• Showing that one is clueful.
• Accusing opponents of the opposite.

0. More precisely, what I mean by “cluefulness” (antonym: cluelessness) is the characteristic of truly understanding aspects of the world. Examples might include:

• Threats, for example from foreign adversaries, criminal brown-skinned immigrants, rioting black-skinned citizens, global climate change or trigger-happy police.
• Struggles, such as those faced by uneducated single mothers, over-educated baristas, low-net-worth Black families, or Christians afraid to say “Merry Christmas”.
• Facts, such as climate science, biology, the professional economists’ consensus that deficits are no big deal, the common-sense “fact” that deficits are horrible, the lesson of experience that government never does anything right, or the lesson of experience that government has vastly improved people’s lives.
• Biases, such as those of scientists, economists, Fox News or the mainstream media.
• Conspiracies, such as those carried out by the “Deep State”, the “billionaire class”, the “corporate media”, satanist pedophiles, or Vladimir Putin.
• Ways of life, like those of deer-hunting Christmas-celebrating rural Evangelical Christians.

Cluefulness messaging was central to Donald Trump’s success, was central to Republican 2020 Congressional campaigns too, and was crucial in the 2020 Democratic primary as well.

1. Let’s review some validating examples. The “clueless” theme fits:

• Epithets such as “crazy”, “stupid”, “libtard”, or “crazy radical socialist”.
• Epithets such as “science denier” or “conspiracy theorist”.
• Criticism of “out of touch” “elites”.
• Most accusations of being foolishly weak against national security threats.

Conversely, politicians try to appear “clueful” via, depending on their target constituency:

• “Social justice” or “culture war” pitches that resonate with groups who regard themselves as oppressed.
• “Economic justice” pitches that resonate with those who feel they have insufficient opportunity.
• Populist pitches that explain how the economy and/or government are purportedly “rigged”.

2. Being judged clueful or clueless affects the impact of almost any (other) message you send.

• If voters find you clueful, they can believe in your policy judgment, your competence, and the likelihood of your focusing on what’s most important.
• But if they judge you as clueless, then they can fear you will go awry. No matter how good their underlying intentions may be, somebody clueless could advocate bad policies, govern incompetently, or just ignore pressing constituent needs.

3. Donald Trump of course makes great use of cluefulness messaging. For example, in the 2016 campaign:

• He was supposedly a great businessman who understood the economy better than politicians do.
• He was supposedly a great dealmaker who could negotiate much better treaties than “stupid” Democratic politicians.
• He confessed to exploiting a rigged system for his own benefit — but claimed he would clean it up, “drain[ing] the swamp”, based on his knowledge of how it worked.

And along the way he claimed to be cleverer and more insightful than the traditional experts about … well, about almost everything.

4. Cluefulness messaging plays into left/right political polarization in multiple ways. One centers on the “choose your own facts” approach to news.

• To many on the right, if you believe anything on CNN or in the New York Times, you’re clueless.
• Conversely, believers in traditional authorities such as scholarly research, government experts or mainstream media see right-wing extremists as the ones without a clue.

5. Another major strand of cluefulness messaging is to directly attack left-wingers’ mentality, often in the nastiest of terms. On social media and talk radio alike, liberalism is a mental illness, leftists are “libtards”, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a complete and utter dunce.

Supporting these swipes are more specific accusations of cluelessness, for example:

• Not knowing how business works.
• Not realizing how other countries take advantage of us.
• Not understanding the need for secure borders.
• Not understanding how guns really work.
• Foolishly believing in the benevolence of thugs.
• Not knowing one sex from the other.

In particular, Trump has long attacked Democrats as being “crazy”, “stupid”, “clueless”, senile or otherwise mentally deficient.

6. Cluefulness messaging is also big on the left. Indeed – and this is one of the examples motivating my whole analysis — the decisive metaphor of the 2020 Democratic primaries was “knowing” the constituencies.

• Amy Klobuchar’s brief period as a serious contender started with her New Hampshire debate closing statement, in which she repeated three times “I know you and I will fight for you”.
• The key passage in Jim Clyburn’s campaign-swinging endorsement of Joe Biden was “We know Joe. But more importantly, Joe knows us.”

7. The cluefulness emphasis gets bigger the further left you go.

• Starting with her brilliant first video, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has based her appeal on understanding the real needs of people like her – financially struggling, urban, likely non-white, possibly young, possibly female.
• Elizabeth Warren’s campaign was based on her alleged understanding of how our whole, basically good system was rigged and broken, and how it could be fixed.
• Bernie Sanders’ even greater appeal generally followed both those strands.

