Category: language

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, poverty, privacy, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

As a professional marketer and speaker, I look at speeches differently from a lot of other people. I look not only at what the speaker says, but at how effectively the ideas and emotions are communicated: how it impacts the listener. Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention [link to a transcript] gets an almost perfect 9.9 from me. I think when people remember the great speeches of the 21st century, this one has a good chance of making the list. Just as we remember 20th-century orators like Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, and Maya Angelou, we will remember Michelle as an orator alongside Barack. People are still talking about Barack Obama’s speech at the 2004 National Convention, and about his speech in Cairo early in his presidency. I predict that people will be remembering Michelle Obama’s speech [link to the video] years from now. Why?

  • Without ever calling the Republicans out, she made a clear distinction not only in the candidates’ values, but also in their origins; Mitt Romney constantly struggles to connect with people less fortunate than he, while Michelle Obama gripped the audience with the unforgettable images of Barack picking her up in a car so old and rusty she could see through the floor to the pavement…of his proudest possession back then, a table he fished out of a dumpster.
  • She reminded us over and over again of the hope and promise of the 2008 campaign, and connected this year’s campaign to that same hope, even while the youth who were so inspired four years ago are disappointed in what Barack Obama has accomplished. Her message to youth was clear: we are not done yet, and we are still here for you—but you need to get out there and vote (italics are taken directly from Michelle Obama’s speech):

And if so many brave men and women could wear our country’s uniform and sacrifice their lives for our most fundamental rights—then surely we can do our part as citizens of this great democracy to exercise those rights. Surely, we can get to the polls and make our voices heard on Election Day. If farmers and blacksmiths could win independence from an empire. If immigrants could leave behind everything they knew for a better life on our shores. If women could be dragged to jail for seeking the vote. If a generation could defeat a depression, and define greatness for all time. If a young preacher could lift us to the mountaintop with his righteous dream. And if proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love—then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream.Because in the end, more than anything else, that is the story of this country — the story of unwavering hope grounded in unyielding struggle.

  • As my wife, D. Dina Friedman, pointed out immediately afterward, she positioned some of Barack’s liabilities, such as his insistence on building consensus with Republicans who not only won’t reach consensus but who are actively sabotaging his efforts, as strengths:

I love that for Barack, there is no such thing as “us” and “them” — he doesn’t care whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or none of the above. He knows that we all love our country. And he’s always ready to listen to good ideas. He’s always looking for the very best in everyone he meets.

  • She reached out to many constituencies: veterans, teachers, firefighters, poor people working class people, those with disabilities, single moms, grandparents, dads, people facing serious illness, those in the struggle for women’s reproductive rights, recent grads under pressure of student loans or other crippling debt, those who remember the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, gays and lesbians and those who stand with them in the struggle for marriage equality. And time after time, she reached out to moms and identified as a mom.
  • Above all, her delivery was from the heart. She connected to her audience as a person, a mom, and as an advocate for the best of American values. She was both sincere and enormously likable. Even her little hint of a stammer came across as endearing. She didn’t need props or PowerPoint. My guess is she didn’t even need the teleprompter that no doubt was in her view.

So why do I give a 9.9 and not a 10? I deduct one tenth for staying behind the lectern. That is much more distancing; when I speak, I stand to the side of the lectern, so there’s no barrier between me and my audience, yet I can still see my notes. However, she was able to overcome that distance and connect personally and viscerally with the live audience and those watching from afar. If Barack Obama does win a second term, I think Michelle Obama will deserve some of the credit.

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, General Commentary, language, Shel's Personal Life

I’ve always loved new places. Tomorrow, I’m going to a place where the dominant language and culture are French, a place I’ve never been before—though close to two places I’ve been several times.

And I’m going by car.

Even though on the surface, English-speaking Canada seems like the United States, they’re actually very different. And Francophone Quebec Province, where we’re headed, is much more different. Past visits have felt more like visiting France than the U.S.

Europeans have very close borders, and I would consider that a blessing. Drive 200 miles or so and you’re in another land—different language, until recently and still in many cases different money, different customs, different food. It’s amazing how different, for instance, it was in Glucholatzi, Poland, compared to Zlate Hore, Czech Republic, just three miles away. The architecture, language, and food were all different (we ate better in Poland.)

Despite the clear demarcations, Europeans have a sense of world citizenship that many Americans lack. It’s rare to find a European under age 40 who only speaks one language, and common to find people who speak four or five. They understand that events a few hundred miles away in another country affect them, while US media provides an appallingly US-centric perspective that in my opinion is seriously flawed, and creates a skewed worldview.

For those of us who live in the northern or southwestern United States, another country is close enough to drive to. I’ve made at least 12 trips to Canada, And in our trips to Arizona, California, and Texas, we’ve crossed into Mexico several times.

