After months of observation, reading articles, looking at videos and attending the Occupy Wall Street movement here in Milwaukee—I’ve found a common thread. Catch phrases. In the ad world we call them taglines or rally cries. Unless you’re from 1957—then you call them slogans.
Taglines are for the most part meaningless without context. For instance: Wieden Kennedy’s perennial “Just do it” means nothing without the aspirational image that tells you what you are supposed to “just do.” But not every cry from a corporation gives context. Sometimes they just introduce a line they can legally say without getting sued, and then hope the audience makes the false connection to their product they are trying to portray.
For instance: This beef has 50% less fat!
The corporation is hoping you’ll make the connection that the product is healthy. And many of us will. But we are missing a necessary step in critical thinking. Less fat than what? A walrus burger? John Kruk? Eggs over easy? Who knows? The corporation typically doesn’t even know, they just need to say something that will urge you to buy they’re product. Obviously it’s less fat than something, right? Who knows what? That’s right folks! They don’t know what they’re less fat than and neither do you. Now stop asking questions and go buy some beef.
Let’s turn the page to something more important. The ruler of the free world—the U.S. President. Why did I just call him a ruler? Well, I guess I heard it somewhere. In fact, he’s not a ruler, and technically there’s not much he can legally do to run things. If you don’t believe me, read the Constitution. The President can’t make legal judgments, declare wars, make laws, create jobs and a lot of other things. He just can’t, at least not legally.
Yes we can! The rally cry that helped pave Mr. Obama’s way to the White House. Enough of us stood up and joined in to elect him. To be fair, the slogan wasn’t the only thing that did it. There were many speeches, appearances and debates that helped as well as a disgruntled, confused population. But let’s pretend that the slogan “Yes we can!” helped the voter buy in.
Now, let’s pretend for a second that the President had no catchy rally cry. Can you speak to what he wants to do as President? Better yet, when you exclaim “Yes we can!” what do you mean? Yes we can get the country on track? Yes we can get the troops out of Iraq? Yes we can all eat pizza on Fridays?
I’m sure each of the voters who answered the question Yes We Can ___________! had something in mind. Just as a consumer audience filled in the blank for the 50% less fat beef, they filled in the blank for “Yes We Can.” If you were an audience member, and you filled in the blank, you missed a key moment of critical thinking. The only blank that exists is the one the audience creates, and the only one that fills it is the audience. That’s right, the question was never really answered by candidate Obama, and to this day has never been clarified.
Yes we can what?
50% less fat than what?
Please don’t think this is meant to critique only Pres. Obama and only the meat seller. It’s meant to critique the intellectual dishonesty and vagueness in today’s communication. Almost all politicians have been doing it for years and so have corporations. George W. Bush had an almost identical slogan, “Yes, America Can!” Both corporations and politicians have megaphones and virtually unlimited funds and opportunity to insert themselves in our daily lives. And it’s a good thing too. Somebody’s got to pay for the production value of CSI: Las Vegas.
It’s not a critique on slogans either. “Just do it” is intellectually honest in context. But frankly, most are not. “What can we get them to believe?” is asked in conference rooms—political and corporate alike—to try and entice consumers and constituents. Most of the time, whatever the product of that meeting is, it isn’t built around honesty. It’s built around manipulation.
It’s a “what can we say and not get sued” philosophy, rather than a “what can we communicate with integrity that sells our product” philosophy. But a politician’s financial incentives are sketchier. With any luck, the free market will sort out the beef issue. But you can’t really sue the president for going back on a policy or raising taxes when they said they wouldn’t. But you can sue Cheerios for telling a big fat lie. On those rare occasions when a politician does get sued, the taxpayers pay for it. In the case of Cheerios, General Mills pays for it.
Barrages of catch phrases from our politicians and advertising has taught the audience several bad things.
Catchy phrases mean something because they are catchy. But that’s the only reason.
People don’t need to know what they’re thinking to be rational.
A politician or corporation’s word is not his bond. So, people buy and elect whom they believe is telling them the least amount of lies—not the most amount of truth.
The funny thing is, politicians and corporations pay a whole lot for strategists and creative professionals to point out phrases and ideas that will make people trust them. Entire industries are built around discovering these key thoughts and ideas that make constituents and consumers tick.
But rather than a corporation or a politician having guiding principles that lead them to honest pieces of communication, they rely on communication efforts to create those principles for them. So, the corporation or politician doesn’t necessarily have a point of view. They only have guided phrases that allow them to have the appearance of necessity.
In other words, the corporations and politicians are regurgitating back what they believe the crowd in front of them wants to hear. They got their message from the crowd, polished it and served it up from a manner from on high—whether it is a podium with a seal on it or a television commercial.
Because the issue is served on high, it now has more importance. The audience believes in its importance. And the politicians get what they want because of this perceived importance.
But, is that so bad? Let’s start with a corporate example. General Mills set out to make a healthy oat cereal to kick-start your day post World War II. Cheerios was born, and after it’s international release in 1945 was an instant hit. So their principles were—make a healthy oat cereal.
Fast forward to 1979.
General Mills does a study and finds out that kids aren’t eating Cheerios. Mainly, because they don’t like the taste. So General Mills, in all of their collective wisdom, decide to show more kids in commercials eating Cheerios during Saturday morning cartoons. They spend thousands of dollars perfecting the commercials. The child is smiling, and he even says to the camera—“Wow mom! This tastes swell!”
They air the commercials, and for a month they get a spike in sales. Then sales go immediately down. Why you ask? The product didn’t change, just the slogan, the catch phrase, the crowd guided messaging. Cheerios are still Cheerios.
Luckily, this example is fictional. Honey Nut Cheerios swooped in and saved the day.