8. While it’s blossomed in the eras of talk radio and social media, cluefulness messaging is hardly new. Since at least the 1950s “Red Scare” era, politicians have accused each other of insufficiently appreciating foreign or domestic dangers. So it was between Richard Nixon and Adlai Stevenson (in both directions, as outlined in my post on Accusations of recklessness or insufficient caring). So it was with many accusations of insufficient defense spending, or when Michael Dukakis looked ridiculous photographed with a tank. Republicans’ focus on China-bashing as a 2020 campaign issue was yet more of the same. And domestic-policy examples from the 20th Century include:

• The famous George Wallace line about “pointy-headed intellectuals who can’t park their bicycles straight”.
• The considerable political cost of George H. W. Bush’s alleged unfamiliarity with supermarket checkout scanners.

Related links:

• I think this is all pretty consistent with dictionary definitions or common usage of “clueless”.
• “Clueful” is akin to but doesn’t go as far as the concept of “grok”.
• Some motivating examples for this analysis are in my December, 2019 post The other side is crazy, and wants to take away your freedoms.
• “Cluefulness” is the most novel of the seven categories in my taxonomy of political messaging.

I believe that voters’ decision factors can largely be divided into seven categories. The six more obvious ones are:

• Caring/Empathy/Concern, aka “Which needs or desires do they most want to address, for whom, and how badly do they seem to want to?”
• Proposals/Policies/Programs/Priorities/Plans/Promises, aka “More precisely, what do they say they want to do for us?”
• Effectiveness/Competence, aka “How good will they be at actually doing it?”
• (Dis)honesty/Corruption, aka “Are they really going to try to do it? Or do they have another agenda instead?”
• Group Identity/Affinity, aka “Are they generally on our team?”
• Behavior/Demeanor/Comportment, aka “Do we even want to team with them?”

In a companion post, I argue for adding a less obvious seventh category:

• Cluefulness/Understanding, aka “Do they even understand what’s going on?”

As generalities, I think this all holds true across different countries and eras, and even describes citizens’ views of non-democratic authoritarian regimes. But the specifics obviously vary by time and place.

Of course, one can message across some or even all of these categories at once. A candidate may propose ideas that reflect their concern for and understanding of the needs of specific groups of voters, with a confident demeanor that helps one believe in their competence to lead the impending fight to defeat the corruption that is holding us all back. Indeed, that pretty much was the strategy for Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump alike.

Even so, let’s briefly examine each area in turn.

Caring, Empathy and Concern

We want our government to care about us, people like us, and the things that are most important to us. Some politicians, like Joe Biden, try to show us they care about everybody, and that the caring is heartfelt. Others, like Donald Trump, do less of that. Either way, they wind up communicating that certain communities and issues are top-of-mind for them.

It’s hard for a third party to do this messaging for you. So a large fraction of the time and money candidates spend on political messaging goes into these areas. If done right, with lots of listening to and/or reflecting back of voters specific concerns, these efforts can double as messaging in the cluefulness dimension.

Proposals, Policies, Programs, Priorities, Plans, Promises

Governments, including in the United States, are almost always representative republics rather than direct democracies, a few examples to the contrary (e.g. ballot initiatives or town meetings) excepted. Even so, the traditional way to communicate your political priorities is through specific proposals. Further, voters commonly support or oppose candidates based on policy positions, specific or directional as the case may be.

Candidates and voters alike commonly treat policy proposals as proxies for other things, such as caring, cluefulness or group affinity. While that makes sense, candidates sometimes forget to argue for the policies themselves. For example, Democrats did a poor job of economic messaging in this year’s national election.

Effectiveness and Competence

Judging politicians’ competence is hard. Governments consist of many people, who often disagree with each other. So nobody can really swoop into office and do exactly what they promise to. Voters rightly give legislators much more of a “pass” for this than they give executives, but the latter often get a lot of forgiveness too. That said, competence in a crisis can be make-or-break for a president, governor or mayor. And presidents are often judged by how well the economy performs during their time in office.

Overall, the problem of messaging about competence is unsolved.* Candidates typically cite their resumes, use them for caring or cluefulness pitches as best they can, and that’s about it. Voters are commonly unimpressed, and indeed may so disregard evidence of competence that they favor inexperienced outsiders over proven, capable leaders.

*Mike Bloomberg recently spent ~$1/2 billion learning just how difficult it is.

(Dis)honesty and Corruption

All successful politicians are at least somewhat untruthful. Still, some are much more dishonest or corrupt than others. Voters’ reactions are highly inconsistent from one case to the next.

Generally, there seems to be much more tolerance for individuals’ integrity lapses than there used to be. 30 years ago, Joe Biden’s plagiarism was disqualifying, and Speaker Wright’s perfectly legal book deal drove him from office. Now … well, you know.

