I’d like to share with you some of the things I’ve learned about putting frame analysis into practice, both during my time at the Rockridge Institute and afterward as a strategy consultant and professional trainer with Cognitive Policy Works.  My experiences span many different settings including:

• Deconstructing the cultural and political frames of an academic research department at a major university;
• Analyzing media frames around health care, foreign policy, immigration, presidential campaigns, environmental issues, social justice, democracy, economic development, and more;
• Advising executive-level managers of non-profit organizations, professional unions, government agencies, and social businesses on strategic social change issues;
• Educating citizen activists in virtual classrooms and in-person workshops about the workings of the political mind.

In all of these settings I’ve found that many people have heard of frames, yet few really understand what they are or how significant their existence is for social change efforts.  Also, I’ve typically found that people have wide ranging misconceptions about what frames are, how they work, and why it is so important that people learn to identify them effectively in their efforts.  This essay is an attempt to start shedding light on this difficult topic.

What the Heck IS a Frame?

George Lakoff, a linguist famous for his insights into frames as they apply to politics, describes them as:

“Frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. [T]hey structure our ideas and concepts, they shape how we reason, and they even impact how we perceive and how we act. For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic – we use them without realizing it.”

Stephen Reece, in the field of media studies, gives this working definition:

“Frames are the organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world.”

Frames are everywhere around us. They are the conceptual models that allow us to make sense of the world.  We cannot have a coherent thought without them.  There is no such thing as “choosing” to use frames, only a matter of consciously selecting frames or blindly using them without knowing it.

Can Frames Be Framed?

One big challenge of discussing frames is that we have to use frames to reason about them.  This means we have to evoke a conceptual model of something familiar to explain something that is not.  As any teacher can attest, this process often leads to misconceptions and faulty understandings of the new concept.  It is especially confounding when the new concept we want to talk about contradicts many commonplace assumptions about thought, language and behavior that are prevalent in our culture.

An example is the reaction to the word ‘frame’ as if it meant “I was framed!”  The conceptual model for being framed is one of a malevolent person placing blame for wrongdoing on another person who is actually innocent.  In this context, to “use frames” is to intentionally mislead people into believing that a good person has done something wrong.  The listener is naturally cautious about incorporating frames into their practices because they see the use of ‘frames’ as malicious and deceptive.

This conceptual model evokes an important semantic frame having to do with the distortion of truth that is linked to it in the meaning-making process.  This happens because a particular philosophical tradition – what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call “objective realism” in their ground-breaking book Philosophy in the Flesh – is prominent in Western culture.  Objective realism presumes that there is a single, objective reality that is true and knowable.  It asserts that the way language works is for every utterance (or written text) to either be true or false relative to some kind of “God’s eye view” of the universe.  As such, to ‘frame’ something is seen as putting an additional layer of interpretation between a word and its correspondence with the world, thus ‘distorting’ it by creating a layer of interpretation between it and its ‘true’ meaning.

Ironically, one of the major implications of frame semantics is that no such “God’s eye view” exists.  A single word or phrase can correspond with many different, equally legitimate meanings.  Linguists call this phenomenon polysemy and it has been extensively documented by the cognitive psychologist Raymond Gibbs in his research on communication intent. (An excellent overview can be found in his book, Intentions and the Experience of Meaning.)

This leads to two obstacles for the practitioner seeking to implement frame analysis in their organization:

1. The need to correct misconceptions as they arise;
2. The need to anticipate and manage doubts and concerns that are bound to deeply held assumptions in Western culture.

The practitioner will need to be mindful of misunderstandings about frames while giving careful consideration to his or her communication strategies in order to avoid defensive reactions where new discoveries about the mind conflict with standard assumptions that happen to be incorrect.

The Critical Piece – Psychological Process of Change

As I’ve attempted to convey strategic insights about frame analysis to practitioners, I’ve learned a valuable lesson:

Pay attention to psychological processes in the face of change!

Attempts to convey new understandings of human thought and behavior will inevitably tap into personal feelings and predispositions people have about their own minds (and their unstated theories of human nature). Unlike other kinds of knowledge about “objects” in the world, learning about the workings of our own minds requires us to consciously grapple with and update our notions of ourselves.  In other words, to use frame analysis effectively a practitioner has to go through a personal change process.

The reason for this is simple.  The conceptual models we have about human thought apply equally to ourselves as they do to those around us.  If we have assumptions about rational thought being purely conscious, quantifiable, logical, and literal we’re going to measure ourselves relative to this ideal.  As we learn that none of these attributes accurately reflects the workings of our own minds we have to reconsider our sense of ourselves.  This is a psychological change process.

