HYPE STRATEGY #9

Frequency of language use and imagery matters. The more frequent the language use or imagery, the more strengthening occurs.

—GEORGE LAKOFF

Human beings like to think we make decisions based on things that matter. If we take on a project, it’s because we genuinely feel it’s a great opportunity. If we buy a pricey product, it’s because its benefits outweigh its costs. And if we spend time and money on entertainment, it’s because we have good taste.

In truth, the forces that influence us—that draw us in and get us excited—typically have less to do with the content of the message than with how it is delivered.

From Julius Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici” to Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death,” the most skilled political outsiders have always used sloganeering, radical simplification, and relentless repetition to help them gain and consolidate power. When the leaders of the French Revolution decided they needed to transform what was then an unruly mob into a revolutionary army, they simply supplied the rallying cry, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” and when the Bolsheviks wanted to mobilize a peasant army, they led the peasants in the singing of “L’Internationale.” These political hype artists all intuitively grasped the principle that simple, gut-level language works far better than complex intellectual arguments.

In recent years, a number of neuroscientists, psychologists, and linguists have been getting to the bottom of why we so readily respond to some patterns of sounds and images more than others. In three separate studies, University of Michigan psychologist Robert Zajonc showed subjects a random selection of nonsense words, Chinese characters, and photos of strangers. He repeated each word or image up to 25 times. Zajonc uncovered a direct correlation between the amount of exposure to a word or image and the subject’s perception of its favorability.

Using fMRI imaging, neuroscientists have more recently demonstrated that the brain’s hippocampus relies on repetition to imprint information. Since we human beings are nature’s foremost learning machines, it is no surprise repetition exerts such a hold on us.

The Rhode Island School of Design, or RISD, is perhaps the premier college of visual and practical arts in the United States. Its graduates regularly emerge as pioneers in painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, industrial design, and textiles science. The facilities are first rate, the curriculum is demanding, and students take their work very seriously. It was at RISD that Rebecca Allen developed the basic tenets of computer art. It was where Dale Chihuly began to revolutionize the art of glass installation sculpture.

So when the pasty kid with the ratty T-shirts was spending all his time there in the basement printing the same goofy sticker over and over, it was no surprise a number of people complained he was wasting important resources on a bunch of nonsense.

Born in 1967, Shepard Fairey had grown up in a world where branding was as much a part of the firmament as earth, fire, water, and air. Jingles on the radio. Billboards on the way to school. TV commercials when you got home. Ads splashed across the sides of buses and park benches. Fairey, on the other hand, saw himself as a nonconformist. He liked art. He liked skateboarding. He liked punk rock. He liked giving the finger to the mind-numbing indoctrination the mainstream world accepted so easily.

In Fairey’s view, the brands and slogans of corporate America were not much different from Soviet propaganda. To prove his point, he decided to conduct an experiment.

“I was teaching a friend how to make stencils in the summer of 1989,” explains Fairey, “and I looked for a picture to use in the newspaper, and there just happened to be an ad for wrestling with Andre the Giant, and I told him that he should make a stencil of it. He said ‘Nah, I’m not making a stencil of that, that’s stupid!’ but I thought it was funny, so I made the stencil and I made a few stickers.”

Fairey made his image as simple and stylized as a hammer and sickle or fast-food logo—monochrome and stripped of all detail. Then he taxed the capabilities of his school’s silk screen machine to reproduce the image ad nauseam. After he had enough of them to fill the better part of his dorm room, the real work began. Each night, when other students were sleeping or partying, he snuck around and pasted the stickers on every street sign, lamppost, and municipal fuse box he could find.

If the goal of the artist’s experiment was to demonstrate the power of mindless repetition, regardless of the subject matter, it succeeded to an extraordinary degree. Stickers and stencils soon bloomed all over Providence, as followers and imitators picked up where he left off. Before long, you couldn’t go to any major metropolitan area in the United States without seeing Andre the Giant.

Viewed rationally, a flag, coat of arms, corporate logo, or official seal has no more inherent meaning than a decal of a professional wrestler. However, repeated enough times in a simple enough form, any symbol—or catchphrase or slogan—acquires emotional resonance and memorability.

