This is the third part of my series looking at how we can take the Republican identity machine down a peg...do some damage to their brand identity. And that’s why we are talking about audience. In order to manipulate brand associations, you have to understand your audience. I know, “manipulate” is a frank word that a lot of liberals are uncomfortable with, but that’s really what effective marketing and PR is — manipulation.
A quick summary of where we are so far:
In my first post, I generally talked about the GOP audience. In the second post, I discussed a model I have for how conservatives think, store information, and make decisions. It has three components:
- The Narrative
- The Noise
- The Pack
The quick explanation of this model is that GOP identifiers live in a narrative that is impacted largely by two things: Noise and Pack. If we are going to get people to shift their narrative, we need to understand The Noise and the Pack in more detail.
Today, I’m going to talk about The Noise!
THE NOISE
If you want to get people’s attention is this busy media world, where consumers (and voters are consumers) are inundated with conflicting messages, you have to get off the path of thinking a 12 point plan and a press release are going to get you there. It especially isn’t going to get you there with conservatives. It’s hard work bypassing all the filters people have set up to NOT PROCESS messages they aren’t receptive to. Unless we get creative about bypassing that, we will keep getting our asses handed to us.
So I’ve generated some basic rules to follow for making noise with conservatives to get their attention about various issues. Within each of these rules, I offer an example of how someone has implemented that rule, and then I give some thoughts on how we might be able to apply them strategically to Trump and the GOP.
RULE 1: STOP TALKING, START SHOWING
As we discussed in previous posts, conservatives use a lot of shorthand techniques in their decision making and information parsing. “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire” is one of the shortcuts we discussed — they don’t necessarily want to wade into facts, rather they prefer to take the aggregate temperature of noise. They also prefer symbolism shortcuts. As an example, they believe if you revere the flag, then they get to actually receive credit for revering all of the collective ideals of America. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Someone can actually revere the flag, and then shit on the ideals of America. But that’s another story.
The key with shortcuts is to think about how to use them to shape thinking, to convey ideas. Instead of railing about the use of shortcuts, use them to make inroads.
One way to look at your messaging is to enumerate your goals, and then for each goal/item, consider how to show it, rather than tell it. Showing is always better.
As an example of how to start showing and stop talking, consider the the former mayor of Bogatá, Antanas Mockus, who was a genius at showing!
When there was a water shortage, Mockus appeared on TV programs taking a shower and turning off the water as he soaped, asking his fellow citizens to do the same. In just two months people were using 14 percent less water.
I would love to see California’s Governor Brown take a navy shower, maybe onboard a military vessel, on TV as a means of encouraging rich white folks to save water in California.
APPLICATION of rule 1 to making noise directed at conservatives
I’m going to give three examples of showing here, a light, medium and heavy example.
Light Example: This is one that I’m involved in: creating a Dissent Deck, which is a deck of small, business-size cards with pithy Dissent sayings on them that we leave in random public places for others to find (pictured to the right). Because these cards are showing up in unexpected places, and they are bright red, and you can pick them up, touch and feel them, it is much more interactive, engaging, and memorable.
We want to grow this into a large, visual piece of resistance that worms its way into people’s everyday life — on the bus, in a bathroom, when you get a plastic bag out of a public dog poop scooping station. These are times when filters are down, and if you begin to see these cards consistently as a Trump supporter, you begin to feel maybe you are out of step with a large number of people. As pack animals, humans don’t like that, especially conservatives. The GOP generally deals with being out of step by shutting out what the rest of America thinks, so we have to figure out how to bypass that, because peer pressure works!
(You can download, print, and distribute your own Dissent Deck at the link above. It’s actually really fun leaving them around your city! More info in general at Dissent Engine.)
Medium Example: The Dems love to talk about how much we support immigrants, communities of color, LGBTQ communities, working class voters, lower income folks, etc. We are the party of the people, or so we like to think. Here’s the problem. We just talk about it, we don’t show it. If I were in charge of Dem messaging, I would develop social media channels around Dems getting real, rolling up their sleeves, and spending time in the trenches, in large ways and small ways. Live video on facebook, snap chat stories, the works. Every week some group from Congress would be doing something real and authentic, along the lines of the following:
- Take a large group and travel to some area farms and participate in a day of picking. I would pay money to see Nancy Pelosi out picking apples in her jeans.