My colleagues and I handle this by establishing a safe learning environment and building trust with our students so that we can guide them through the strange landscape that is the accurate depiction of the human mind.  We take care to incorporate our understandings of psychology into the learning process to help us see when a student is uncomfortable with the material and help them along.

The Challenge of Institutional Structures and Norms

Ultimately, frame analysis is only useful if it leads to a change in organizational practice.  Merely identifying problematic (or helpful) frames won’t get practitioners very far if the exercise doesn’t lead to changes both in communication and outreach strategy.  Furthermore, the deconstruction of cultural narratives (which frame analysis is a key part) often reveals hidden assumptions on the part of the advocacy organization itself.  Improvements in overall effectiveness will be contingent on the ability of executive-level managers to be self-critical and reflective about how their organization is framed and what its practices mean to key publics it must engage with in order to have success.

Even more challenging, however, is the adoption process for replacing existing practices with new ones.  Any practitioner who has attempted to bring new ideas into a bureaucracy knows how difficult initiatives like this can be.  One of the reasons frame analysis gets relegated to the “messaging silo” is that this is the easiest way to dismiss its implications for organizational change.  And such resistance is commonplace when people are confronted with the uncomfortable prospect that they may have to do things differently.

At a higher level, shifts in organizational strategy will implicate new configurations of alliances and partnerships.  When the innovative organization adopts frame-based methodologies, it will have to get other organizations on board in order to cooperate.  This “trans-organizational” level of application is the most difficult we have attempted so far, having some success with two coalitions of NGOs in the UK around the theme of Identity Campaigning.

By now, I hope that it is clear why more people haven’t adopted frame analysis in their work.  Many enthusiastic readers of George Lakoff express frustration that his brilliant ideas have not been more widely adopted.  Complications like the ones presented here should begin to clarify why the change process has taken so long.  To summarize:

• Frame analysis is based on nuanced and unfamiliar concepts that are easily misunderstood;
• Skilled use of frame analysis involves an introspective personal change process that must be guided by expert trainers;
• Implications for changes in organizational practice are often met with resistance;
• Merging the innovative practices of one organization into the web of institutions they cooperate with is a time-consuming and difficult process.

Through our work at Cognitive Policy Works we are carving a path for others to follow.  We will continue to share our insights as we provide the valuable services of frame analysis, professional trainings, and strategic management in the midst of organizational change.

In the service of this vital work,

Joe Brewer
Founder and Director
Cognitive Policy Works

Well, the ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ (TEEB) report for Business will be published in July, and – according to today’s Guardian – it is expected to conclude that biodiversity is worth an awful lot. Some of the approaches to putting a price on it seem a bit mad - like asking people how much they will pay to fly to see a bit of rainforest, as a means of calculating its value (if people ever care too much about biodiversity to want to fly anywhere, does that mean it becomes worthless?).

But, niggles notwithstanding, the TEEB Report for Business is being billed as doing for biodiversity what Stern did for the climate. The Stern Review, of course, pointed out that it is much better for economic growth, in the long run, to reduce emissions now rather than pay to adapt to climate change later on. Unfortunately, this wasn’t an argument that galvanised the world into forging a global agreement at Copenhagen, and, before the launch of “Stern for Nature”, it’s perhaps as well to ask why.

I’m going to offer two partial answers to this question, one economic, one psychological.

The economic problem with the Stern Review was this: having conceded that the case for climate change is most compelling when based upon cost-benefit analysis (CBA), this argument was left open to attack on the basis of the technicalities of how that analysis is to be conducted – in particular, what discounting rate to use.

So, for example the economist Richard Tol, happily accepting Stern’s rationale that decisions about whether or not to abate greenhouse gas emissions should be based on CBA, did his own number crunching and was led to conclude that it is uneconomic to try to contain atmospheric CO2 to less than 850ppm.

The problem is, that once you have conceded that the primary rationale for abating climate change is economic it is all too easy to become embroiled in arguments about what ‘economic’ really is.

Could we be heading the same way with biodiversity?

The signs aren’t good: whatever the aggregate costs of biodiversity loss, most companies don’t seem that worried. Also today, Price Waterhouse Coopers published some of the analysis they have done for the TEEB study. They find that “only two of the world’s largest 100 companies have identified biodiversity and ecosystem loss as a strategic issue” – this in the light of extinction rates estimated at up to 10,000 times background levels.

