Well, is there a downside to pigeonholing people? I think that a lot of people don't like to be pigeonholed. If you're being told that you're this kind of yuppie or that kind of blue-collar person and you become aware of that, you can start to resent it. And so one thing that's happened here is in the marketing world, the folks are very explicit about what's going on. If you read Direct Marketing News, you'll see spectacular claims about how well we can pigeonhole people. But the hope is that real customers out there, real people out there, won't really know how they're being pigeonholed.
... Instead of being Americans, we're sliced into 70 demographic groups. We might be sliced into hundreds of subcategories under that. And then the worry is that we don't share anything as a people. Some people think that democracy was enhanced in the three-network world that we grew up in, or four networks, because we were all watching the same shows. We all saw Gilligan's Island, and we all saw Walter Cronkite, and that way, as Americans, we shared certain things. Today, if there's 500 channels and five million Web sites, maybe we're not going to share so much as Americans. Maybe we'll lose the sense that we're all in this together.
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Right. Well, one possibility is that people get the information they care about. There's this optimistic vision of marketing, political marketing or commercial marketing which is if you get 1,000 ads this month, you get 1,000 ads that are interesting to you. If you're a New Yorker reader, maybe you don't get the stock car magazine and vice versa. And that way you're using your time better as part of the efficiency of America to get you the information you're interested in. That's an optimistic vision.
A huge change was in the 1980s, when a direct marketing genius named Richard Viguerie really got the Republican Party going on a direct mail campaign. He created a mailing list that was a group of fervent believers that became the fund-raising basis for Republican success. His insight was [that] you could use the tools for marketing from the commercial side and apply them to politics.
The technique is a little bit different because politics and corporations are a little bit different. But in the end you're still using the same focus groups; you're still using the same dial technology; you're still using the same quantitative data; you're still doing split samples where you ask half a sample one way and the other half a different way. You're still asking and re-asking the questions. You're still showing them visuals to see what they like the best, and you're still showing them or having them listen to audio track to see how they respond. So the actual techniques are the same, but how they are applied is different. And that really is the separation; that's the differentiation between politics and the corporate world. ...
The advantage of working for a corporation is that it has only one message, because a product or a service doesn't speak; it's just there, and you can advertise it. The challenge in working in politics, particularly if you're working for a political party, is that everyone's a messenger. I think the best example of this, frankly, is Israel, where you can have 20 members of the Cabinet, and they've got 68 messages between them, because among the 20, all of them think that they're prime minister or will be prime minister or should be prime minister or hate the person who is prime minister. And when you have all these people saying things in a different way, nobody hears anything.
I've got a certain rule that I always teach my staff: It's not what you say; it's what people hear that matters. I may respond to you effectively, but if you edit it in such a way that they only hear the negativity of what I do, then that's all they're going to know. And so they're going to conclude that my profession isn't an honorable profession. And that's why how I say it has as much of an impact on what people think of me as what I say.
[Regarding consistency,] there's a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you're absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time. And it is so hard, but you've just got to keep repeating, because we hear so many different things -- the noises from outside, the sounds, all the things that are coming into our head, the 200 cable channels and the satellite versus cable, and what we hear from our friends. We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.
The think tanks are the single worst, most undisciplined example of communication I've ever seen. Cato [Institute] still calls it the "privatization of Social Security." Heritage [Foundation] did so until a couple of years ago. Every time you use the words "privatization" and "Social Security" in the same sentence, you frighten seniors, and more of them turn against you. This is a specific and perfect example of the intellectual goo-goo heads who are more interested in policy than they were in success. Changing the word from "privatize" to "personalize," which is the work that we had done, they wouldn't accept it, because to them it was selling an idea short.
They would rather communicate their way and lose the issue than communicate in a sensible way and win. The fact is, ideology and communication more often than not run into each other rather than complement each other. Principle and communication work together. Ideology and communication often work apart. ...
If you're looking for an example of how advertising is a really corrosive force in society, I advise you to look away from consumer product advertising and just look at political advertising, because it's a stain on our democracy.
If you're selling soup or soap or oatmeal or automobiles, one thing you basically have to do is tell the truth -- not the eternal truth, but the factual truth. Sometimes you put your best foot forward, but you have to fundamentally not mislead people, not overly exaggerate. There's a limit to the amount of puffery that you're entitled to. You basically have to stick to the facts, because even if the government doesn't do anything about it, your competitors are going to drag your ass into federal court, and they're going to sue you, and they're going to make your life a living hell. And while they're doing that, your campaign is off the air, and by the way, it's in the newspapers, and you're taking a lot of hits to your brand image.
Yes, there is a difference between being a consumer and being a citizen. And yes, those two issues have been conflated -- illogically in my view. Let's just talk briefly about super-sizing and the obesity of America and McDonald's.
McDonald's sells hamburgers. Hamburgers are fatty; they make you fat. And the more you eat, and the more french fries you eat, the fatter you're going to get. Now, is it personally better for you as an organism not to eat this stuff? Yes. You as a consumer, does it make you feel good to eat this stuff because you like french fries and hamburgers? Yes. As a citizen, do you have any responsibility to adjust your diet according to what others think is best for you? No. And yet somehow the notion of what's good for you and what's good for public health and what a corporation sells for a living have all been twisted together when there are three separate issues.
Citizens and consumers are two entirely different things. They have nothing in common. I mean, we happen to be citizens, and we happen to be consumers. But citizens are participants in government. Citizens are equals. Citizens are the equals of politicians. Citizens have to be taken seriously because they theoretically have the power in a democracy.
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