If they were principled in their mission rather than faking it with advertising, the outcome would have been different. Again, this fictional story is about innovating a product through messaging and failing—instead of product innovation through improvements and succeeding. Luckily, the free market took care of it.
Cheerios was looking for a bigger market-share—more power in the unconquerable land of breakfast cereal instead of adjusting guiding principles or creating new ones to tempt your kid to eat more of them.
Although this next situation doesn’t exactly parallel—the core issue is following the crowd’s wishes instead of following guiding principles. We have to understand this before we dig deep into the intellectually dishonest communications of these ideas.
A very, very, very brief history of what motivates politicians.
Politics have always been nasty. Name calling and muckraking have been around since—forever. But besides the name calling, politicians were once motivated by principles, and that’s what got them elected. Then they ran for principles and power, and got elected because choices were narrow. Then they ran on the illusion of principles and the lust for power, and got elected on those illusions and the fact that the choices were even narrower. Now most politicians will say whatever they can to get the power. Principles become flexible over the years and power becomes the motivation. I know, it sounds sad. But it’s true—power is the motivator and principles have turned into vague ad-style catch phrases.
That’s the Cheerio parallel. Just replace power with market-share and we are almost talking about the same thing. Though I’d never equate elected officials with cereal. It’s disrespectful. I like cereal too much.
A crowd lines up on the steps of Capitol Hill—5000 of them. They have signs. They’re shouting stuff like, “We want lower taxes!” And the politicians lower the taxes. The crowd says, “We have the right to healthcare!” Again, the politicians figure out a way to do it. In this fictional situation the crowd gets more money and free healthcare. But what if the government can’t afford it now that the taxes have been lowered? The politicians sit in a conference room ringing their collective hands.
“I gave them what they wanted. Now what? The government is broke and now I have to shut it down.”
The crowd doesn’t always make the best decisions because they don’t know the law and they don’t know how much money it takes to run a government. That’s why they elect people to do it for them. And if those people have principles then they make tough decisions based on those principles and not on a crowd’s rally cry. If the crowd doesn’t think they are making the best decisions, they don’t get elected again.
Now, let’s go back to Wall Street and hang out with the protesters for a bit. What’s their slogan or rally cry—and more importantly, what does it mean? The most popular cry from the protesters is “We are the 99%.” Let’s think about this critically for a moment. The protesters could be saying a few things at once with this statement:
We are a lot of people.
We are not the 1%
We are the over-whelming majority
We are broke
There is a major difference in wealth between the majority and the small minority.
These are just a few. And the last two are extrapolated and not inherent to the message. They take a little research, but if you go to where the protesters are—the last two interpretations are contextual. I’m sure that if you were to ask ten different people, you’d get at least 5 different answers. That’s a conservative guess. But let’s ask the question why. Why are thousands of people around the country yelling the same message with different intentions?
It’s because the message is easy to yell, fits neatly on a sign and has many individual vague meanings—just like “Yes we can” and “50% Less Fat.” Years of vague political and advertising like these have trained consumers and constituents to develop short meaningless messaging—because that’s what they hear all day.
Corporations and politicians put on a vague, beige face for their audience because they are afraid that if they actually commit to principles they’d be too polarizing to purchase or elect. Or even worse, someone might try and hold them to those principles. So, the safe bet is to be vague, and let the audience find their own intentions in the messaging.
“I thought this beef was going to have less fat than John Goodman!”
“Yes we can get all sorts of nice stuff from those terrible fat-cat executives!”
But who cares if everyone has different intentions? Just as long as people hear them, right? Can they say the same thing and get across several clear messages? No, they can’t. Sorry, that’s not how effective communication works. If you want to communicate something, you have to understand what you are saying.
Here’s what’s getting communicated so far. There’s a ton of pissed-off people in a park—and that they are pissed-off at rich people and corporations. According to Adbusters, Occupy Wall Street’s mission is:
“to end the monied corruption of our democracy”
On OccupyWallStreet.org they state their purpose in this way:
“#ows is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations.”
To do this they are announcing who they are. They are the 99%. What does that have to do with ending the “monied corruption of our democracy?” I don’t know. The U.S. is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. But hey, that’s semantics, right? Who cares if our government is incorrectly defined?
Ending monied corruption? That’s something I can get behind. Corruption is bad. I know. I looked it up. Alright, I’m in. Let’s end monied corruption by telling people who we are. We are the 99%! Now all I need is that shirt I mow my lawn in and some camping supplies. This is going to be great! We’re going to take down the man by telling him that we aren’t the man! Or something like that.
But that doesn’t make sense. Strip away the emotional aspects of a bunch of people yelling and think about it. Making the obvious announcement that you are not in the top 1% doesn’t say much. But hey, it’s catchy.
And come to think of it, how are corporations corrupt? Or is it the government? Or both. I guess I really don’t need to know. Nor do I need to know what my beef is less fat than. Or what “change” I am supposed to believe in or whom I should really protest.
But there’s another way to look at the Occupy Wall Street movement. Maybe you’re not a political movement at all. Maybe you are an important social movement that’s simply fed up with the way this country is moving, and you’re just here to shake things up a bit. Maybe you’re here to tell the status quo you won’t take it anymore, even though you can’t define the anymore you won’t take—kind of like hippies with less patchouli and better birth control.
Here is a note to my friends at OWS. You’re wonderful, and I’d take a bullet to defend your right to protest. But please for Pete’s sake, understand what you believe. And just because corporations and politicians give you vague meaningless messaging doesn’t mean you have to do it too.
I know it’s difficult to inform yourself with all of the crap news and government rhetoric out there. But, if you continue to be the uninformed consumer and electorate—you’ll only get what someone is trying to sell you.