As one PWC partner says:

“Environmental destruction is not in most cases as a result of headline-grabbing man made disasters, but the steady erosion of biodiversity as a cost of economic development. But these costs to the productive capacity of the economy are not valued and not felt by any one company, so it’s easy to see why at this stage, the threat is less visible to business leaders.”

Well, if it’s not something that individual companies are going to do much about in their own self-interest, maybe the economic arguments will nonetheless lead to ambitious and proportional intergovernmental action on biodiversity loss?

This is where the psychology comes in – and again, the parallel with climate change shouldn’t fill us with optimism. The problem is this: there is surely an economic case to be made for collective action on climate change in pursuit of economic benefits. But this requires individual nation states to subjugate their own short term economic interests (compromising competitiveness now) in order to enter an international agreement (leading, as Stern argues, to more jam tomorrow for everyone).

Many people have difficulty with this. Clemons and Schimmelbusch have characterised this difficulty, in an American context, as follows:

“If we [the US] clean up our environmental act and the Chinese don’t we all die anyway and their economy will outperform ours while we live. If we don’t clean up our act, we still all die, but at least we have a stronger economy until then”

Unfortunately, viewed psychologically, this attitude is all-too-predictable. Concern about financial interest and concern about common-interest are almost perfectly opposed. There are many pieces of work that point to this: Prime people’s awareness of money, and they become more selfish, less co-operative, less trusting, and less concerned about the environment. Simulations of managing forests find that people who are more concerned about money cut down more trees, for a quicker simulated financial return (although they make less money in the long-run). And these effects seem to be detectable at a national level: Tim Kasser has found that societies where more people are concerned about wealth tend to have higher footprints (even when controlling for per capita GDP).

Put another way, the Stern Review demanded that governments accepted both the importance of prioritising the common-good and the pre-eminence of economic cost-benefit analysis (as a mechanism for establishing where the common interest lies). And yet, it is psychologically difficult to hold these two things as important at the same time. TEEB, it seems, is heading in the same direction.

The alternative? Don’t ask how much it’s worth. Ask why it matters.

Have you noticed that a lot of people seem to think that appeals to self-interest lead to a moral and just society?

No, I’m not merely talking about economists. Self-interest evangelicals have been spreading the good news for decades in public policy programs, political science departments, and financial institutions too. Converts can be found in environmental organizations that tell us we’ll save on our energy bills if only we change those light bulbs. And blind zealots run polling companies that deploy the doctrine of self-oriented rationalism when they tell us that the preferences of individuals exist in a meaningful way to be measured - with nary an inkling that the way polls are conducted might influence how people respond.

Is self-interest fundamentalism dying? Cracks are certainly spreading through its foundations, as I’ll discuss in a moment. The more important questions we need to grapple with are whether it should die away and, if so, with what should we replace it? Consider your answers to these questions. I’ll share some of mine below.

Yes, rationalist fundamentalism still has a stranglehold on society. It’s meteoric rise to dominance goes all the way back to the nuclear arms race that poured truckloads of cash from public coffers into defense contractor piggy banks through the “game” of mutually assured destruction during the Cold War. We saw it clearly during the Vietnam War when “body counts’ laid the foundation for an entire generation of video game players to score points by killing more enemies - never mind that we were slaughtering innumerable civilians.

And, of course, it was only a matter of time before schools fell under the knife of test-based bookkeeping to “hold students accountable” to rationalist ideals of performance measurement - at the expense of actual learning. A web of trans-national organizations have come into existence - the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank being the best known - that push the ideology of self-interest into the center stage of world affairs.

Theory of Self-Interest: A Creation Story

How could an impoverished model of human-as-self-focused-calculating-machine have ever come into being? A common myth is that self-interest theories rose out of behavioral studies conducted by psychologists. A nice bedtime story perhaps, but it isn’t true. Would you believe me if I told you the behavioral model underlying the global economy came, not from the human sciences, but from mathematics?

Back in the 1940’s and 50’s, a research center was created to explore fundamental issues of concern to the Air Force. This Research ANd Development institute was aptly named the RAND Corporation. Within the high security walls of this military think tank, mathematicians developed abstract principles for nuclear strategy during the Cold War. In the midst of this particular, historically contingent environment - and motivated by concerns of defense contractors in the air combat arena - the notion of self-interested rational action was born. Proof positive that the most bizarre stories are found in the non-fiction section of your local library.

(If you’d like to read the full story, check out S.M. Amadae’s Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism.)