- Send small delegations to pop up “we support you” protests at planned parenthoods, mosques, and immigrant centers with funny signs! (Have videos of them actually making their signs.)
- Work side-by-side with jail road cleaning crew.
- Send a crew to work an assembly line or warehouse jobs at an Amazon warehouse.
- Clean up schools with night crew janitors.
- Small groups frequenting and showcasing immigrant-owned restaurants.
- Take a large group and attend church services in minority communities, or non-christian services. Just pop in.
- Host a random Senate fundraising carwash and Congressional fundraising carwash on different car lots at the same time in DC, and make it a competition to see who can raise more money for a cause that fights Trump.
In every case, senators and congresspeople should be interacting with folks, interviewing them, talking about what they learn, sharing their observations. And make the actual representatives and senators run the technology. Watching old dudes stumble with new technology, is funny...and humanizing!
Heavy Example: This will make a lot of people uncomfortable, but remember, we are talking about how to make noise that gets attention, so I’m putting it all out into the fighting arena. Because flag burning enrages Republicans, that also means it gets their attention. When trying to get people’s attention, it’s smart to use techniques that are known to work. So perhaps the left could use flag burning to send a new message. Instead of using it as a symbol to say “we don’t agree with something our country is doing,” protesters could use it to show “This is what Republicans are doing to America — they are burning our country down.” This would get loads of coverage for the protests, which creates noise around the idea that a lot of America isn’t very happy. Mind you, this tactic would make a lot of people very mad, so you aren’t using this to win hearts and minds, more like you are using it to demonstrate extreme anger on the left, and stake out a more radical left position on the political spectrum, so the idea of what is reasonable and who is in the middle shifts leftward. This kind of work can paves the way for moderates to make progress.
RULE 2: THEY REMEMBER HOW YOU MAKE THEM FEEL
I love Maya Angelou’s quote “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
I want to build on this, because I think it’s true, but not always in ways people think. For instance, unless you are ready to go to the mat about something, Republicans don’t think you really care about the issue, particularly conservative men. So you have to literally make them feel something unpleasant before they will process that it’s something you care about. (Another shortcut...) Liberals find this very irritating because progressives don’t want to argue, they want to talk about it and work out a compromise. This tendency to make things work is used against liberals time and again.
The lesson here is that sometimes you have to make them feel a way they don’t want to feel to get the point across that you care about something. Stupid, I know. But there it is.
So what do Republicans not want to feel? Shame. They really don’t want to feel humiliated — okay, none of us do, but it’s a big deal for Republicans. Our instinct as Dems is to honor that, which is frankly, stupid. Instead, we should be using it to drive behavior.
An example, again, from the Mayor of Bogata. He wanted to reduce traffic fatalities and injuries in the city, and he realized that people weren’t really motivated by getting tickets or fines. So instead, he launched hundreds of mimes to wander the city and mock anyone breaking traffic laws, they seriously embarrassed the shit out of law breakers, pedestrians and drivers alike. Guess what? It freaking worked. Traffic fatalities went down 50%.
People remembered how much they didn’t like being mocked, and they changed their behavior accordingly.
APPLICATION of rule 2 to making noise directed at conservatives
My dream for implementing this in our current political climate, which involves the GOP walling themselves off from feedback from the majority of America, is to create a tip line/flash spoken word protest movement. It runs like this.
- First, we gather together like minded activists who live in or around DC who are willing to stand up in a public place and recite a spoken word piece about how Republican policies are actually affecting real people (Insurance stories, Medicare stories, Social Security stories, SNAP stories, etc.)
- Second, we actually write said spoken word pieces.
- Third, we set up a tip line, a la TMZ, where people phone in photo tips of where GOP folks are in DC at any given time. We may want to explore paying for tips.
- Fourth, we send out a Lyft-style request to our volunteers, and any volunteer near a spot where a conservative has been tipster-outed can take the assignment.
- Fifth, said volunteer walks in and recites the spoken word piece to that GOP leader in loud public voice wherever they are.
Republicans will not be able to go to a restaurant, to a coffeeshop, to a performance, anywhere, without hearing how real America thinks and feels. And it will be filmed and shared by bystanders on social media. That, my friends, is noise.