But systemic corruption – real or imagined – is a rising issue. Right-wingers rant against the “Deep State”, “corporate media”, and “swamp”. On the left, “corporatist” has become a nasty buzzword, applied to any politician to the right of Elizabeth Warren, and often to her as well. And even Joe Biden messages hard against the related problem of “systemic racism”.

Group Identity or Affinity

Voters’ group identity is hugely important, never more so in the US than in the present “Us vs. Them” era of polarization. In many cases, voters are satisfied if candidates seem in sync with their group (and don’t get caught denigrating them); hence my use of the alternate term group affinity. For example, George W. Bush famously signaled that he was an actual evangelical Christian. But Donald Trump, obviously not a sincere evangelical himself, became at least as popular with that group as Bush was.

Sometimes, of course, actual group membership matters, especially in discrimination-related categories such as skin color or sex. But group affinity is commonly a great substitute.

Behavior, Demeanor and Comportment

There have long been norms for the dignified way leaders are supposed to behave. Indeed, academic research suggests that the dignified appearance of competence is more important electorally than any evidence of the real thing. But populists have long realized than appearing undignified can appeal to voters too. And whatever group of people you’re photographed among, you should look comfortable and happy to be with them.

Generalities aside, there are a lot of ways to screw up. Sex scandals are commonly bad. You shouldn’t look dumb on a tank. You shouldn’t be too blatant about your bigotry. And if you’re female, you must thread the needle between sounding too strident and too passive.

Cluefulness vs. cluelessness

This is the least obvious of my seven categories, and the one I want to take the most care in describing. I have done so in a companion post.

Marketing, persuasion and decision-making have a lot to do with emotions. Often, especially in politics, those emotions are negative.

In discussing that, it is common to focus on one or two particular kinds of emotion. Steve Bannon and Barack Obama both talk about “fear and anger”. I blogged last year about fear, and in a companion to this piece have written about outrage. But in this particular post, let’s acknowledge and partially disambiguate a broad range of negative motivations.

0. One complication arises immediately, in that words describing negative emotions may have multiple important word senses. For example:

• “Disgust” can denote revulsion at some impurity, such as a bad taste, a bad smell, or a sexual behavior one finds unnatural. But the word “disgusting” is also sometimes used to indicate almost anything the speaker disapproves of strongly.
• “Fear” can refer to any concern about a bad outcome, or it can more narrowly denote a vivid, visceral fright, or in can denote long-running, targeted anxiety, for example about one’s economic security.

1. One of this century’s most consequential political gestures was based on shame and humiliation. Mohammed Bouazizi was so distressed at the humiliations he suffered from a policewoman in his Tunisian town that he committed suicide by setting himself on fire. This act quite literally ignited the Arab Spring.

2. Shame also used to be a big part of consumer marketing in the US. One manifestation was the desire to “keep up with the Joneses”.

3. Shame-based marketing was also key to the rise of hygeine-oriented consumer packaged goods, such as deodorant soaps, dandruff shampoos, and laundry detergents. Such products, as well as other household cleaners, also often are marketed through invocations of disgust.

4. It is argued that conservatives are much more motivated by feelings of disgust than liberals are. This supposedly applies to both narrow and broad word-senses of “disgust”.

I’m not convinced, however, about the broad sense. Conservatives around the world support some remarkably disgusting leaders.

5. Any Hunter S. Thompson references even aside, hatred plays a distressingly large political role.

6. Disdain is all around in politics. So is resentment about real or perceived disdain.

Some would call this deplorable.

7. Up to a point, Steve Bannon is right; anger is a great big deal, especially if it manifests as outrage.

8. The persuasive power of negative emotions is obvious. But how and how much is it possible to counter-persuade? Actually, we are trained from childhood to resist our negative feelings. This is especially true of fear.

• People who give into fear are regarded as cowardly or weak.
• Further, some kinds of fear can be effectively countered with versions of “Come on now. Let’s analyze that rationally …”

And so fear is often the negative emotion that it is easiest to argue against, at least with respect to the strength of the fear. Widely held fears that are also widely doubted include, for example, concerns about:

• Climate change and the resulting consequences.
• Pollution and the resulting consequences.
• Moslem immigrants.
• Mexican immigrants.
• A president who displays daily contempt for democratic norms.

There also is strong pressure to resist disgust. Some of that is experienced in ordinary family life; parents stifle their own disgust at dirty diapers, and later encourage their children not to reject unfamiliar foods.. Increasingly many young people are also trained specifically to resist fear and disgust directed toward people of various minority statuses – which may help explain what in retrospect was a nicely rapid shift in societal attitudes towards the acceptance of homosexuality.