So the birth place of modern market fundamentalism, in the guise of “rational choice theory”, was the military think tank that gave us the disastrous arms race. Untested and theoretical, it quickly spread throughout the highest levels of government during the tenure of Robert McNamara at the Department of Defense, then whipped through the economics departments of many prominent universities, spurred the creation of public policy analysis as a “scientific” field, and undergirded today’s global institutions of economic governance.

But things are starting to change.

Looking Forward: 21st Century Institutions

The first experimental studies of rational choice theory by behavioral scientists, principally Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, showed that a foundational premise of the theory was wrong. (As a technical side point, they showed that preferences can be reversed by merely framing a question differently.) The “prospect theory” that arose through these experiments became the bedrock of a new field - behavioral economics - that has grown in prominence since its birth in the 1970’s.

Throughout the subsequent decades, researchers found more damning evidence against self-interest. Paul Slovic and his collaborators at Decision Research have systematically explored how risk perception influences our decisions in many ways that fly in the face of rational choice theory. Human beings depend on emotional cues to make decisions. And many of these cues are associative rather than based on inferences - thus they do not fit the paradigm of rationality presumed by rational choice theory. In fact, human beings cannot manage risk - especially in the highly complex social situations we often find ourselves in - when regions of our brains that process emotional information are damaged. Antonio Damasio sealed this argument in his 1994 book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.

A new view of human reason is on the rise in academia. Unlike its predecessor, the new paradigm is profoundly based in the workings of our bodies. This “embodiment” view incorporates insights from computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and robotics. Its adherents include people like Gilles Fauconnier, Raymond Gibbs, Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Eleanor Rosch, Mark Turner, and Drew Westen.

Arising with this new view is a profound shift in how we understand human thought and behavior. Just as the institutions of yesteryear grew out of the old paradigm, research in the cognitive sciences beckons us to think differently about the institutions of tomorrow.

This is where I do my work.

I’ve seen how methods like cost-benefit analysis fail utterly when applied to environmental challenges. Future costs are weighed against current gains in a false choice between short-term profit seeking and long-term sustainability. I’ve also watched as public policies built on outdated performance measures undermine that which they are meant to improve. A key example is the educational paradigm that gave us No Child Left Behind - high-stakes testing - which flies in the face of what our teachers know about real learning. Any effort to treat moral pursuits - like making the world safe for future generations or educating a child - will demand broader measures of success than numbers alone can describe.

In a previous article, I described some things we’ll need our institutions to do in the 21st Century:

In a world based on this new perspective, things work very differently:

• Citizens recognize fear-inducing news reports intended to inflate manufactured risks and hide awareness of genuine threats, thereby reducing the effectiveness of these manipulative tactics.
• Journalists understand the consequences of how facts are presented and beliefs are promoted in the structure of news reporting, resulting in coverage that enhances—rather than erodes—the democratic process.
• Policy-makers abandon contrived and faulty presumptions about “economic rational actors” and instead craft solutions to societal challenges that improve the lives of real people through deeper insights into the human condition, culminating in robust policies that stand the test of time.
• Advocates articulate clear and compelling calls to action that resonate deeply with the values of the citizenry, thereby promoting greater civic engagement and community empowerment.

What’s more, we’ll need to build a new foundation for our economic institutions. A recent example shows that the old approach is inadequate. Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, two Nobel prize winning economists, led a commission to improve upon the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) when measuring economic well-being. They spent most of the 79 pages of their personal reflections describing a long history of criticisms that show GDP to be grossly inadequate. Yet, very little of substance was offered to take its place.

What does it mean that a group of leading economists don’t know how to measure economic progress? In the words of Sen, when talking about the limits of rational choice theory:

It seems easy to accept that rationality involves many features that cannot be summarized in terms of some straightforward formula, such as binary consistency. But this recognition does not immediately lead to alternative characterizations that might be regarded as satisfactory, even though the inadequacies of the traditional assumptions of rational behavior standardly used in economic theory have become hard to deny.

This tells us that many economists recognize the limitations of rational choice, but they don’t have ready-made alternatives. Yet the old tools are well-known and ready for use so they pick them up again and again. They are looking for something better, but haven’t found it yet.

