Are You Plain Spoken?

I'm all for clarity, but not plain speaking.


Clarity helps get your point across.


But plain speaking is just dull.


As luck would have it, this weekend my wife and I caught a terrific Smithsonian exhibit on its final day.


We saw more than 100 photos, paintings, sculptures and artifacts depicting the career of Gertrude Stein, our original Kim Kardashian.


Seeing Gertrude Stein showcased America's first "celebrity-for-being-a-celebrity," best known for paling around in Paris with Picasso, rooming with the homely Alice B. Toklas, and showing up in Woody Allen's latest film.


Of all the pieces on display, I loved most the vests Stein made so famous.


In her manner of dressing, living and speaking, Stein knew how to make a statement.


"It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken," she famously wrote in 1923.

How about you? Are you plain spoken?

Second Best

During last week's Republican debate, with a little wordplay Newt Gingrich deftly turned an assault on his character to his advantage.


At one point in the debate, Rick Santorum called Ginrich "grandiose."  


Darn tootin' I'm grandiose, Gringrich responded. That makes me an American. "This is a grandiose country of big people doing big things," he announced.


Gingrich pulled off the coup because he accurately understands the difference between the word's denotation and connotation.

The denotation of a word is its primary or literal meaning.  The connotation is the range of secondary, often poetic, meanings.

Webster's defines "grandiose" as (1) Characterized by an affectation of grandeur and (2) Impressive because of uncommon largeness.

Gingrich scored a point because he knew the secondary definition of the word.

Nice Guys Finish Last

In consumer media, bad guys always trump nice ones.

They have to. Otherwise, we'd turn away out of boredom.

What audience would sit through Macbeth, after all, if the Scottish king only did charity work?

If you tuned into the media last week, you heard the hoopla about Verizon's plan to charge wireless subscribers a $2 fee every time they paid their bills on line or by phone.

Those greedy, slimy sons of a gun.

The news you might have missed: late in the week, Verizon dropped its plan, after 95,000 consumers signed a complaint.

The announcement was posted quietly on Friday on the company's Website. I'm certain Verizon wants the story, just as quietly, to go away.

But it won't, for a while at least.

Customers have long memories. 

Verizon, the nation's largest wireless carrier, has more than 90 million subscribers.

If you took a poll today, I'd bet 90 million of them know the company just announced a plan to charge the $2 fee; but only 9 million know Verizon dropped that plan 48 hours after the announcement.

Spellbound

Consultant Kare Anderson, writing for the Harvard Business Review, thinks comparisons, not cold facts, are the secret to holding customers' attention.

"We are wired to draw connections between things, even where there aren't any," she writes. If you want to hold your audience spellbound, put that wiring into service.

When you compare your product to something your customers already know, you do yourself a huge favor.  Once you've drawn a comparison between your product and something familiar to your audience, Anderson says, "you have set the context in which people will view it and decide upon it, just as a general chooses terrain favorable to winning a battle."

Anderson offers these tips:

• Swipe someone else's slogan. A California hospital increased blood donations by asking the public, "Got blood?"
• Use numbers. Outdoor gear-maker REI's TV commercial depicts two women atop a mountain at night. The voiceover says, "Even the finest 4-star restaurant is no match for one with 4 million stars."
• Try humor. A Cuban who couldn't serve decent food to his guests blamed Castro's revolution: "The three successes were education, healthcare and sports. The three failures were breakfast, lunch and dinner."

What's that Smell?

It's true: America is exceptional. America is the only nation in the world where people's trust in every kind of institution declined in 2011, according to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer.

But you already knew that (particularly if you've read my free report, Path of Persuasion).

What are most marketers doing about it? They're cultivating "trustiness," writes Seth Godin in his blog this week.

Trustiness stinks.

It's shabby.

And hollow.

And it stinks.

It's easier than ever to build a facade of trust," Godin says. Real trust, on the other hand, "is built when no one is looking."

In other words, trust is earned; trustiness is just clever BS. "Trustiness is what happens when you use trust as a PR tool," Godin writes.

The difference between the two is obvious, once you experience trust. "Trust experienced is remarkable; trustiness once discovered leaves a bad taste for even your most valued customers."

Or at least a bad smell.

2013 Update. Not long ago, the slogan of CBS News was Experience You Can Trust. Now we learn CBS puts profit above free speech, as reported by Forbes. How's that for abusing trust?