Tomorrow, our destination is a small town east of Montreal and west of Quebec City. I expect it might be a good deal more French than its larger neighbors. I will have to rely on Spanish cognates—I can have a conversation in Spanish, as long as the other person isn’t too fussy about grammar—and my wife’s high school French. It’s good once in a while to have the experience of being the minority in a different culture, and it’s amazing how much communication can happen with sign language, drawing pictures, and a few phrases.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Innovation, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Technology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , ,

I’ve said for years that industrial designers should have to live and work with their products for six to twelve months before they’re released to the market. It’s much easier to fix the bugs pre-release, but the designers don’t actually use the product, so they don’t see the bugs.

This witty and entertaining 20-minute speech by Seth Godin offers seven reasons why products, systems, organizations, or even mindsets are broken (scroll down to the video):

  1. Not my job
  2. Selfish jerks
  3. The world changed
  4. I didn’t know
  5. I’m not a fish
  6. Contradictions
  7. Broken on purpose

“I’m not a fish” is the one that too-often rules the design world. He shows slides of a culvert designed to transport fish—but designed so fish can’t use it. The industrial designer is unable to think like his or her “customer,” and the project fails.

Some of the others, among them “not my job” and “the world changed” lead to other types of stupidity. Most of them are actual real-life examples—but I’m hoping the photo of a sign that says “Caution: This sign has sharp edges. Do not touch the edges of this sign” in large, dramatic letters, and then in tiny letters, “also, the bridge is out ahead” is a joke.

The seventh item, “broken on purpose,” is about thinking differently—about making your project not only attractive to the right people, but unattractive to the wrong people. If you want to stimulate your brain toward genius, pay careful attention to that segment.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Green Marketing, Innovation, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

A blogger on Sustainable Business, Marc Stoiber, wonders why a major sustainability milestone achieved by Translink, the Vancouver, British Colombia transit system, went almost unnoticed by local and national media.

The funny thing is…transit systems control their own media, one that reaches the two most important audiences they have. If I were the company’s marketing director, I’d put inside placards on the front and back of both sides of every bus and subway (four signs in each car) to reach the actual riders—and exterior signage to reach the next-most-important constituency: Vancouver-area residents not yet using public transit.

The interior placards would not just brag about the accomplishment—they’d say thank you to the riders for their part. And those exterior signs would recruit new riders to join the tribe, e.g., “become part of the greenest commute in North America.” And I’d supplement this with a nice social media campaign, which itself could be a subject for exciting press releases, etc.

Then, the local media and perhaps the national media would almost certainly pick up the story—but even if they didn’t, the message would be out there, and if done right, ridership would grow.

Stoiber goes on to discuss the very creative marketing of another transit advocate, Jason Roberts—who put up a website for the a nonexistent light-rail transit line in Dallas, Texas called the Oak Cliff Transit Authority—and was able to organize so effectively around this public vision that the project actually got funded! You might call Roberts’ story “If You Dream It, They Will Come—IF You’re a Marketer and Organizer Who Can Create and Gather a Tribe.”

Vancouver Transit execs: I’d love to consult with you on how to build big awareness. I already have one Vancouver-based green company as a client.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Copywriting, language, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , ,

Yesterday, I blogged about the combination of vision, engineering, and marketing that made Apple and some other companies so successful. And for years, I’ve been a champion of putting reasons in your marketing.

This TED talk by Simon Sinek goes a step farther. Again using Apple as an example, he says it’s not enough merely to include the because; you want to lead with it. If you put your reasons why—your higher purpose—right at the top you immediately attract the people who are falling-all-over-themselves-eager to be part of your dream and your mission. This, he says, is why we don’t buy MP3 players or tablets from companies like Dell, but we salivate at Apple’s every product release—because Apple leads (and has led, since at least the original Macintosh introduction in 1984) with the deeper why.

Another of his examples is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech; King, he notes, did not say, “I have a plan.”

However, King’s speech actually had a bit of a slow build. The first 351 words (of 881, total) are about the plight of black people in this country from the Emancipation Proclamation to the day 100 years later when he gave his speech. Only then, more than a third of the way into his speech, does he move into his vision of the race-neutral future.

Still, I think Sinek is right—but I think it also has to hit on the benefits to the individual, unless you’re speaking only to the driven. I’ve often used this technique in my copywriting without consciously thinking about it. From now on, I will do it consciously.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, language, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , , ,

Either Mitt Romney is trying to add comedy to his repertoire or he’s gone delusional on us.

At least twice last week, he made off-the-wall statements accusing Obama of Romney’s own much-indulged-in behaviors and attitudes.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s report on Romney calling Obama “out of touch.”

Let’s see…Romney is the man who revels in being in the One Percent, talks about the Cadillacs, plural, that his wife drives, brags about firing people, jokes about factory closings, and thinks that corporations are actually people (to name a few of his bizarre statements). Not since Dan Quayle have we had a probably major-party nominee for national office so good at cramming his foot into his mouth..

And then a day or two later, Romney said Obama repeatedly undergoes “a series of election-year conversions” on his issue positions. It’s true, Obama has a disturbing tendency to back off anything remotely controversial once a little heat is applied by the opposition, and this is a continual disappointment to progressives. But retreating under fire is not the same as shifting with the wind. Romney changes positions so often, his own campaign strategist Eric Fehrnstrom created the wonderfully apt metaphor of the Etch-A-Sketch campaign: shake it to reset.