I’d like to offer that the alternatives are starting to emerge in the unexpected corner of academia where researchers study the human mind. New tools cannot be found so long as the old paradigm of human nature remains. My colleagues and I are in the process of developing these new tools. What does our paradigm look like? Here are the key features:

• Human beings are profoundly social. We are wired for empathy and we learn how to act in the world through interactions with other human beings and the natural world;
• Human reason is embodied. We think and act through the interplay of brain, body, and environment. Emotions are vital to effective decision-making. And our understandings are shaped by the contexts we operate in;
• Human thought is evaluative. We interpret the world through core values, our sense of identity, and conceptual models for how we believe the world works. There’s no such thing as “an objective world” when dealing with social and political issues because we a co-creators of the realities we experience.

Each of these features tells us something about how a human-based economy should work. It should recognize the value of community in our dealings with one another. It should be designed around our biological needs for survival in a world where things like potable water and fossil fuels are becoming limited and the planetary climate system has been disrupted in a manner that threatens us all. And it should acknowledge that interpretations of human well-being are perpetually contested by competing perspectives.

Yes, it is time to let self-interest fundamentalism go the way of monarchy and feudalism. It may not go silently into the night, but the end is nigh. Pretty soon we will have laid the foundation for a sustainable future - both ecologically and financially. In order to do so, we’ll have to acknowledge how human beings actually are instead of how theorists engaged in military strategy presumed us to be 60 years ago.

This is a huge undertaking. It won’t be completed overnight. Nor will it be the sole effort of a few visionary thinkers. But it must start somewhere. My suggestion is that you’ll see it starting to take shape at the boundary between cognitive science and the world of expert practitioners at all levels of governance.

Look there and you’ll probably find me too.

This article is republished from Cognitive Policy Works.

[Link to video]

Identity campaigning builds upon aspects of core identity to engage people around intrinsic motivations.  It challenges conventional ideas about rational action and self-interest.  And it calls upon people to become more empowered and engaged in personal transformations in order to solve societal problems.

Notice how the children in this video are not calling upon you to make better purchases (the consumer mindset), nor are they asking you to vote for a specific candidate or policy (a consumer transaction).  Instead, they are calling on other children to unify and set their shared identity around an empowering set of core values - opennesses, tolerance, mutual respect, compassion, civility, engagement, etc.

How is this different from other campaigns?  Will it prove more effective than other contemporary approaches?

Last fall, Alex Steffen of WorldChanging gave a series of presentations where he called for Seattle to be the first carbon neutral city in North America.  The room was electric with the buzz of energy.  I know because I was there.  I immediately set about the work of taking this energy and building a movement (learn the full story here).

Today we launched a new website for Seattle Innovators, shortly after Seattle’s city council made history last Monday for announcing that one of its top priorities would be to go carbon neutral.  It’s a very exciting time to be in the Emerald city!

How is this an identity campaign?  At its core is an emphasis on deeply held assumptions about society (what George Lakoff calls “deep frames”) and the core values that comprise the Seattleite’s cultural identity.  We are challenging commonly held notions about how local government works, what the role of community is in shaping the region, and how deep cultural foundations shape who we are as a people.

It’s only the beginning, but we’ve already formed unexpected alliances with local government, non-profits, research institutions, and social businesses.  These alliances reflect a shift in shared identity that comes with thinking about innovation as the bubbling of creativity that drives a local culture (as contrasted with innovation as clever ways to sell products, so typical of 20th Century corporate thinking).

I will report back from time to time about how the insights and strategies Tom and I have discussed are being applied in this radically different approach to social change.

The piece opens with Soli from Futerra recounting her ‘magic wand’ experiment: she asked a group of environmentalists how many of them would magic away climate change if people were left unchanged after its disappearance. Apparently, precious few people showed any enthusiasm for her offers of magic.

The experiment is taken as evidence that environmentalists are more interested in social engineering than in addressing environmental challenges.  The environmental challenges are simply a cover for the social engineering.

What isn’t, apparently,  investigated is whether Soli’s audience were really wedded to using climate change as leverage for mass “social engineering”, or whether it was because they realised that their new fairy would have to produce a load more magic wands for all those other problems, and keep on producing them ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

The charge of social engineering is now one that contributors to this site are well-rehearsed in rebutting. It has been thoroughly explored in other posts - here, for example.

(Our response in a nutshell: what you call social engineering, we call cultural influence. Are we ”engineered” by ad men and politicians? Maybe.  They are certainly, by their own admission, shaping culture in a way that has profound effects on our identity - and therefore, by extension, on our motivation to engage ethical problems like climate change or developing world poverty. If you think we are socially engineered by them, then maybe you’re right to call any approach to redress the balance “social engineering”, too: but don’t tar what we’re doing with the ’social engineering’ brush unless you’re prepared to tar most other public discourse in the same way.  Whether we are all participating in a struggle for dominant values, or for the upper hand in a grand  “social engineering” project,  we are all implicated in that debate - one that is as old as civilisation.)

