The language experts from maslansky + partners take on the smartest, savviest, and sometimes stupidest messages in the market today. CEO Michael Maslansky and President Lee Carter bring their experience with words, communication, and behavioral science to the table — along with a colleague or two — and offer up a “lay of the language.” Their insight helps make sense of business, life, and culture, and proves over and over again that It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear™.

What’s the difference between a glass half full and a glass half empty? A school with the most graduates and a school with the largest alumni network? Plant-based protein and synthetic meat? In this week’s edition of HearSay, Michael and Lee are joined by colleagues Will Howard and Katie Cronen to talk about framing — the heart and soul of m+p’s language expertise.  Join us for some of our favorite framing examples and why it’s an important exercise for companies.

Listen below or on your preferred streaming platform:

LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW

Lee Carter’s book, Persuasion

Michael Maslansky’s book, The Language of Trust

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EPISODE 6 TRANSCRIPT:

Will Howard:

It comes down to taking a defining feature and instead of fighting it out on the same battlefield as everyone else, taking your ball, going home, starting your own category where you have the advantage.

(music)

Lee Carter:
They said what?  Welcome to Hearsay. A podcast from the language strategists at Maslansky and Partners, where we provide our take on the smartest, savviest, and stupidest messages in the marketplace today, and what you can learn from their experience. Our philosophy is, it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear, and that’s why we call this hearsay. I’m Lee Carter, president and partner at Maslansky and Partners, and author of a book called Persuasion: Convincing Others When Facts Don’t Seem to Matter, and I’m a lifelong word nerd.

Michael:
And I’m Michael Maslansky, CEO of the firm that invented language strategy, and the author of The Language of Trust, Selling Ideas in a World of Skeptics. Today, we’re going to talk about one of the most effective tools you can use to win an argument, change perceptions, and make your product stand out from the crowd. It’s a little bit behavioral science, a little bit linguistics, but it’s at the heart of many of today’s political debates, and is the foundation of great brand positioning. In fact, it’s a decision that you make almost every time you open your mouth and it happens to you hundreds, if not thousands of times a day.

Lee:
It’s called framing, and I’m so excited to talk about it today, because framing is part of the foundation of everything we do here at Maslansky and Partners. We say it’s part of our special sauce. And even though it sounds kind of wonky or academic, it’s one of those things that as soon as we explain it, you’re just going to get it, and you’re going to start thinking like, “Oh, I see it happening all around me in everything we do.”

Michael:
So, this is going to be fun, because it’s one of these really powerful tools that literally reshapes the way we look at the world with a single word. So, before we dive into the conversation, we’re going to bring in a couple of colleagues. One is a Hearsay veteran, the other is a framing expert. And if that description makes you prefer one over the other, well, you’ve just been framed. The good news is that both are actually Hearsay veterans, and both are actually experts at framing. So, welcome to Katie Cronen and Will Howard. Thanks for coming back for a return trip to Hearsay.

Katie Cronen:
I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me for this one.

Will Howard:
Yeah, thanks for having us. Excited to dive in.

Michael:
How did it feel to be framed?

Katie:
I instantly had this reaction of, oh, which one do people think I am? And am I okay with it?

Michael:
See? Well, it’s the power of framing. That’s what we’re going to talk about. So Will, I’m going to start with you. Before we get into the weeds, I want you to blow me away with some examples of framing that everyone will immediately appreciate.