I live in Massachusetts and I lived here under the Romney  administration. He was very much in favor of the healthcare plan that was passed during his time at the helm, despite its strong resemblance to the Obamacare he claims to hate. I remember when he was at least somewhat protective of women’s reproductive rights. I remember a lot of positions he has abandoned and then turned around and actively trashed. People keep talking about his integrity; I see a candidate who will sacrifice any principle for votes.

So, Mitt–do you actually believe this stuff you’re spouting, or are you just trying to bring some humor into the campaign trail?

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, language, Politics Tagged with , , , , , ,

In the 1970 movie, “Love Story,” Oliver has the famous line, “Love means never having to say you‘re sorry.” It was bad advice then and it’s still bad advice.

When you do something wrong, the right response is to apologize, sincerely and without a lot of waffly “but” language or excuses. Maybe you even do something to make it up to the wronged party. Unlike Oliver, I apologize to my wife when I’ve been wrong about something or behaved badly, and she does the same to me when she’s the one who screwed up. And I apologize to other people if I’ve done something that inadvertently hurt them.

Will someone please tell Newt Gingrich that this is how mature people, and mature countries, behave? Gingrich is upset that President Obama apologized because the military in Afghanistan accidentally caught up some Korans in a batch of papers they were incinerating.

I’m betting Gingrich would stridently demand an apology if someone of another religion burned copies of the New Testament. Why does’t he see the need for an apology when someone else’s holy book is destroyed.

Or does being Republican now mean “never having to say you’re sorry”?

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , ,

I received this tweet from a stranger today:

@shelhorowitz , please follow me, and check me out. Thank you. [URL]

To which I tweeted back:

Give me a reason

As a marketing consultant and copywriter, that’s one of my mantras. I think “because” is one of the most important words in marketing. I’m always probing the why with my clients, and using that to create compelling marketing strategies and materials.

The days of “oh, look at me, I’m so cool, I have a website” were probably gone by about 1996, if not before.

Your prospects are busy people. They want to know why before they click on your link. They want to know why before they give up even 30 seconds of their time.

Specifically, they want to know the benefit. Will you make them laugh? Give them a tool they need? Solve a problem? Give them celebrity gossip? Help them go green (as I do)? Make a specific offer. They will thank you—and some of them, the right ones, will visit.

This will serve you well in any marketing medium: advertising, freebie information, socialmedia, and lots more, as well as your website.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, propaganda Tagged with , , , , , ,

In my post yesterday on oil-industry and think-tank funding of climate deniers, I deliberately used the term “catastrophic climate change” instead of the more common phrase, “global warming.”

You may be wondering why:

  • “Warming” is a joyous word, with happy connotations. Think about “warm-hearted” friends or a “warm lead” in sales—but climate change is nothing to be joyous about
  • “Warming” implies a gradual shift, nothing to be very concerned about, just a natural evolution—rather than the reality of intense and cataclysmic storms
  • The weather patterns are not all heat-related—right now, for example,  millions of people are freezing in Europe
  • It’s hard for many people to make the connections between rising temperatures and the major weather events they influence—such as the human interventions that turned Katrina from a “normal” hurricane into one of the most destructive storms ever, only to be surpassed by the Indian Ocean tsunami a few months later

As change activists and marketers, we need to own the language we use, to frame today’s realities in messaging that is easy to grasp and hard to distort. (George Lakoff, among others, has written very eloquently on this.)

I heard one speaker several years ago suggest that “global roasting” would be more appropriate—his graphic description of what we can expect is essential reading for climate activists for the wreckage that our planet will become—but even that doesn’t do the problem justice.

Even the phrase, “climate change,” is not enough. “Catastrophic climate change,” with its extra alliterative power and clear focus on potential disaster gives people a frame they can grasp. I suggest we use this term in our messaging.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, language, Marketing Trends/News, Politics, propaganda, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Want to buy a scientist?

When you find a scientist who claims to show that human-caused catastrophic climate change either isn’t real or isn’t a problem or doesn’t really exist, you usually find a money trail leading to one of the worst polluters (usually, oil giant ExxonMobil, sometimes, petrochemical magnates and right-wing darlings Koch brothers).

But ultra-right-wing think-tanks play in this sandbox too. Friday, TriplePundit posted leaked secret anti-climate-change strategy documents from Heartland Institute; they actually have the chutzpah to put $100,000 toward developing a K-12 school curriculum to

…show that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.

Oh yes, and they’ve also set aside $18,000 a monthly to fund pundits who present the climate-change-is-not-a-problem viewpoint.

Hmm, that sounds a lot like the attempts by creationists to throttle the study of evolution and biology. When science can’t back up your position, influence young kids with the Big Lie technique that was so beloved by Nazi propagandists. And the get television news commentators to present a “fair and balanced” approach, pitting your purchased experts against objective scientists as if they were equally credible, and sow doubt in the public mind.

To climate skeptics, I say “look out the window.” In my own area of Western Massachusetts alone, we’ve experienced the following just since June 1:

None of these events are the normal weather pattern around here.

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