Unfortunately, the last major training some people have in resisting anger occurs around age 3.

Much political messaging boils down to “They don’t care (enough)”.  Indeed, that theme is central to:

• Much fear-oriented messaging, for example in the areas of immigration, national security or economic security.
• Most complaints about selfish or “out-of-touch” elites.
• Much of what could be called “compassionate outrage”.
• Much other political outrage as well.

At the highest level, this is obvious.

• People want their leaders to care about them.
• Negative political messaging often works better than positive claims.
• Therefore, “My opponent doesn’t care about you” is a natural claim to try.

As in so much else, debates about “caring” often hinge on credibility/confidence and/or importance.

• Trump supporters accuse Democrats of favoring “open borders” and “catch and release” tactics that irresponsibly allow the country be flooded by murdering rapist thugs.
• Democrats claim to care just as much about rape and murder as Republicans do, but dispute the view that immigrants are to blame.
• Democrats accuse Republicans of ignoring the devastating dangers of climate change.
  • Republicans argue that the 97% of relevant scientists who believe in climate change are biased and mistaken.
  • Some Republicans further minimize the importance of climate change by arguing humans will engineer our way out of the worst problems anyway.
• Everybody admits African-Americans in the United States suffer prejudice. But how they view it differs greatly.
  • Leftists argue that racism is of overwhelming importance – economically and psychologically devastating, and too often downright fatal.
  • Right-wingers argue that it’s more occasional, with few effects that shouldn’t just be shrugged off.
• Similar things are true about white conservative Christians, but with the political parties reversed.
• What liberals might call a “micro-aggression”, demonstrating grave lack of caring toward women, people of color, or LGBTs, might to conservatives be “just words”.

More generally, claiming your opponent doesn’t care about something faces two inherent credibility challenges:

• They will usually claim and try to prove the direct opposite.
• You’re not a telepath, so your claims about your opponent’s state of mind cannot be authoritative.

Thus, a “non-caring” claim often expands to some version of “Truly doesn’t care or perhaps just is ignorant”, e.g.:

• “There’s a great danger. My opponents are ignoring it.”
• “They can’t see past their privilege to understand the real problems out there.”

Accusations of cowardice or some lesser form of wimpyness sometimes get into the mix as well.

One of the earliest examples of this I recall was a recording of a 1952 Richard Nixon campaign speech, in which he said – in the context of McCarthyish anti-Communist warnings — that Adlai Stevenson’s “loyalty” was not to be questioned, but his “judgment” was.

• I looked a few days ago and couldn’t find audio online, but did eventually come up with a couple of written links.
• Bizarrely, I also found a 1960 Stevenson speech in which – whether straightforwardly or in a trolling clapback – he used the same formulation against Nixon: “Our indictment of this Administration is not with a lack of loyalty, but with a lack of judgment.”

Finally, an old joke seems too relevant to omit:

“What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Related link

• A Michael Jackson song anticipating the “Black Lives Matter” movement was called They Don’t Care About Us.

Present-day politics are commonly governed by negative emotions, such as fear, anger and disgust. So says conventional wisdom, and I agree. Analyzing these surging emotions is difficult, but here’s a framework that I think could help:

A huge fraction of significant modern politics boils down to outrage at patterns of events.

1. My best argument for focusing specifically on outrage is this — political issues sort roughly into three buckets: 

• There are some things that are generally agreed upon, give or take levels of competence in carrying them out. For example, we all believe potholes should be filled, streets should be patrolled, and that there should be sufficient national defense to deter invasion.
• Some disagreements are long-running, with people either favoring or disagreeing with aspects of the status quo. You may think defense spending is much too high, much too low, or about right. You may think government should aggressively invest in nascent industries or that it shouldn’t “pick winners”. This is the realm of normal politics.
• Some things are viewed by some people as unacceptably beyond the pale. I.e., they are outraged, and they vigorously pursue change. And so a large fraction of political turmoil and change — especially if it’s sudden — is driven by outrage.

The impact of outrage can be traced through most of recorded history. Riots and revolutions are commonly driven by outrage. Recorded riots go back to ancient times. Revolutions — for example the American, Russian and Chinese ones — shaped the modern world.

2. What is this “outrage” of which we speak? Dictionary definitions describe outrage as a strong, negative reaction to one or more of:

• Perceived unfairness or injustice.
• Violation of actual or should-be taboos.
• Direct attacks on the outragee or the outragee’s group, often in the form of insults, actual or perceived as the case may be.

What that really boils down to is that outrage is the combination of two things — anger and a story about its target.

