instead of ‘contract.’ And ‘autograph’ instead of ‘signature.’”
Hasbro insisted that its G.I. Joe is not a doll. At the time, the U.S. tariff code put higher duties on dolls than toys. Disagreeing, a Customs Court judge ruled that for customs purposes Joe was indeed a doll. But Hasbro knows that a boy usually wouldn’t play with a doll. Once G.I. Joe cleared customs, he became an “action figure.”
When the Miami Heat tied its own NBA record for scoring the fewest points in a game, coach Pat Riley didn’t say the Heat’s performance was awful. Or terrible. Or dreadful. Taking the rocky out of rocky road, Riley told the press that the Heat had suffered “skill erosion.”
The oldest Baby Boomers have now turned 65. Boomers are famously demanding and rebellious. Marketing pros are warning, “Don’t remind them that they’ve aged.” ADT is now marketing its “ADT Medical Alert Systems” as “ADT Companion Services.” Kohler, the bathroom fixture manufacturer, used to sell “shower grab bars”. But now Kohler is using a more Boomer-palatable name: “Belay shower handrail.” “Belay” is named for a rock-climbing technique.
Choosing the right words is a powerful logic tool. But get too carried away and you’ll lose credibility. When a cruise missile crashed in 1986, the U.S. Air Force announced that it had “impacted with the ground prematurely.”
Argument pros are wordsmiths. Don’t call it as you see it. Call it as you want the other guy to see it. The words and names you choose will impact how the other person feels about swamps, summer sausage, and the project he or she is spending endless hours working on.
“MCVEIGH WAS NOT A PATRIOT. HE WAS A TERRORIST. AND THE JURY SAID HE DESERVED TO DIE.”
—NEWSWEEK ON THE TRIAL OF OKLAHOMA BOMBER TIMOTHY J. MCVEIGH
Civilians are often killed by bombs. Sometimes the people doing the bombing are U.S. airmen flying combat missions. At other times they’re militants detonating explosives on trains, in office buildings, or on city streets.
Whether it’s the airman or Timothy McVeigh, someone who intentionally sets off a bomb is a bomber. That’s a neutral and undeniable statement of fact. That bomber could also be something more: a guerilla, a soldier, a terrorist, or a patriot.
That something more is in the eyes of the beholder. The bomber, labeled a freedom fighter by some, will be labeled a murderer by others.
Until someone comes along with a label, the bomber is still just a bomber. If I tell you the bomber is a patriot—and you believe me—you will think and react differently than if I tell you he is a terrorist. But those who dispatched the terrorist on his mission will see him as a hero.
The label terrorist was never used in Reuters news stories about those responsible for the 9-11 tragedy. Except when it quoted others who were using the “T” label, the acclaimed news service opted instead for benign phrases such as “hard-line Afghan Islamists” and “hard-line Taliban.” The reason? “Terrorist” is an emotionally loaded label. A judgmental label. Reuters provides stories to newspapers and media subscribers worldwide, and many throughout Islam saw the World Trade Center perpetrators as heroes or warriors rather than terrorists.
What was your attitude about Vietnam war protests? Did you unthinkingly buy into what others told you—that the protesters were nothing more than “anti-American agitators”? When Washington hesitated over Kosovo or Bosnia, did you say we’re refusing to lead? When our bombers flew, did you say they’re the leading edge of American imperialism? Did you readily accept President Reagan’s label that Russia was the “Evil Empire” or President George W. Bush’s label that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are the “Axis of Evil”?
Be a label-smith. Craft labels that will prompt others to think what you think and see what you see.
Call upon words, phrases, and labels that propel your argument down-field. The six Power-Uppers grab attention. Highlight key concepts. Bring clarity to your argument. Zoom your points home, making them memorable and easily shared.