As a hype artist, you need to use this feature of the human brain to your benefit. Stop overcomplicating and overexplaining your products, services, messages, or causes. Instead, boil down your central idea into a pithy, memorable phrase or image and repeat it in as many forms and through as many media as you can get access to. When people can’t escape your rallying cry or symbol or standard, they will come to adopt it as their own even if they initially rejected or ignored it.

At the same time, repeating yourself is not sufficient for binding adoring hordes to you, your cause, or your products. Not all phrases and images are created equal. To truly worm your way into the hearts and minds of your audience, there is an intricate tapestry of language and form you must master.

AS MALLEABLE AS A BABY’S NOGGIN

In his book The Language Instinct, Dr. Steven Pinker, director of Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, explores why we so often respond more viscerally to the form of a message than to its actual content. “Humans like anything that purifies the basics of their world,” he writes, “and that resonates with the way the brain decodes the blooming, buzzing confusion out there. We like stripes and plaids, we like periodic and harmonic sounds, and we like rhymes.”

Laura Ries has built her career around this concept.

Ries first made a name for herself at the New York agency TBWA, running major accounts like Woolite and Evian. Eventually she went into business with her father, a man who knew a thing or two about marketing in his own right. Al Ries was the person who, along with coauthor Jack Trout, first described a new concept called brand “positioning” in a series of articles in Advertising Age. A book based on the concept went on to sell 1.5 million copies and became part of the curriculum of almost as many Marketing 101 courses.

Laura Ries went on to carve out her own area of expertise by reverse-engineering what makes certain brand slogans explode while others flop. And as she tells it, the brain’s default vocabulary is made up of images.

“Specific names that conjure up mental images are more powerful than abstract names,” says Ries. “In the academic world, what do researchers call a 50-page document they might have spent months or years working on? A paper. . . . What does a business executive call an appointment to serve on the board of directors of a Fortune 500 company? A seat. Burger King is a better name for a food chain than Sandwich King. Red Lobster is a better name for a seafood chain than Red Seafood.”

Ries was certainly not the first person to remark on the benefits of using slogans that evoke imagery. But her unique contribution has been to figure out the more subtle elements that determine which ones actually stick.

As Ries notes, human beings have been using hooks like rhyme and alliteration to imprint their ideas into people’s brains for as long as anyone can remember. It is these hooks, when combined with imagery and relentless repetition, that really move the minds, mouths, and feet of millions. Once you become aware of Laura Ries’s philosophy of sloganeering, you start to see it everywhere.

BMW was only the eleventh bestselling European car import until it rolled out its slogan “The ultimate driving machine,” a phrase that evoked an actual entity of steel and rubber zipping down an actual road. In less than three years, it was the most popular luxury vehicle brand in the world. But when it later abandoned that slogan in favor of the vague replacement “Joy,” Mercedes quickly overtook it again.

American public opinion was strongly tilted against entry into World War I. President Woodrow Wilson tasked the Creel Committee to fix this, which it did by means of the alliterative slogan “The war to end all wars.” By 1917, 1.5 million young men had volunteered for the strong possibility of dying in a trench.

And then there was Aimee Semple McPherson.

McPherson emerged from her era’s mess of tent show preachers, holy rollers, and self-styled prophets to become the first modern evangelist superstar. Her Angelus Temple became the first megachurch in the 1920s, and her International Institute of Four Square Evangelism brought in $1.5 million a year ($18 million in present-day money).

One of McPherson’s favorite sermons kicked off with the preacher thundering into her church, straddling a motorcycle, dressed as a traffic cop. When she reached the front, she would spin her bike into a halt, blow her whistle, and shout: “Stop! You’re speeding to hell!”

In another sermon, she described civilization as a carousel that periodically wore out, needing a master mechanic (such as Jesus . . . or Sister Aimee) to come along and fix it. Her title for this sermon? “The Merry Go Round Broke Down.”