3. Also simple and amenable to modeling is the view that outrage amounts to:

• People getting greatly upset at …
• … the real or perceived combination of:
  • A transgression.
  • A victim.
  • A villain.

Major classes of transgression include:

• Injustice and inequality in the application of government power …
  • … especially hostile/coercive power such as policing …
  • … but also benign/friendly power such as patronage jobs or localized spending.
• Gross incompetence or dereliction of duty, especially in anything related to public safety.
• Violating norms of “proper” or “ethical” behavior.
• Insult or denigration.

Perceived villains can include, for example: individual politicians, political parties, specific regulatory agencies, the “government” in general, big corporations, the “media”, rich people in general (or just the “super-rich”), or “global/coastal” “elites” in general.

Perceived victims might be grouped in categories such as race, class, region, gender, age or religion.

4. Now we get to some paradoxes. Outrage often seems ridiculous, as people get upset about seemingly trivial things yet stay calm about much bigger ones. Accordingly, political partisans feast on arguments like “If you’re outraged about A, it’s hypocritical to the max that you aren’t also outraged about B”. Indeed, a word has been coined for such arguments: Whataboutism.

The obvious explanation is this: Outrage about a specific incident usually isn’t just or mainly about that event. More commonly, it’s about a general pattern that that event or other happening supposedly represents. (The metaphor of the “final straw” that “broke the camel’s back” will sometimes apply.) Illustrative examples include:

• Any one terrible thing Donald Trump says could just be a gaffe. But 10 or 100 or 1000 of them? That’s a pattern.
• Hillary Clinton’s email missteps are no worse than many, many other senior officials’ security lapses. (For example, both Donald Trump and John Kelly have done worse.) But if you generally think she’s an unfit national security official, or a habitual liar — well, then maybe you want to lock her up for whichever of her missteps she could actually be convicted of.

Non-political examples may occur to anyone who’s ever been in a long-term romantic relationship.

5. But that analysis takes us to a second paradox, or at least a conundrum: If outrage is all about specific incidents triggering strong responses to patterns that have long seemed established, what actually pushes somebody over the edge into outraged fury?

That is a central question in all of politics. I wrote this series of posts largely to raise it … and also to lay groundwork for future answers. Please stay tuned.

Politics, we keep hearing, is partisan, emotional, “tribal” and generally devoid of rationality, with voters who are essentially impossible to persuade. There’s much truth to that — but it can’t be the whole story! Election outcomes are not all foreordained. Campaigning and other political persuasion do actually influence political outcomes.

How does this influence work? While a complete exposition is obviously beyond the scope of this blog, I think we can cover substantial ground. 

0. Let’s start by acknowledging a central truism — voters’ views are generally some combination of:

• “Things are good, or on track to being good, and I want that to keep going.”
• “Things are bad, or at risk of becoming bad, and I want that to change.”

In recent elections, the change orientation has usually been dominant.

1. Changing people’s minds and feelings outright is very difficult, and it’s rare that you get to pitch at a tabula rasa. So if you’re trying to influence somebody’s heartfelt beliefs, your best chances are usually to:

• Strengthen or undermine their confidence in something they already believe to be true.
• Increase or lower the importance they assign to something they believe is happening.
• Conflate these two approaches into generally strengthening or weakening their views.

That part of the framework was spelled out in an earlier post on modifying beliefs.

2. Many negative emotions can play into voters’ desires for change. The most broadly applicable is surely fear. But while fear is a hugely powerful motivator, it’s an unreliable one.

• We spend our entire lives being urged and persuaded to overcome our fears. We’re susceptible to such persuasion working. And that’s a good thing; if you can’t overcome your fears, you can’t really function at all.
• Fairly often, the credibility of fear messaging can be successfully undermined, by good arguments and bad ones alike. As just one example, please consider how many people do not fear catastrophic climate change, because they believe that 97% of the relevant scientists are biased, misguided or corrupt.

Along with fear, the other key negative political emotion is outrage. In practice, “outrage” equates roughly to “anger hot enough that somebody is motivated to act on it”. So if you want quick results, “outrage” is where you should look. But outrage can also be characterized as “anger at outrageousness”, where outrageousness is:

• Violation of what are or should be standards or norms of behavior …
• … by identifiable villains.

Those points are spelled out across several posts, with subjects that include fear, outrage, or negative emotions in general.

3. People worry not only about their own emotions, but also what they believe the feelings of leaders and other powerful folks to be. The respect/disdain spectrum is important here; Hillary Clinton was punished by her “deplorables”, Mitt Romney by his “47%”. Even more important, I think – and certainly more connected to practical consequences – is the judgment as to whether leaders and “elites” care about the same things voters do.