Elected officials should feel shame for pursuing policies that harm Americans.
Know any billionaires who want to fund this? I would put my business on hiatus to set this up in a heartbeat.
RULE 3: PICK TWO GOP STRENGTHS, THEN BEAT THEM TO DEATH…FOR YEARS
When engaging in character assassination, or brand destruction of a politician or a party, you have to attack a perceived strength. Then, you have to beat these strengths to death for years. Why does this work? Because we bypass conservative (and frankly human) filters by invoking the shortcut conservatives use to process information: “Where there is smoke, there is fire.” Conservatives may not dive into details, but they do aggregate and respond to general trends in what people are making noise about.
The Republicans used this strategy with Hillary Clinton very effectively. She went from a 69% popularity rating when she stepped down as Secretary as State to ratings in the low 40s during the campaign. They beat two drums — Benghazi and Emails — relentlessly and effectively, exactly in her two areas of perceived strength: trustworthiness and competency. Right? She ran on “Most qualified person running for President.” And you know what? They very successfully undermined that brand by using this technique.
APPLICATION of rule 3 to making noise directed at conservatives
So what two areas should we focus on to diminish Trump and the GOP? (And mind you, we have to tie one to another — the GOP and Trump should always be linked. We don’t want them later trying to claim that it was all the other’s fault.) In the comment thread of my last post, I posited two areas of strength that are a fundamental part of their Pack Identity that might be worthy of focus: monetary success and patriotism. They both tie together nicely, as you will see below.
Also, I want to be clear that we have to pick just a couple of things. A classic Dem mistake is to be paralyzed by wanting to right every wrong, explain every cheat. And to do it in an ad hoc, uncoordinated manner. (I am so sick of individual Dems all frantically circulating random petitions on Facebook. LEAD US for God’s sake.) Pick something, ask us to support it. Republicans don’t care and won’t pay attention to a lot of random small things. Noise. We need to make a lot of it about a few things. That is what is memorable. So let’s consider monetary success and patriotism in more detail.
GOP STRENGTH 1: MONETARY SUCCESS
One of the reasons GOP voters go against their economic self interest is because they are really excited about being in the pack with the rich kids, it makes them feel successful by brand association. (And yes, we need to work on messaging that doesn’t require people to self identify as screwed up and poor….but that’s another post.) We cannot let this brand association stand. We must tear it down. One way to start would be by attacking how they are making their money (by screwing people), not the fact that they have money. So something like, “Hey, we don’t begrudge people being rich, but you shouldn’t make your money by poisoning the drinking water of...” That sort of thing. This could be particularly effective with Trump at the helm.
Step 1 For Trump: Create Simple, Three-Part Divestment Demand.
I can’t believe I haven’t been seeing a very short and very clear list of divestment demands consistently coming from Dems, every day, every hour, on every kind of media. Keep it short and simple: In order to be considered a legitimate President, Donald Trump must:
- Release all of his tax returns so we know if he has Russian business interests and what his exact holdings are.
- Immediately place ALL holdings in a blind trust.
- Remove his children from running his companies, and remove them from influence in government.
There, now we have a list of demands to rally around. Right now, there is nothing but a litany of bad news to rally around, so everyone mills. We need a specific list of short demands that are easily actionable. That could get people riled up and it is something we can put continued pressure on Trump to do. Even if he never does it, by continuing to ask for the same things, over and over, for a long time, it lends the sense that there is something nefarious he is hiding.
Step 2 For Trump: Unceasing Bribe Investigations.
Stop using the phrase “Conflict of Interest”. Instead, use the phrases “Fraud” and “Bribe Taker”. It ties into patriotism and treason when you have a a foreign angle, and works for domestic bribery as well. So essentially, any way in which an entity or other country uses GOP/Trump businesses to curry favor, the GOP are acting as bribe takers and perpetrating fraud. This should frame everything, including how we talk about and pursue investigations. They are bribery investigations, pure and simple. (We might need a legal check on exactly how to frame this for slander reasons since the Drumfster is lawsuit happy.)