Will:
Yeah, happy to. At a basic level, framing means making a linguistics choice about how you present something, in order to shape how people perceive it. And the framing you choose, intentionally or unintentionally, is going to determine how people respond to your idea whenever you’re trying to persuade someone. So in politics, you’ll hear each party talk about the same issue with different language, and there’s probably a ton of examples that are pretty familiar to people. It’s the difference between increasing border security and building a border wall. It’s the difference between detention centers and kids in cages. They’re phrases and language that we hear in debates all the time, but they’re really intentional choices being made by each side, about how they’re going to set up an issue to try to tip the issue in their favor. And it doesn’t just have to be political, you can really frame anything. And it happens all the time with every discussion or debate that you have. The simplest example and probably the most classic examples starts with a cup of water on the table. At a really basic level, I can tell you it’s half full or it’s half empty. Same cup, same water, different framing. One of them is very positive and is trying to get you excited, one is negative and is suggesting maybe you shouldn’t be so excited about that water. But those are really just the basic classic examples, you can really get creative. So, if I want you to feel good about the water, there’s all sorts of ways that I can frame that same glass on the table. I could tell you it’s deluxe water from the crystal springs of Fiji. I could tell you what’s not in it. I could say, “Hey, at least there’s no poison in there, regardless of how much there is.”  Or I could reframe entirely, and say, “You know what? It’s enough water to hydrate you.” Frame it in terms of what it’s going to help you achieve, or what it’s going to help you do. And conversely, if you want to get upset about it, I can try to frame it negatively, and stretch out the timescale and say, “It’s less water than yesterday.”  Or I could try to prey on your ingrained insecurities, and some of the scientific paranoia that’s out there today, and say, “Well, maybe you think it’s water. It’s actually the nefarious chemical, hydrogen dioxide.”  Or I could set the amount of water aside entirely and say, “You know what? You should be able to choose how much water you get. Regardless of how much is in there, you should reject the billionaires, and or media elites trying to tell you how much water to get,” and make the debate about your right to choose how much water you want.  So, whatever framing you choose or how you introduce an idea, is really going to set up what argument you’re going to have. And choosing the right frame is a really important step, to winning a debate.

Michael:
Wow. That’s a lot to digest there in terms of framing, but you’ve given us a lot to pull from. I think the interesting thing is that when we think about winning a debate, it’s really every conversation we have, right? I think we hear a lot, questions about whether framing or using language like this is manipulation. Lee, what do you think? Is it manipulative to use framing like this?

Lee:
No, it’s smart.  I mean, it would be manipulative, I think, if you were not telling the truth. If you were trying to position something that is not true as true. And so, I’m sure you could look at it as manipulative if you’re cynical, but I think that really, we make a decision on how we communicate every single day. Every choice of words, every choice of framing, whether we’re conscious of it or not. And it starts when we’re young, it starts even before you realize what you’re doing. You know if you’re talking to your mother versus your father, you frame an argument in a different way to get what you want. And so, this is really just being strategic about it, and making sure that you’re deliberate with those decisions.

Will:

I would just throw out, that regardless of whether or not it’s manipulative, to Lee’s point, it’s necessary. Every time you open your mouth, you have to pick words, and the words that you choose are going to determine how something is received. And I think there’s a big part of this which just comes down to not taking anything for granted.

Michael:

I would actually say as a parent, you see at just how early in age kids learn how to do this, whether they do it intentionally or not. When they say, “My friend got this and it’s not fair that I don’t get to have it,” or, “My sister got it,” or, “My brother got it,” they’re framing it in a fairness argument.

Lee:

We see this happen each and every day with companies too. This isn’t just about political framing, this is in marketing, this is in communication all around us that companies use. So Katie, can you tell me a little bit about how companies practice framing?

Katie:

Sure. One of the biggest areas I see is companies who have a product coming to market, and the biggest challenge is that they have to differentiate. They’re in a very crowded landscape, there are a lot of competitors, sometimes who have very similar offerings, sometimes potentially better offerings. And especially when a bunch of products, to the customer eye look very, very similar. One of the things that you can do is you can look to separate yourself out from the crowd through the use of language. An example comes to mind from the area of birth control, actually. So in the world of long acting reversible contraceptives, which has the affectionate nickname of LARC, there’re give or take five options. And what happens when physicians talk to women about these options, they tend to run through the list of options in this order, they go through four or so different versions of IUDs, and then they tack on… And there’s also this arm implant. Now, what happens is as humans, when we have these conversations, we tend to give short shrift to the last option. And if you’re the arm implant, you’re one of five options when in the best case scenario, you’re actually a category totally of your own. And what we found is there’s a lot to like about the arm implant, but the more we refer to it as the arm implant, the more people’s minds go to, “Why is it in the arm?” It just kinda seems weird at first blush, especially compared to conversations about different options that are intrauterine devices, or IUDs. Now, there are also, on the flip side, a lot of things that people have questions about or concerns about with IUDs. And so we found that by shifting the way we talk about the implant, the arm implant, away from just referring to the fact that it’s in the arm and instead framing it as the only non-uterine option, suddenly, we’re having a different conversation with physicians, with nurse practitioners, also with women. And that was a big shift for them.

