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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
Words that Work:
It's Not What You Say, It's What People
Hear
by Dr. Frank Luntz
Hyperion - January
2007
How
"Words That Work" Are Created
"If you think about it, talking to a
polling company is an odd way to behave.
Strangers ask you to give them time and
personal information for nothing so that
they can profit from it."
--Nick Cohen, Sunday Observer
(London)
"If I need five people in a mall to
be paid forty dollars to tell me how to do
my job, I shouldn't have my job."
--Roger Ailes, President, Fox News
Channel
This story may get me barred from the
United States Senate, but it was how I
established my credibility with the
toughest, most skeptical organization in
America. Back in 1998, I was asked to
create and then present new language on
environmental issues to a meeting of the
entire Republican Senate Conference.
Helping members of the House is easy: They
are open-minded, creative, and focused.
The Senate, however, is a different animal
entirely. They're generally older,
uncompromising, and don't take kindly to
others telling them either what to think
or what to say. They also demand
proof that your conclusions and
recommendations are based on fact. I knew
that to convince these senators that I had
created the right language, I had to do
something so novel, surprising, and
provocative (rule five of successful
communication) that even the most
determined cynic would accept the
results.
And so I arrived there armed with a
video presentation that I knew could cost
me dearly with four specific senators but
would earn me the confidence I needed with
everyone else. On that tape were speeches
that I had written for these four
senators. More accurately, I had written
just one speech, and I had four senators
read exactly the same text, word for word.
I then had the speech "dial-tested" using
a Madison Avenue technique described later
in this chapter. The presentation video
was a compilation of the results -- each
senator's second-by-second score.
On a big screen in front of the room,
the senators watched as computer-generated
lines created by a focus group of swing
voters rose and fell based on how those
thirty individuals felt about each word
and phrase. But instead of showing each
Senate speech individually, I had the tape
edited to show how each paragraph fared,
paragraph by paragraph, line by line,
senator by senator. Sure enough, it didn't
matter whether the speech was well
delivered or mangled. It didn't matter
whether the senator had a rich southern
accent or flat northwestern inflection.
The senator's gender didn't even matter.
Regardless of the senator or the delivery,
the good language scored well and the bad
language scored poorly. And so the more
than forty senators in the room were
mildly amused to see that their four
colleagues had unknowingly delivered the
exact same speech, but they were impressed
and convinced that good language does well
no matter how good or bad the speaker. The
methodology for creating words that work
passed their stringent credibility test,
and I have been invited back more than two
dozen times.
Here's where I need to address the
profession -- the methodology -- and give
you a peek behind the one-way glass and
word-laboratory curtain. My editors wanted
this section to be very brief: to them,
how words that work are created is less
important than the words themselves. But I
insisted that the process of word creation
is and should be just as important as the
outcome. So if you are just trying to pick
up the language lingo, you may want to
skip this section. But if you are in the
business of language, or you enjoy the
"making of" DVD "extras" as much as the
movie itself, read on.
Let's start with the practitioners.
It's hard to tell who is in greater
demand today: the Madison Avenue branding
experts who are brought in to teach
political parties how to define
themselves, or the political consultants
brought into corporate boardrooms to teach
businesses how to communicate more
effectively. The tools and techniques
invented on Madison Avenue firmly took
hold in Washington during the Reagan years
-- and they continue to drive our politics
today. Similarly, more and more companies
are turning to political professionals for
help achieving the speed, agility, and
linguistic accuracy that were once the
unique province of electoral
campaigns.
Pollsters and the polling they do are
unnecessarily shrouded in a cloud of
mystery, much of it their own making, in
the mistaken assumption that the less
people understand about the pollster's
craft, the more the pollster can charge.
The two best-known pollsters of the modern
political era are Pat Caddell, who did the
numbers for the Carter White House from
1977 through 1981, and Dick Morris, who
became more of a general political advisor
to President Clinton for most of his
political career. Both men took on almost
mythical proportions in the eyes of their
clients and the media for their uncanny
ability to translate staid numbers into
vibrant political and linguistic strategy.
And both men broke the first professional
rule of thumb (and by the way, the term
"rule of thumb" is based on an archaic
rule where a husband was not allowed to
beat his wife with anything thicker than
his thumb) that the pollster is not the
maker of public opinion but the translator
of it.
Nevertheless, they forever changed the
world of public opinion gathering. Caddell
was the first pollster to test and turn
language into a powerful political weapon,
applying the art of "wordsmithing" to the
science of opinion gathering. Morris,
through the actual polling services of
Mark Penn and Doug Schoen, was the first
outside political advisor to essentially
drive White House communication strategy.
Between them, they applied the techniques
of ongoing public opinion sampling and the
application of language as an instrument
of policy to create the permanent
presidential campaign.