And then there was one of her best-known productions, in which members of her congregation would march throughout the church depicting figures like St. Paul, Joan of Arc, and Nero. McPherson’s name for this theatrical display? “The March of the Martyrs.”

Rhyme. Alliteration. Concrete action. And plenty of imagery. Sister Aimee may have loved her flock, but there was no way she was going to rely on mere explanations of God’s Kingdom to get her followers to pin their banknotes to the clothing lines she regularly strung from one end of her church to the other.

In describing the sway leaders like McPherson hold over their followers, Gustave Le Bon writes, “Whatever be the ideas suggested to crowds, they can only exercise influence on condition that they assume a very absolute, uncompromising, and simple shape.”

Timothy Leary began his career as a fairly conventional scholar and scientist. After completing his PhD in clinical psychology, he served as director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation and lectured at Harvard University. But by 1966, Leary had become notorious in certain elite circles for his contrarian ideas and lifestyle experiments.

A few years earlier, he had first encountered lysergic acid diethylamide—or LSD. Eventually the potential of this compound to alter perception became the dominant strand in his work and then his life. He left his post as a Harvard psychology professor and began to consider what to do with his newfound knowledge about the true nature of reality. It became increasingly clear to him that he could not keep these insights to himself. What he now knew could remake society, and it was his duty to spread it to the masses. Yet Leary knew his impact was still limited.

He needed to do something different.

The answer came during a lunch with Marshall McLuhan, an already famous professor of media and communications. After listening to his friend’s problem, McLuhan told him he was going about it all the wrong way. If he really wanted to attract a mass audience, he would have to model those who had already been doing it successfully for the better part of a century. The masterminds of Madison Avenue.

This advice was hard for Leary to accept. His mission, as he saw it, was about taking down precisely the kind of empty commercialism the advertising industry specialized in promoting. He agonized over the decision nonstop.

But ultimately Leary went along with his friend’s opinion. He spent weeks poring over jingles, slogans, and ad copy. He racked his brain, trying to figure out how to summarize the profundity of his realization with the kind of pithy phrase that was typically used to sell hamburgers and lawnmowers.

And then it hit him:

Turn on, tune in, drop out.

The slogan had it all. It was alliterative and punchy. It was active. It was visual.

In early 1967, Leary was invited to give a speech at the first Human Be-In in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The attendees were young and shaggy—a mix of hippies, bikers, and runaways. But the savvy former professor had the good sense to match his speech with the tenor of his audience. To say the speech was short on specifics would be an understatement. In fact, most of it consisted of a single, rhythmic, alliterative phrase repeated over and over and over:

Turn on, tune in, drop out.

Turn on, tune in, drop out.

Turn on, tune in, drop out.

It had the desired effect. From that point forward, the rate at which Leary’s message spread was nothing short of remarkable. Drawing directly from the establishment’s bag of tricks, Timothy Leary created the rallying cry the counterculture would come together around in their attempt to change the world.

What makes “Turn on, tune in, drop out” especially effective is that it works on multiple levels. It certainly has all the hypnotic hallmarks of repetition, alliteration, and rhythm our brains readily respond to. At the same time, it provides marching orders to its audience.

As we’ve seen many times throughout this book, people—especially people in groups—follow those who give them a blueprint for how to feel and act, as long as they don’t believe that is what’s happening. When you are developing a slogan that describes what you offer, make it concrete. But when you are developing a slogan designed to give people guidance on how to act, keep it vague.

What were people turning onto, tuning into, or dropping out of? How exactly are people making America great again? Who knows? It’s better that way. Let the members of your audience fill in their own meanings. This way, they will inevitably attribute any positive changes they make to you but won’t be able to hold you responsible for any missteps.

THE CREATIVE POWER OF REPETITION, RHYTHM, AND RHYME

Sometime in the early fifties, Todd Storz and Bill Stewart went to Omaha to turn around the city’s last-place radio station KOWH. There were already five other stations in town that featured a varied mix of live performances, drama, and news. They tried anything they thought might get people’s attention and keep them tuned in. Different blends of material. Different on-air personalities. Different promotions. But they quickly discovered that in this heartland city, no one was exactly clamoring for new forms of cultural expression.