Lee:

I love that example, and we see this so, so often, how do you frame something about what it’s not? So we did work years ago on a credit card, really crowded space, as you talked about, really not a whole lot different about this credit card than the other credit cards. And it was like there was, sometimes we call these things an arms race, when you’re in a category that’s really crowded and everybody’s saying, “Well you’re going to give 3%, I’m going to give 4%. You’re giving 4%, I’m giving 5%,” and everything becomes about being better.  So I’d love to hear, Katie, if you could talk a little bit more about how would you tackle, or how did you, or how did we, tackle the challenge on the credit card when they were in an arms race?

Katie:

Yeah. We were working on this credit card, and to your point, that is a category where there are minor, minor differences across features and benefits from cash rewards cards. And one of the things that we noticed though is that each credit card usually has a bunch of terms and exclusions. And maybe, you get the highest percentage here, but on this category and it rotates. Or you’ll max out here, but if you frame it this way, you can get the most dollars overall. And our client, in fact, just in going through all of their materials, we found that their value proposition was actually really quite straightforward. They didn’t have the same kinds of asterisks attached to their product. And so we tried out referring to that card as the no hoops card, because we were trying to tap into this idea that no matter what people expect, that there are hoops that you have to jump through. You can maximize the value of your card if you do A, B, C, and D, and only try to redeem your points on Thursdays between the hours of 1:00 AM and 3:00 AM, or something ridiculous like that.  So rather than trying to compete on these individual features, this percent here versus that percent here, we shifted it and made it about the fact that this is the card where there are no hoops. And that was effective and really helped people understand immediately that this is a card that really cares about being convenient for customers.

Will:

A lot of this comes down to not taking your category for granted and rather than fighting for a small share of a crowded category, taking the feature that defines you and using it to create a new category within or beside that category.  So it can be as simple as the difference between being we’re the one out of 15 SUV’s on the lot that has four cup holders and soft seats. And instead of being the most luxurious of 15 SUV’s, we are the first ever luxury SUV.  So you create your own category where you win by default, much like instead of being the least inconvenient of 15 credit cards, you’re the one no hoops credit card.  And it comes down to taking a defining feature and instead of fighting it out in the same battlefield as everyone else, taking your ball, going home, starting your own category, where you have the advantage.

Lee:

And so it’s interesting to me because so often when we talk about these cases, no hoops, you talk about some of these others, they seem almost obvious when you hear about them, like, “Oh, that’s a smart insight. You just develop the language.” How do you find it? I think Michael, you worked on a project a while ago when the iPhone used to be one place, right? You go to one provider, they had an iPhone, and that’s the only way you could get the iPhone. And then somebody else got the iPhone. How do you end up convincing, differentiating on being the provider and winning? How would you find your wedge?

Michael (00:26:07):

The process of framing is, if you almost picture a picture frame, there are different ways that you can look at any image. You can have a big frame and see the whole picture, you can have a small frame and pick any aspect of it to really focus in on. It’s doing a really deep analysis on the whole picture and figuring out where there may be aspects of it that you can amplify or elevate or compare or distinguish. In the context of the iPhone, AT&T was the first mobile phone provider to have exclusivity on the iPhone. They were about to lose that exclusivity to Verizon. And at that point, there was a lot of fear that Verizon was actually going to make a huge dent in the market. Verizon actually was seen superior in a lot of ways at that point.   And in doing the research on this, what we found is that there were two aspects of AT&T’s approach that Verizon couldn’t match. One is that you could talk and surf at the same time. At that point, on Verizon’s network, you could either talk or surf the internet. You couldn’t do both. And the other was that you could use it internationally. And actually, the international component was super interesting because what we found is that when you ask people about the importance of having a phone that they could use internationally, they’d say it was incredibly important. If you ask them whether they traveled internationally, many of them would say, “No.” It didn’t seem to matter. The fact that they might at some want to travel internationally was a benefit that they really wanted to hold onto. And so by positioning AT&T’s version of the iPhone as one that you could talk and surf with and you could use internationally, we actually really muted the impact of losing exclusivity to Verizon, by taking what was a seemingly small benefit and really amplifying it and making it the focus where the frame through which we positioned to the whole campaign.