That’s spelled out in a post about accusations of recklessness or insufficient caring.

4. Identity-based politics have been around for all of recorded history. If nothing else, identity-based nationalism is central to a large fraction of all war efforts. The patrician/plebian distinction dates back to the beginnings of ancient Rome. The Sunni-Shiite split started upon the death of Mohammed.

Identity is also huge in modern democracies, be it in terms of race, religion, region, gender, class or other divisions. Some reasons are almost immune to persuasion, for example:

• “I wish people in my group well. I like to see them succeed.”
• “I want people to look up to someone who resembles me. Maybe they’ll treat me better then too.”

But actual identity-based persuasion is also important, in multiple ways.

• Outrage stories typically have us-vs.-them aspects.
• Identity – group- and/or resume-based as the case may be – can support authenticity/credibility in multiple ways.
• In particular, identity can support claims as to who or what a candidate cares about.

5. Indeed, I believe that a political version of the layered messaging model could be based on a consequences chain like:

Identity + Biography –> Priorities + Abilities –> Results

The basic idea here is:

• “Results” proof:

• • I’ll deliver the results you want and need …
  • … because …
  • … it’s my priority to do so and I have the ability to pull it off.
• “Priorities” proof:
  • My priorities …
  • … grow out of my identity …
  • … and/or are confirmed by …
  • … my biography.
• “Abilities” proof
  • My biography demonstrates abilities I have shown in the past.

6. There’s yet one more major theme in political persuasion we could discuss, namely hope. But these days, it’s hard to think of anything say about that topic.

Related links

• Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’ introductory video was an instant classic, due to the brilliance of its identity-centric messaging.
• Hope was of course the last item left in Pandora’s “Box”.

• Even if it’s hard to completely change somebody’s beliefs …
• … it is often easier to modify them in some way …
• … especially by weakening or strengthening those convictions.

Indeed, there are at least two major ways to change the strength of people’s ongoing beliefs, namely by influencing:

• How sure people are that their belief is accurate — i.e., the confidence they hold in it.
• How sure they are that, even if accurate, their belief should contribute much to their decision making — i.e., the importance they ascribe to it.

I think this framework has considerable explanatory power.

1. Changing somebody’s mind is particularly hard in our current hyper-partisan, truth-challenged political environment. Yet political swings are common. How can that be?

The standard answer starts with voter turnout:

• Voters’ preferences remain the same …
• … but they’ve lost confidence that their preferred candidates or parties will accomplish anything …
• … so they don’t find it important to bother to vote.

2. The strength/confidence/importance framework also fits with the current political reaction against “out-of-touch elites”, who supposedly:

• Aren’t talking about what’s important to voters.
• Inspire no confidence that they’ll deliver on any of their promises.

3. In the recent US presidential election and its aftermath, many phenomena fit the template:

• People generally believe whatever their first impression was.
• People with similar beliefs can reach opposite conclusions because they differ as to which believed “facts” are important.

For example:

• Many people correctly perceived Trump as a lout and a lunatic. But they were all over the map in their estimation of how important those negative traits are.
• Many people initially perceived Trump as a skilled businessman.
  • Vast contrary evidence then emerged, but for most people that didn’t seem to undermine that initial impression of him.
  • But all along, people did hold widely divergent views as to whether Trump’s business skills would help make him an effective president.

4. Fear-based messaging is widely used, in politics and technology alike. It fits both parts of our template.

• Often, the essence of fear-based messaging is to persuade targets that particular risks — Muslim terrorists, Mexican rapists, database crashes, etc. — are important enough to act against.
• Sometimes, fear-based messaging takes the form of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), wherein you undermine your audience’s confidence that a competitive alternative can do the job.

5. The confidence knife can cut both ways. Fear-based messaging can sometimes be sabotaged by a confidence-reducing counterattack. The tobacco industry worked hard to cast doubt on scientifically proven tobacco risks; the same techniques are now used to blunt fears of global climate change.

6. Our emphasis on importance and confidence also fits well with common-sense market segmentation.

• You want to pitch to people who will find your story important.
• You want to pitch to people who will easily believe you.
  

7. This template can also help get past a common error.

• Some marketing theorists focus on getting your targets to adopt a particular conceptual frame.
• But that can’t be exactly right — for any given subject, people actually tend to have similar conceptual frames.
• Rather, what happens is that people vary greatly as to which parts of the frame they deem important.

8. So how can one use the strength/confidence/importance template to help one’s messaging? For starters, I spend a lot of effort on helping my clients be more credible. For if you’re not credible, how confident will the targets ever be in your story?