After months of futile effort, they fell back on an approach many great men before them had resorted to when faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

They went out to get drunk.

The two executives ordered beers, found stools with a good view of the room, and settled in to watch the small crowd. Actually, Storz and Stewart had a secondary motivation for visiting the local tavern. The bar had a jukebox, and they wanted to get a firsthand feel for the tastes of their market. What they quickly confirmed was that these tastes were about as bland as Omaha’s featureless terrain.

Although the jukebox had 60-plus selections on offer, patrons kept picking the same song—a trite and banal ditty called “The Music Goes Round and Round.” Someone would pop a coin into the slot, and the tune would play. It would end, and then a minute or two later someone else would do the same thing. And so on.

It would have been one thing if their fellow drinkers had been dancing or even humming along. But their reaction was nil—the song more or less served as background music for patrons talking about their work and their worries and their lives. Yet they kept playing it.

As it often did, Todd Storz’s mind eventually drifted back to the war. This night he thought back to when he and his buddies would go out for R&R and that, come to think about it, they didn’t act all too differently from the working folks here in the Midwest. Whenever the soldiers managed to find a jukebox, they too would play the same songs over and over. Far from home, they just wanted something familiar.

In that moment, something clicked for Storz. He looked up from his beer and immediately shared his insight with his partner. Life is full of uncertainty and unasked-for change. Maybe they—and their competitors—had it wrong. Maybe people didn’t want variety after all. Maybe KOWH could solve its problem by selling repetition itself.

It was the breakthrough they had been looking for. Back at the station, they immediately put their new idea into practice. They studied charts of top-selling records in trade publications like Billboard. They built tight playlists that mirrored these charts. They commanded and cajoled skeptical disc jockeys into not playing anything else.

Within months, KOWH went from having less than 5 percent of market share to regularly attracting nearly half of all radio listeners in the city.

The new format quickly spread beyond Omaha—first to other cities in the Midwest, then outward to the coasts. By the mid-fifties, repetitive hit-based programming was the standard for most radio stations across America. Soon the new format had a name: Top 40 radio.

Storz and Stewart were thrilled by the profits their innovation commanded. As Todd Storz explained years later: “I do not believe there is such thing as better or inferior music. If the public suddenly showed a preference for Chinese music, we would play it.”

But not everyone was pleased by their breakthrough. Old stalwarts of the music biz lambasted what they saw as a crass appeal to the lowest common denominator. Some even claimed the relentless repetition that made Top 40 radio work was actually a form of brainwashing

Were they right?

As it turns out, the story of Todd Storz and Bill Stewart would have an interesting coda. In the wake of the Top 40 format they created, programmers finally had to respond to what people wanted to hear rather than what they thought was good for them.

As music journalist James Miller writes, “What much of the public wanted to hear was neither Chinese music nor so-called good music, but rather bluesy riffs, country reels, tricked-up pseudo-folk songs. . . . As Top 40 spread, melodies gave way to riffs, riffs became ‘jingles,’ jingles became ‘hooks’—instantly recognizable sound patterns, either melodic or rhythmic, designed to snare a listener’s attention.”

Eventually one of the new breed of programmer–disc jockeys who sprang up in the wake of the new format—a man named Alan Freed—decided the streamlined blend of blues, country, folk, and pop that had emerged to serve the demands of the Top 40 audience needed a name.

The DJ called this new form of music rock and roll.

We often think of repetition and radical simplification as synonymous with dumbing things down. At its most extreme, we use terms like “mass hypnosis,” “mind numbing,” and “brainwashing” to describe their effects. As with all hype, however, repetition and radical simplification are not inherently negative. Music—along with prayers, mantras, proverbs, chants, and cheers—can provide comfort, relief, and excitement, depending on the context. Like the radio executives whose innovation led to Top 40 radio and rock ‘n’ roll, applying a healthy dose of repetition and simplification to your creative endeavors will help you burn them into the hearts and minds of those you want to reach.

Putting It into Practice