Will:

There’s two really important ingredients to what Michael was talking about there. The first is a thorough examination. Not taking anything for granted when you take a look at your product and realize that the right word choice might be able to elevate even a seemingly innocuous benefit, if you can choose the right way to frame it. So that first level of thorough study and questioning and imagination is really important. And then the second layer that Michael referred to is testing. A lot of times, you don’t know how much something is going to stand out or how something is going to be received until you put it in front of people. And then you’ll often be surprised by the seemingly obvious pieces that they grab onto.

Katie:

Yeah. That reminds me of some work we did for culinary school, where they’re trying to increase enrollments, get people to go to their school over some of the options that they may be considering. And they thought they had a slam dunk because they considered themselves experts in the culinary arts. And in fact, they could brag that they had the most culinary graduates of any of their competition. Well you take that into testing and people react pretty lukewarm, potentially negatively to that because it sounds like you’re just handing out diplomas versus actually caring about the education of your students or providing a certain level of rigor that you can’t just get from anywhere. But you take that same proof point of we have the most graduates in the culinary arts and turn that into something that a potential student could see as a real benefit to them. We shifted it to talking about how we have the largest alumni network. And suddenly, instead of just picturing a school shuffling you through, printing diplomas, you start thinking about, “Oh, so I’ll have a lot of connections potentially to get my job after I go to this school, which makes it a great choice.”

Lee:

Sometimes, people laundry list proof points and think, “Well which one of these is going to be the best?” But it’s not just about that. It’s also how you frame that proof point is going to dictate how well you receive that. So this plays out in pharmaceutical data, it plays out in performance data, in financial services and all sorts of things. How you talk about your proof, your evidence can shape perceptions too. And I think it’s so important to keep that in mind.

Michael:

So I think Lee, I mean that raises a big point that we see a lot in the quantitative testing of proof points or messages out there where very often, you will take a message or a proof point and test it once and think that you’ve determined the impact of that idea based on how it tests when in fact, what we’re often doing is taking that proof point or that message and testing five different articulations of it, five different ways of framing the same idea, because how you frame it, what words you use, how you articulate that proof point makes all the difference in most cases between whether or not people think that it’s a valuable benefit or it’s irrelevant.

Lee:

We’ve just talked about the area of being crowded when you’re trying to differentiate yourself. But this same exercise, applies for companies who are trying to overcome baggage or negative perceptions, or we call controversial topics. How do you correct a wrong? Or how do you correct a misperception? How do you change perceptions? If you have new leadership, if you’ve gone through a tough time as an industry, if you’ve had a tough time as a company even, how do you change those perceptions? So Will, I’d love to hear from you how you have worked with some clients on just that.

Will:

The first start of the answer is just that genuinely changing someone’s perceptions of something that they’ve already established is extremely hard. And if you think about the way that the brain interacts with the world, a lot of it comes down to a word I’ve used a couple of times already, which is category. When you encounter something, you bucket it in some way and you say, “This is what this is, this is what it’s like even if I’ve never seen it before.” And once that categorization has taken place, you have a lot of assumptions about it, what it is, what it does, what it means, how it’s going to interact with you. If you see a lion, your immediate assumption is that it is dangerous and it means a threat to your life. And it’s going to be very difficult for me to say, “Yes, yes, this is a lion, but it’s actually not dangerous to you.” I’ve got to push that brick up the hill. And the same thing happens in a product category. If I’m holding up a bottle and you identify it as beer, it is going to be quite difficult for me to convince you that beer is actually healthy. Yes, it’s beer, but it’s not bad for you, which is why in that space, you see the invention of the light beer category. It’s not beer, it’s light beer. It’s something else. And it’s the same in other places where there’s baggage, like it’s not smokeless tobacco, it’s vaping. It’s something else. I’ve shed the baggage by creating a new category rather than trying to change your mind about a category where you’ve already entrenched your set of beliefs.

