Did anybody watch Frontline last night?
If not, it was a very good program in that producer examined the modern world of marketing. It started off talking about an airline trying to create a culture without so much as showing a picture of a plane, then explored some guru trying to get emotive responses out of people as to what words or thoughts conured up "luxury", and then - lo and behold - the program progressed to political campigns, Frank Luntz (...and his evil ways).
We really have gone Orwellian as there was Lunzt, breaking down for all to see in plain view, how tweaking the language played on the emotional responses of people such that intellectual analysis of an issue never has a chance. The RNC hired Luntz and has used him very effectively (not news to most people here).
The examples given of such effective language manipulation were "Estate Tax" and "Global Warming". Republicans were fighting an uphill PR battle in getting people to respond to the party line, ie, 1) Estate Taxes need to be eliminated, and 2) Global Warming worries need to be weakened as they are bad for business.
Luntz figured out that if you switch those phrases to "Death Tax" and "Climate Change", the RNC would have just enough people eating out of their hands to be effective. It was sickening and shocking to see this laid out so clinically, but there it was and it has to be dealt with.
I have to believe that the current hype of "Moral Values" is another such Luntzism (also probably not news on this site). The more it is used and said, the deeper the hole the left gets stuck in. We need a new counter-phrase as it will stick to us in the same irrational way "tax-and-spend" has.
I don't have an answer, but this is a problem.
I hate reducing things of such substance and importance to mere tweaks of the language thanks to marketing focus groups, but Frontline made a compelling case. We have to:
- Fight to control the language
- Establish a narrative of how our goals and values are based on substantive connections between real people and real ideas that can overwhelm the RNC's fear-based divisive individualistic "concepts"; and
- Get the message out.
Excuse the hack monday morning quarterbacking, but I wanted to see if somebody else more versed in this stuff saw the show and had ideas to share.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/