Further, let’s note that many messaging choices relate to a key tradeoff:

• Bold claims make your message sound more important.
• Modest claims are usually more credible.

This is particularly true when you’re trying to market enterprise technology.

A checklist for thinking through that dilemma starts:

• If you’re so modest that you don’t sound like you believe your own story, you lose on credibility and importance alike.
• You always need an answer to “Why should I care?” Ideally, your claims are sufficiently bold that the question answers itself.
• Whiffing on credibility costs you support from some influencers, or even turns them against you. Some influencers may be too important for you to let that happen.

Related links

• In a companion post, I listed three other categories of persuasion.
• I’ve previously discussed how to be compelling and credible at once.
• We’re all evidently members of the “out-of-touch elites”.

• Nobody likes to admit — even to themselves — that they were wrong.
• Once a decision is made, it can be genuinely costly to change.
• Many views — especially political ones — are “tribal”. You believe what you believe because that’s what group membership requires you to believe.
• Analyzing things can be difficult and stressful. People like to make up their minds, resolve the uncertainty, and move on.

Yet tremendous resources are devoted to persuasion, meant to change or confirm people’s beliefs as the case may be. That’s the essence of such activities as marketing, religion, education, and political campaigns — not to mention blogging.  I.e. — despite the difficulties, persuasion is widely (and of course correctly) believed to be possible. Let’s explore how that works.

Most persuasion and mind-changing, I believe, fits into five overlapping categories, which may be summarized as:

• Influencing people’s first impressions of or initial beliefs about a subject.
• Persuading somebody to narrow or otherwise change the scope of an ongoing belief.
• Influencing somebody’s level of confidence in an ongoing belief.
• Influencing the importance somebody ascribes to an ongoing belief.
• Actually changing somebody’s mind about something.

The first two are discussed below. The next two are discussed in a companion post. I’m still trying to figure out how the last one works.

1. Creating initial/first impressions is nice marketing work if you can get it:

• You don’t have the difficulties of changing somebody’s mind …
• … but you hope to impose those difficulties on all the persuaders who come after you.

Even so, there are multiple ways to screw up first-impression marketing, including:

• Make your story boring or unappealing.
• Make it so implausible that people don’t believe you.
• Lie in ways that are convincing at first, but get you in trouble when you are eventually caught.

2. More common are opportunities to influence the scope of somebody’s beliefs, generally via some version of: “Yes, there’s a lot of truth to what you believe, but it happens not to apply in every situation.” The basic idea here is:

• You agree with people sufficiently to perhaps not seem threatening to them.
• You nonetheless get to tell them there are reasons for doing whatever you wish them to do.

3. Scope-limitation is a classic strategy when selling against large technology vendors, along lines such as:

• “Oracle and DB2 may be great products for huge companies, but not for smaller ones such as yours.”
• “SAP may be great in many industries, but in your vertical market we’re better”.

Often such pitches also fall into another persuasion category, when you claim that your product’s advantages are important to a particular customer, while its disadvantages are not.

4. A huge subcategory of scope limitation pertains to time, in the template “Yes, that used to be true, so you were certainly correct to believe it. But now things have changed.” I think this helps explain the huge emphasis on news — real or imagined — as part of the persuasion process.

5. Political beliefs are particularly subject to exceptions and scope limitations. For example:

• People who generally oppose government spending usually have certain categories they don’t object to, such as defense, or social spending that they benefit from personally.
• Similarly, deficit spending is perceived as dangerous … but perhaps not in times of war … or maybe when politics have aligned to allow a tax cut.
• Populism-oriented voters can believe:
  • Overall economic numbers accurately show that many people are doing well.
  • Their own group, however, is struggling.
• Even the worst bigots make exceptions for certain individuals.

6. Two other kinds of persuasion can both be categorized as affecting the strength of somebody’s beliefs:

• Somebody maintains an opinion, but their perception of its importance is raised or lowered.
• Somebody maintains an opinion, but their confidence in it is weakened or strengthened.

These are addressed in a companion post.

7. Finally, I do of course have some thoughts about outright changing of people’s minds. In particular:

• Some decisions truly are in large part rational, even if not entirely so. Those lend themselves to opinion changes as people figure things out.
• Faith in leaders — political, business, religious, whatever — can of course be shaken. Followers seem most likely to turn on leaders when they feel they have been both lied to and betrayed. The classic example in US history is the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. But modern disillusionment with leadership of both US political parties serves as an example too.

People’s minds can be changed. The War on Truth is not unwinnable.