Lee:
Now let’s talk for a second about you’re late to the game. You’re the third to market.  You’re Johnson & Johnson coming into the vaccine game. You’re the third there. And they did something really smart.  They framed on being the single shot. They came in, they were late to market, and it carved a place for them, and people said, “You know what? Single shot. I’d actually want that one, despite data.” 

Michael:
If you look at the COVID vaccine, we had two approved vaccines with incredibly high efficacy numbers according to the studies that were out there, 95%, 80, whatever it was. Really high efficacy. Then you come out with the third to market. Not only is it the third to market, but the safety or the efficacy numbers were much lower. So arguably this shot should be a very poor third place compared to the others if people had a choice. And what J&J did is they identified the one clear advantage that they had, and they didn’t just talk about the advantage, they built it into the way the shot was defined. And by calling it the J&J One Shot, every time you talk about it, you were reinforcing their one singular benefit over the others. By implication, the others are more than one shot. So when we talk about the language changing the debate, that’s the kind of language that just shifts the conversation from being about overall efficacy to overall ease of user or convenience or fear of getting a second shot. And it’s a really powerful shift.

Lee:
So another area I think that that framing really helps is when things are incredibly complex. We work a lot on very complex products, complex businesses, on overly regulated businesses, or I shouldn’t say overly regulated, but highly regulated businesses.

Michael:
You just framed it right there.

(laughter)

Lee:
So how do you think I feel about it. We can edit that out. Anyway. Okay. So in very complex areas. Michael, one of the first projects you and I ever worked on was in financial services, and we had to talk about risk management associated with annuities.

Michael:
I never thought I would spend so much of my time and life on annuities, but I have, and it’s been very rewarding, and it’s a really interesting challenge because you’ve got a really complicated product that has real benefits for many investors, many retirees. So how do you bring that to life? And what was interesting is that we saw so much negative framing by the industry trying to scare people into buying a product that was going to protect them against the risks of their retirement, and you’d find these long brochures that would spend the first 12 to 15 pages talking about all the risks to their retirement, one of which they called longevity risk. So we looked at that and we went out and we tested it and people said, “Longevity risk? You mean like the risk that I live too long.” And it didn’t really seem to be the kind of thing that people were afraid of, what they were afraid of was outliving their money. And we found that when it was framed as a risk of living too long, it was not really a risk that people cared to protect themselves against. When it was framed as outliving your money it was a whole different story. So what we find that clients often fall into is that they know an industry so well, they speak industry jargon so deeply that they don’t even recognize that it’s jargon. They look at these proof points or what they think are benefits as really powerful, but you go out and you communicate with your target audience and you find that they don’t really understand what it is that you’re talking about. So reframing the same idea in more positive or plain spoken terms in this case made it a much more powerful risk to talk about.

(music)

Michael:
All right, so with the time that we have left, we’re going to pivot a little bit and we’re going to talk through how one might think about a framing challenge. And one of the topics that is out there a lot in the news these days is what we call protein based meat, or some call protein based meat. Others might call it synthetic meat. There’s lab grown meat. There’s the whole alt meat category, and actually, I think the fact that that it’s even been described as an alternative to meat is and of itself was not necessary.  It could have been just a new kind of protein. In fact, the initial players in the category called it a meat alternative or protein based meat. So let’s say we have a client now who comes to us and they want us to help position them in the space, or position this category. What do we do? Will, how do you start the process of making sense of this category?

Will:
The first, most fundamental question that you have to address going into is what is it? What word are we going to use to choose it? And it’s not a decision you should make lightly, because the word that you choose is going to bring with it a lot of associations and a lot of baggage. I think you want to compare it to meat is a pretty good place to start. Is this a meat substitute, a meat alternative, a meat replacement, an evolution of meat, beyond meat?  So do you anchor to something that’s there already is a pretty interesting first question. And there’s other words out there.