Today, polling is no longer a black
art. There is a poll on every possible
topic, and some Americans follow polls the
way Wall Street follows the market. I am
constantly amazed that the Q&A periods
following my speeches across the country
to various corporate and association
audiences are consistently peppered with
questions about some specific polling
result in the news that day and its
veracity -- usually asked by someone who
holds a contrary point of view.
The truth is, Americans are drowning in
polling numbers. National news
organizations poll on a monthly or even
weekly basis, and the results are given
more weight, space in print, and time on
air than what the politicians are actually
saying. Most recently there have been
times when polls about the war in Iraq
drowned out the real, actual events of the
day. Unfortunately, while the media have
all the numbers they can possibly crunch,
most surveys and their accompanying
analyses are lacking in meaningful
insight.
I don't seek to undermine the
profession that built my home and pays my
mortgage, but telephone surveys have
serious limitations that most readers
would acknowledge -- if they were in fact
polled. The first is the increasing
difficulty of getting a truly random
sample of the population. The increase in
cell-phone usage, particularly among those
under age thirty, has made it extremely
difficult to sample younger Americans
(because some cell-phone calling plans
charge individuals for incoming calls, it
is not acceptable to poll cell phones).
Similarly, the rise of "do not call"
lists, the increase in unlisted phone
numbers, and a general unwillingness of
some Americans to answer questions from a
stranger are all challenges that pollsters
have to overcome every day.
Another problem with telephone polls,
and Internet surveys as well, is that
Americans don't want to respond yes or no
to alternatives that are either
unacceptable or require clarification. In
the context of today's political
environment, there are too many shades of
gray, too many "Yes, but what I really
think is . . ." attitudes, too many voter
priorities that cannot be ranked and
explained over the phone. You can test a
few words or slogans, but after about
fifteen minutes, the respondent will stop
responding. Internet surveys have an even
shorter patience threshold before
respondent fatigue sets in.
Even more problematic is the ordering
of questions. Opinion pollsters know full
well that where they ask a question
within the survey exerts tremendous
influence on what answers they
receive. If a pollster has just spent
fifteen minutes with you on the phone,
grilling you about the frustrations of
dealing with your HMO, and then closes the
survey by asking you to rate the
importance of health care reform against a
host of other issues, you're far more
likely to pick health care as highly
important than you would be if it had been
the first question in the survey.
Likewise, laying out a new corporate
pension policy to your employees will
generate a strikingly different reception
if you've first explained to them that the
current policy is bankrupting the company
and will lead to layoffs.
And even if the ordering of questions
is correct, too many polls report what
voters or consumers think without
explaining how they feel -- and
why. They measure thoughts and opinions,
but they don't provide a deeper
understanding of the mind -- and the
heart. Feelings and emotions are what
generate words that work.
That's why I am a committed disciple of
focus groups in general and the "Instant
Response Dial Session" in particular. A
focus group is often nothing more than a
formal discussion for ninety minutes or
two hours with eight to twelve people who
have similar backgrounds, behaviors,
opinions, or some other commonality.
Madison Avenue has been commissioning
focus groups for more than half a century,
and virtually every aspect of every major
new product launch will involve a dozen or
more of these sessions. Political
researchers were slower to apply the value
of face-to-face discussions to politics,
as they are somewhat less profitable and
somewhat more labor-intensive than
traditional telephone surveys.
Focus groups have been much maligned by
the media as a rogue science, designed to
learn how to obscure and/or manipulate.
True, they do have their limitations, most
important among them the scientific
inability to project the results of a
discussion with two or three dozen people
to a population of thousands or millions.
They are reflective of the people in the
session, not the total population.
But a well-run focus group is the most
honest of all research techniques because
it involves the most candid commentary and
all of the uncensored intensity that real
people can muster. As in telephone
polling, focus groups begin by gauging
respondent awareness and superficial
opinions and attitudes. But unlike
telephone polling, the superficiality is
then stripped away, revealing deeper
motivations, associations, and underlying
needs. The interaction between a
professional moderator and the
participants encourages more honesty and
less pandering, while measuring the
intensity of opinion as well as individual
motivation. That's where you'll find the
words that work.
A well-run focus group is a laboratory
for social interaction and word creation
-- yet it is one of the most obscure
components of audience research. The
composition of the focus group must be
arrived at scientifically and
statistically, and most Americans will
never be invited to participate simply
because most Americans don't qualify.
Copyright
2007 by Dr. Frank Luntz. All rights
reserved. Published with
permission.
Dr.
Frank Luntz was named the "hottest
pollster in America" by the Boston
Globe, and "has a special expertise,
on that happens to be in demand these
days," according to The New York
Times. He is sought by CEOs of Fortune
100 companies, political candidates,
public advocacy groups, and world leaders
-- just about anyone who wants to know how
to say things better and more effectively.
Dr. Luntz has supervised more than 1,200
surveys and focus groups in twenty
countries, and has engineered some of the
most potent political and corporate
campaigns of the last decade. For more
information, please visit www.luntz.com.
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Dolhenty's Review of this Book
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