• If you have an invention you can’t fund yourself, having your first customer(s) pay for development may be the key to realizing your dreams.
• Likely prospects are companies that:
  • Are sufficiently hard-core technically to value your bleeding-edge ideas …
  • … and to be willing to invest in projects with obviously high risks of failure.
  • Are sufficiently limited technically to believe that your team is significantly stronger than what they could hire and deploy themselves.

This post covers the nitty-gritty of sponsored-development deal-making.

As per the previous post in this series, suppose you are fortunate enough to identify the right customer for a sponsored-development relationship. Then the deal process is likely* to go something like this:

• You start as you would in any other unproven-vendor sales cycle.
• You politely turn down the inevitable offer to simply hire you and your team onto their payroll.
• You explain that you have to keep the intellectual property yourself. This is crucial. If they don’t firmly agree, walk away from the sales cycle at that point.
• You ascertain whether there’s really a deal to be done. This is harder than it is in other kinds of sales cycle.
• You get to the neighborhood of “Yes”.
• You politely reject the first offer they make to fund you, because one of terms will be that, if all goes well, they can buy your company at a price in the range of 3-5X what they will be investing. That’s not nearly enough upside for you.
• You do a win-win deal.

*Actually, the deal process is likely to fail. Most deal processes do. But if it does succeed, it’s likely to look like what I just outlined.

Two of the bullets above allude to challenges in agreeing on deal terms. The first concerns IP ownership. The structure you should insist on is: 

• You keep the IP.
• You grant the customer any specific license rights they ask for.
• The only thing you refuse to grant is some open-ended lawyerish 10-clause sentence that boils down to “We can do anything we like, including things we haven’t thought of yet.”

It is important to agree on this framework early in the discussions, and never to waver. And by the way, I have personally negotiated a number of deals with just that dynamic — the other party thought they had a natural right to work-for-hire, but were agreeable to a substitute set of licensing rights instead.

Later in the deal negotiation, most customers will try to use the obvious power imbalance to recapture control from you. If you handled the IP discussion successfully, they will likely revisit it briefly, and then pivot to an alternative way of controlling the IP after all — a suggestion that they buy you outright, or else get an option to buy you later on. My thoughts on this approach start:

• An option to buy you could be OK if the acquisition price amounts to a Very Good Exit.
• It’s not OK, however, if the exit is merely Pretty Decent. After all, you need to be rewarded for your entrepreneurial risk, both before and after signing the deal.
• A warrant to buy a fraction of your company could be a good compromise, as you and the customer share in the upside.

In both cases, recall some maxims of negotiation theory:

• Whenever possible, negotiate about basic principles of the deal, or the general scope of possible outcomes, not about deal particulars. Those efforts have much more leverage than simply asking to have some specific numbers changed.
• This is particularly important for the weaker party. If both parties have agreed to a general principle that winds up favoring you, perhaps your negotiating partner/opponent can’t claw that concession back. But if you’re just negotiating about the details of your respective positions, it’s easy for them to keep making additional demands.

Understanding the decision-making structure of your prospect is crucial; doing so is one sales skill you absolutely have to learn. And it won’t be easy. You start with all the standard issues for big enterprise sales, including:

• Who all has to say “yes”? How pre-committed are they to doing so if the people you’re actually talking to want to do the deal?
• How will additional levels of approval give your prospect a tool with which to negotiate more favorable deal terms?

Things will be even more complicated in the case of innovatively sponsored development, because:

• If there are any investment-like financial terms to the deal (for example the warrant idea mentioned above), a whole different part of the customer could get involved in the discussions too.
• If the whole deal structure is new to the customer, they could simply chicken out at the last moment. No matter how good a job you do of understanding your prospect’s decision-making, you could still get tripped up.

The whole thing will surely tax your ability to navigate an enterprise deal.

And finally, there’s a class of scenarios that overlaps with those we’ve been discussing, namely those in which the customer is looking at their deal with you as the first example of a new way of doing business. For example:

• They might want to tie sponsored development to an equity investment, as the start of a new VC-ish profit center
• They might want to resell your technology as a first step to turning themselves from a brick-and-mortar enterprise into a tech vendor.

I’ve seen a number of such situations, some involving sponsored development and some not. They don’t typically go well, because it usually turns out that whoever is driving the new initiative doesn’t really have corporate buy-in and reliable backing to the extent that they need. If you’re selling into such a situation, ask to meet somebody very senior in the company, very early in the sales cycle. When you do, check whether they seem to actually understand what it is that they’re supposedly committed to. If you can’t get to see them at all, or if they don’t seem to have seriously thought things through (yet), be very wary about committing much more time or energy to the relationship.

But despite all my concerns and warnings, I still believe that customer-funded development should be a bigger part of software innovation than it currently is. And it could be the ticket to realizing your entrepreneurial dream.