Michael:
And even that, I mean, we’ve seen the fact that by calling it meat, that creates a whole set of problems as well. XXXX There are lawsuits being waged around there about whether you can call it meat, in the milk space about whether you can call almond milk milk, and all of these spaces where you’re trying to create… So first, why would you connect it to meat? Why do that?

Will:
Well I think you could make the argument that you want to make it as familiar as possible to people.   And you want to give people an onboarding to make sense of it. What dishes do I put this in? What is it going to taste like?  If you see a food you’ve never seen before on a shelf that you’ve never tried, you’re going to look for ways to make sense of it like the packaging, like the color, like the texture, and language is a really important one of those. If I tell you that this is a lot like meat, then you could argue you have a ready-made audience of people who are looking for meat.

Katie:
Not to mention, I probably want to be able to sell it to Arby’s and McDonald’s and Burger King and grocery stores, so the argument there is trying not to niche myself in a way that’s actually going to minimize my customer base.

Michael:
Right, because if you start with some new category, then you might have to start from scratch with customers as well, as opposed to stealing share from an existing category.

Lee:
I also want to know where it goes on my plate.

Will:
Yeah. There’s a really interesting language shift that we’ve noticed, restaurants and cookbooks both, they’ve started referring to the protein in your meal instead of the meat in your meal, and that’s another direction you could go with this. You could say, you know what, actually, rather than fight over this contested word meat that potentially has some baggage or that we potentially don’t have a legal right to use, what if we try to change the whole national perception of how a meal works and we just start talking about proteins instead of meat, giving it a super category, an overarching category, that encompasses what’s out there already, but gives us space at the table, for our category.

Lee:
Let me ask you, this is interesting because it’s like what it is, it could be is a protein is a [crosstalk 00:59:11] it could also be like, what is that part of your plate? It’s like your anchor dish, you-

Katie:
Your main?

Lee:
Your main. Your base.

Will:
Your base. I mean, that’s just the nouns, linguistically. Then you think about some of the modifiers too that are out there, like synthetic, lab grown, cultured, cell based, these are not great words.

Lee:
No thank you.

Will:
And even if they accurately describe it, are those really words that you want to saddle yourself with the baggage of in a time where skepticism of science and just general leeriness towards things made in a lab is at an all time high?

Michael:
And yet part of the reason why I think they’re doing it is because there are the benefits that come from having made it in the lab, where if you look at the world from Bill Gates’ perspective and you’re trying to attack climate change and cows and agriculture are probably the biggest contributor to climate change at this point. Then the savior for the planet may rest in creating food in a lab. And so now we’ve got this dynamic of you’re framing something for what’s potentially positive benefits, but I’m not sure that lab grown or synthetic or cultured are getting at the positive benefits in the way that they probably intend.

Katie:
You know, this could be the kind of situation where if you are working for the lab grown meats of the world, you actually want to use a non-blank meat or non-harvested, non-slaughtered. No, I’m kidding.  But when I think about the issues with synthetic and lab grown, cell-based, it’s so artificial, and I’m only thinking about what is being done, that I’m losing the mindset of, hey, you’re actually avoiding this potentially other harmful thing.

Will:
A lot of it too comes down to audience too, that lifelike spectrum is really interesting because as a lifelong vegetarian, you see a kind of a split in the way that they market this stuff. You see language that says, this is very lifelike, this lab grown meat bleeds when you cut it, it’s so like meat. And the idea there is to cater to an audience who is currently uninterested in vegetarian meats. But as a vegetarian who hasn’t eaten real meat in eight years, I hear this meat bleeds and I’m turned off. So you kind of have to make a decision about, what are you trying to achieve with your framing? What audience are you trying to reach? And based on that, that might inform some of the language choices you make as well.