But at his most dangerous, Rowlatt goes further.

He comes very close to dismissing any approach to tackling environmental problems that looks beyond the technofix (to the more systemic social and cultural drivers of environmental problems) as evidence of evangelicals for a new religion whipping up, and then preying on, people’s fear of an (environmental) apocalypse. It’s a theme that Justin’s producer, Helen Grady, also takes up enthusiastically here.

I don’t deny that this is a theme that does percolate through some environmentalism. (It’s one that identity campaigning goes to lengths to highlight as unhelpful - see for example, the discussion of the use of fear in Meeting Environmental Challenges).

But to imply that this is the necessary alternative to focussing our efforts exclusively on the technological responses to climate change is dangerous. It leads to the off-hand condemnation of anyone who begins to highlight the social and environmental impacts of a society dominated by consumerism, or the demonstrable  social and environmental benefits of a closer relationship to nature, as necessarily motivated by pseudo-religious zealotry.

And that’s just disingenuous.

We suggested (on page 49) that environmental organizations can approach this problematic aspect of identity by developing:

“approaches that help people express the fear, anger, sadness, angst, or sense of threat from environmental challenges that many are probably already experiencing (whether consciously or otherwise)”

and providing:

“opportunities for people to begin to explore and express the unpleasant feelings they have about environmental challenges.”

With the meeting at Copenhagen over and very little having come of it (from what I’ve read), I just want to take this opportunity to share how I feel, and encourage others to do the same.
I do not feel disappointed, as disappointment suggests I had expectations that were not met; unfortunately, my expectations about what would happen at Copenhagen were met.
I am angry that once again economics trumps the environment.
I feel guilty about my many hypocrisies.
I am sad and afraid about the world my kids and grandchildren will inherit.
While part of me is coping with these feelings by thinking about what to write or do next, I also find myself coping through many of the means Tom and I catalogued in our book.
I want to lash out at the diplomats and the businesses who blocked real progress from happening.
I consider the possibility of no longer writing about climate disruption, as it forces me to keep thinking about these issues.
I fantasize about no longer reading the newspaper and instead retiring to high ground.

Pretty cool, eh? Do the Green Thing say:

Shopping is a buzz, an energy, but it uses energy too, all the energy needed to make all the things we shop for. So if you’ve got to shop but want to see the global temperature drop, buy the green thing that took lots of love to create but zero energy to make. Shop your sustainable heart out and Buy Nothing^TM

…except I Want One Of Those saw another opportunity:

A snip at £3.99. IWOOT write:

What better present for the person who has everything than a poignant reminder that they want for nothing? This lovingly crafted vial of emptiness is filled to the brim with unfettered nothingness.

Why sell spoof nothing when you can make good money selling the real thing?

]]> http://www.identitycampaigning.org/2009/12/nothing-the-real-thing/feed/ http://www.identitycampaigning.org/2009/12/solitaires-skin-crawls-at-identity-campaigning/ http://www.identitycampaigning.org/2009/12/solitaires-skin-crawls-at-identity-campaigning/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:17:28 +0000 admin http://www.identitycampaigning.org/?p=688 Solitaire Townsend, Director of Futerra ‘Sustainability Communications’, writes:

The notion of changing the audience rather than the message is at the heart of the ‘identity campaigning’ concept led by WWF. Identity campaigning argues that we shouldn’t accept the basic psychology of our audience – but seek to change it.

This means re-programming people’s values away from consumption, status and selfish desires and towards collective awareness and a closer relationship with our place in the natural world. Actually this drives us bonkers, especially because implicit is the message ‘if only everyone else thought and acted like us everything would be okay’.

That makes our skin crawl a bit, and we know the majority public audience hates environmental worthies suggesting there’s not only something wrong with their footprint: there’s something wrong with their personality.

Unfortunately, Soli, like it or not, the message does, inescapably, change the audience. Every effective politician knows it (Thatcher – “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul”) every marketer knows it (“we shape culture”).

Also unfortunately, today’s dominant messages (to which you do your best to add) change the audience in the wrong way. For example, being bombarded by 5000 advertisements a day - often without any choice in whether or not I see them - changes the way I think, and what I value. This leaves me caring less about other people, and less about our environment. And you’d use the same techniques - further embedding those values - to ’sell’ green living.

There’s a war about values going on, and you are on the wrong side.