Step 3: Lawsuits:
Find companies Trump competes against that are willing to sue him for unfair advantage since he won’t divest. Throw in lawsuits about betraying the constitution with business interests. (Also un-American). Lawsuits about appointing his children. Talk about how much it is costing America. blah blah blah. We also need to make sure Dem talking heads speak about all lawsuits, state and federal, all the time, in the same way.
Bonus GOP Policy Tie In
These characteristics of Trump described above — being a fraud, being a con man, being a cheat — can also be used as a sort of continuation play in framing GOP policies. If we can find a phrase structure for Trump’s bad behavior, and then apply that same framework to GOP policy initiatives, the cadence becomes the tie in with no complicated explanations needed. It all becomes part and parcel of the same thing.
I was thinking a reverse Robin Hood kind of phrasing might work: “Steals from [insert victim] and gives to [himself, cronies, etc.].”
Trump
- Trump is stealing from American taxpayers and lining his own pockets. [Such as for renting out Trump Tower]
- Trump is stealing from American taxpayers and giving that money to Carrier to automate the plant. Those jobs will be gone in Indiana soon anyway.
- Trump plans to rob hard working American taxpayers and line the pockets of his 1% swamp buddies taking up residence in DC.
- Trump is taking bribes from foreign governments and lining his own pockets at the expense of the American people.
- Trump is stealing government cabinet positions and selling them to the highest bidders who donated to his campaign.
Then you take this same cadence and apply it in general to Republican initiatives:
Infrastructure:
- Trump plans to steal from the American taxpayer and gives to rich contractors to build bridges to nowhere.
- Trump plans to take from the American taxpayer and gives to rich contractors to build a freeway that isn’t even needed.
Medicare:
- Paul Ryan is literally willing to kill your grandmother so he can give a tax break to the 1%
- Paul Ryan is taking from sick Americans and giving to rich insurance company CEOs
Social Security:
- Paul Ryan wants your grandparents to eat dog food so he can give a tax break to the 1%
- Paul Ryan wants to steal your Social Security payments so he can give a tax break to the 1%
Environment:
- Donald Trump is taking clean air from the American people and selling it to oil company CEOs.
- Donald Trump is taking clean water from the American people and selling it to large companies.
- Donald Trump is taking public land from the American people and giving it to a few ranchers.
You get the picture. They are making money by stealing from America. They are con men. They are frauds. They are cheats. They are destroying the reputation of America to enrich themselves.
Some people might say, “Well we tried that with Trump University and what we knew of his taxes...it didn’t work.” I would remind you, they didn’t destroy Clinton’s popularity overnight. It’s a cumulative thing. And with Trump, that’s hard to manage because there are so many transgressions to focus on, it all gets lost, one buried underneath the next outrage. We have to focus on a few things and be relentless about them, for years.
GOP STRENGTH 2: PATRIOTISM
I was having lunch with a left leaning friend recently, and we were talking about the election, of course, and I mentioned how it might be good to hit the GOP in the area of patriotism. My friend replied, “Really, do people really care about that?”
That’s a Dem thinking like a Dem and assuming the Republican audience believes the same things that Dems do. They don’t.
When I do market research in red communities, one of the questions I ask is “What is your [district, city, neighborhood, town, etc.] passionate about?” Very open ended. People in conservative communities invariably answer this question with “patriotism” as an item — it matters to them, a lot. Progressive communities never answer with patriotism. This is a classic example of how liberals don’t pursue a strategy because it doesn’t appeal to us.
We need to assail Trump, and the GOP for being UN-AMERICAN, and for being TRAITORS, and we need to paint them with an elitist bent, wherever possible. I’m going to reiterate my thoughts from the comment section of my last post that are still true today, even more so with all the Russian hacking stories. We need to mock them for electing the thing they supposedly hate — east coat elites!
- It is un-American to collude with Russians, the GOP and Trump are traitors.
- It is un-American to reject the White House and not work where your job actually takes place.
- It is un-American to choose to live in New York rather than the South, where your job actually is.
- It is un-American that your family doesn’t live with you in the White House.
- It is un-American to be best friends with Julian Assange.
- It is un-American to take bribes from foreign leaders.
- It is un-American to work with a foreign power to throw an election.
- It is un-American to give your kids jobs in the White House while they run your company.
Next up in the series: The Pack!