Lee:
Let’s just say we land on sustainable protein because it’s got a benefit, it’s sustainable, it’s a protein, we’re not talking about meat, doesn’t bleed, it’s not lab grown. But what’s the problem with that? To me, one of the biggest problems is that the baggage associated with this category is also taste and texture. So how do you go about that? Would you start layering in descriptors? Where do you start taking into account the baggage on where we might land?
Katie:
This is where I would give major kudos to the impossible burger and beyond meat, because both of those descriptors, impossible and beyond, have nothing to do with how it was done, but inherent in impossible and beyond is this acknowledgement that up until now the trade-off was taste and texture, but we have dealt with that and conquered that. So I really love those bits of language.

Will:

Another angle into this is to think about the value that you want to appeal to. Historically the big value has been the PETA, animals are people too, don’t hurt them.  Humane animal treatment really kick-started the boom in vegetarianism that we’ve seen with really rising numbers and interest in these products and the basic value there is kindness to animals, cruelty-free meat, that kind of idea. But you have to wonder if that’s kind of hit its ceiling and what is going to be the value that starts to reach the people who have basically said, I’m okay with the factory farming, I’m okay with animal suffering, I just really want a tasty burger? You see the conversation is starting to shift with, like Bill Gates, to save the planet. This is the only sustainable way forward. But there’s other angles too. There’s people who have tried the health thing is better for people. Feed the world,this is a cost-effective way to bring meat to more people. There’s a lot of different values that you could try to appeal to here. And I think we’ve only scratched the surface.

(music)

Lee:
At the end of every episode, we ask our guests the same few questions, but you guys are repeat guests so I am going to shift things up a little bit today and ask you a different question. We usually ask what’s your superpower. What I’d love to hear from you guys is what your favorite framing in the wild is. What is the favorite piece of language framing that you’ve seen out there recently?

Katie:
It’s not delivery, it’s DiGiorno. It’s got alliteration. I know what they’re talking about.

Lee:
All right, there you go.

Katie:
Elevating a category of its own.

Will:
I’m so spent from all the examples we’ve been through, I can’t think of one on the spot.

Michael:
I’ll jump in. There are a couple that I like of late. So not brand new, but TD Bank’s unexpectedly human. Kind of almost the same idea as It’s not delivery, it’s DiGiorno. And Liberty Mutual’s “pay for what you need,” is a interesting take on what was obviously the insight that people feel like they overpay for insurance. And so those are some interesting examples.

Will:
In that same vein, I think the one State Farm has been doing recently referring to a deal as a Micheal deal or a Katie deal or a Lee deal instead of a personalized offer, I think is actually a really fresh take on personalization, which is a very played out… It’s a very powerful idea, but it’s something that everyone’s fighting for, personalized to your needs, and I think calling it a Michael deal is a really clever way to continue to do that.

Michael:
Well, I do get good deals.

Will:
I’m sure you do. Very persuasive.

Lee:
I’m the one who gets the best deals. You might not know this about me, but I am the best bargain shopper you’ll ever meet. That’s one of my superpowers. All right, I’d love to know your favorite word as a kid.
Will:
Ornithologist. I wanted to study birds when I grew up and I think it was the longest word I knew when I was very little, so I said it more than you would believe.

Lee:
How old were you when you started saying it? Because I want to picture this.

Will:
I don’t know. Young enough that I would cut a lot of bird pictures out of magazines. It’s a whole thing. But yeah., Ornithologist.

Lee:
Katie, what about you?

Katie:
I love to tell people my favorite color when I was a kid, but the twist here is that my father is born and raised in Brooklyn, so I learned the pronunciation of the color incorrectly. So I would tell people how much I loved the color “future.”

Lee:
That’s amazing. I love it. Well, thank you so much, Katie and Will, this has been a great, great conversation.

Michael:
For more language insights and to be in the loop on all the other fun stuff we’re doing, and you can hear just how much fun we’re having all the time, follow us. Follow us on LinkedIn @Maslansky-Partners and join our mailing list at maslansky.com/connect. If you’ve got questions, feedback, or want to tell us just how wrong we are, or if you have ideas for us on cultured or synthetic meat or otherwise, please reach out to us at [email protected]. That’s all for now. Join us next time on Hearsay because it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.