Behavioral science is studying this new reality to rethink and improve communication campaigns. Those who understand the new society are achieving amazing successes, including the world’s largest digital companies, some traditional companies, and the candidates of new political movements.
Old communication model. Old communication was vertical in nature, produced by campaign teams or corporate publicists. It was designed to be copied and distributed to customers and voters through the media, which was the main link between people and companies or parties. The ad created sound clips and was intended for dissemination.
According to Chip and Dan Heath, in their book Made to Stick, communication had to be “sticky” for the message to stick in the mind, like Kennedy’s speech about the trip to the moon, Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech or some corporate ad that children hum. The message was deposited into the receiver who simply remembered it.
Authoritarians don’t like this
The practice of professional and critical journalism is an essential pillar of democracy. This is why it bothers those who believe they are the bearers of the truth.
According to these authors, effective advertising shares six qualities: simple (i.e. understandable by anyone), attracting attention and arousing curiosity, concrete (possible to visualize using images), credible (never comes across as manipulative), emotional (appealing to feelings), and narrative (does not explain, but tells how to solve problems).
Explosion on the Internet. Most people are used to watching the same TV channels and reading a few newspapers. This monopoly began to weaken with the advent of cable channels, which expanded the range of sources, and then finally exploded with the advent of the network. Until then, only those who had power, access to the media, or who paid for advertising had influence. The ideas of a person who did not have these resources were marginal and were never made public.
Meme Drop is the new business model, a message launched into the dizzying flow of information on the networks. They are designed to be interpreted in different ways by recipients, who in turn become creative. Campaigns like those of Bernie Sanders and Zahran Mamdani in the United States and Guillermo Lasso in Ecuador have known how to use this tool.
Principles of interactive society. People are no longer satisfied with consuming products or ideas, but rather demand participation in their development and dissemination. For an effective communication strategy to reach these independent citizens, it is necessary to complement the principles of the past with other principles of the interactive society:
Action: The message must not only arouse admiration and memory, but it must move and encourage action.
Connection: You need to connect users so that they recognize each other through values or images, and so that they feel “part of.”
Transferability: The message must be transferable. Dissemination becomes more widespread when the basis of the message allows the customer/voter to modify it at will. Maximum outreach occurs when they use their personal lists to spread the word.
Political and legislative challenge. The major problem facing current democratic politics is maintaining active communication between leaders and voters, not only to win elections, but also to govern. Not only must care be taken to ensure that the candidate’s message is correct, but it is even more important to account for what voters understand when they paraphrase and disseminate the content of the message.
With the Fourth Industrial Revolution, economic, social and labor legislation, designed for a static world, needs to change. Some only think about preserving existing workers’ rights, while artificial intelligence, robotics and other elements produce radical changes in production, translating into new behaviors for workers and consumers. This is not about taking away workers’ rights, but about ensuring that these rights, which now protect only union members, reach a population that is predominantly entrepreneurs and members of small and medium-sized businesses.
In addition to the basic political work of reaching agreements in Congress and elites to approve reforms, it is necessary to communicate with the entire population, applying many of the concepts developed in this memorandum, so that change arises not only from a majority vote in both chambers, but from communication with a majority of the population who, if they understand the process, can support or at least not resist reforms that will benefit everyone in the long run.
*Professor at GWU.
Member of the Argentine Political Club.