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 client — 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™.

When you are trying to build (or re-build) reputation, your job is to disrupt the way people think. And to disrupt, you can’t just speak louder, you need to speak smarter. Instincts tell us to correct misperceptions. And our instincts are often wrong. Leaning in to facts and data often backfires. Change the narrative and you can change minds. Lee Carter and Michael Maslansky are joined by Senior Vice President Katie Cronen to discuss one of the often overlooked elements of reputation management, the effective use of language, message, and narrative.

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW

Lee Carter’s book, Persuasion

Michael Maslansky’s book, The Language of Trust

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EPISODE 5 TRANSCRIPT:

Katie Cronen:

… if you stake everything on whether or not your product speaks for itself and then it wobbles, you got nothing else to speak.

Michael Maslansky:

They said what? Welcome to Hearsay, a podcast from the language strategist at maslansky + partners, where we give our take on the strategy behind the smartest, savviest, and stupidest messages in the market today, and what you can learn from them. Our philosophy is it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear. And that’s why we called this hearsay. I am Michael Maslansky, CEO of maslansky + partners and author of The Language of Trust, and that’s what we’re gonna focus on today, which is near and dear to my heart and I’m excited for it.

Lee Carter:

I’m Lee Carter and I’m president partner here at maslansky + partners, and wrote a book called Persuasion. I have a lot of passion around this topic about how to use language to really effectively rebuild trust and really change the way people view you, and that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today of focus on how do you communicate and rebuild reputation.

Michael Maslansky:

We’re back for another episode of Hearsay. And so far this season, we have been joined by colleagues to cover a lot of different topics. Today we’re gonna focus on reputation, and we have invited to join us, a senior Vice president at maslansky + partners, Katie Cronen. Very excited to have you here to talk about reputation ’cause you have been along with us on many a journey to help companies improve their reputation.

Katie Cronen:

Thanks, Michael. I’m happy to be here. I have to say, when I think about all of the work that I’ve been a part of, the reputation challenges have been up there among my favorites.

Michael Maslansky:

We think about companies going through crises, companies dealing with kind of major shifts in the market or the economy, companies dealing with leadership changes, where there are major impacts on how companies are perceived. Companies that may have had a good reputation in the past all of a sudden face a challenge and they need to rebuild their reputation, or they never had a great reputation, realized that they need to bolster their reputation in order to stand out in an increasingly competitive space. Often, we’re talking about appealing to kind of a broader set of stakeholders. Sometimes it’s focused on reputation among customers or consumers, but often it’s reputation for investors or for activists or regulators.

These broad reputation challenges seem to be everywhere these days. You’ve got innovation and digital transformation, where companies need to show that they’re keeping up with everything that was going on in the world or ESG or changes as a result of the pandemic and the economy. How do we build a reputation that people associate with us that gives us advantage, gives us permission to operate, gives us benefit of the doubt. And so my first question is, well, we’re walking into a client, and they know that they have a reputation challenge. What do we see? What do you think are some of the default approaches that they’re likely to think about when it comes to rebuilding a reputation and what do we do in those situations in order to help them succeed?

Katie Cronen:

One of the most common refrains that we come across when we’re starting conversations with clients who have specifically said, “Hey, we have this reputation challenge,” is they start listing off, “If only people knew A, B, C, D, and E about us, then we wouldn’t be having this problem.” Most of the time, clients are looking at the competitive landscape relative to the pace setters or the people who they want to be thought of and they’re lagging as their product or their product line feels more and more apples to apples against what’s out there, or they’re competing for talent, they smartly look to what else can we be known for or what can we do as far as our reputation so that we get the advantage and the benefit of the doubt?

When we have these conversations, people usually say, “They don’t know us as well as we know ourselves internally. (laughs) But if you could just get our audiences to appreciate this laundry list of facts about how great we are, then they’d come to the same conclusion that I come to as working for them.

Michael Maslansky:

So let me just jump in there to kind of make this a bit more tangible, I’m gonna throw out an industry that you may be talking about, and I’m gonna say pharma. (laughs) That pharma may be an industry where you’ve got a lot of amazing organizations out there, that they have pressures like every industry does, but that there’s a desire for each of them to build their own reputation.

Katie Cronen:

If you think about pharma and the landscape today, there are a couple of companies that if you ask investors, if you ask consumers, if you ask doctors, who’s got a good reputation in the pharmaceutical industry today, you’re going to hear Moderna, Pfizer, maybe Johnson & Johnson. Part of that is reflection of the time that we’re in and these mission-critical vaccines that they develop for COVID. There are probably a couple of companies that investors or influencers or policy makers may associate with as bad actors, especially from a couple of years ago because there were massive price hikes.

But those are two ends of the spectrum, and there are a heck of a lot of companies in the middle who do really great work and they all want credit for how they save and improve lives. They all have a laundry list of things in their pipeline, employees they hire, and they all give back to society in different ways, and basically none of them are getting credit for it.

They’re super frustrated, so then they think, “Let’s highlight the good stuff we’re doing.” Then you get this crowd of companies all talking about the good stuff that they’re doing. Now in pharma, the big thing is about health equity and access. And then the companies are often thinking, “What are all the tactics we can do to get the word out there? We’re gonna go to more conferences, we’ll show up at Aspen, we’ll do a TED Talk, We’ll do the all of these different things to get these ideas out there.” What’s happening is they’re really trying to speak louder. They’re not necessarily gonna speak smarter. Everybody’s trying to talk about the same things at the same places, and it’s not raking through and changing anybody’s opinion because every one of them sounds the same. If they’re all really focused more on tactics and also thinking if people just knew these facts, it would be enough and it’s not.

The other thing that happens there is when in the world of pharma, if they’re focusing on all of these tactics and the good things that they wanna be doing, I don’t see enough of the time that those efforts are taking into account the negative narratives that are out there about pharmaceutical companies. And if you think about, let’s say the airline industry, do they have a good reputation? It’s probably a mixed bag. What is the negative baggage that the airline industry writ large brings to the table? It’s a lot of nickel and diamond customers in order to turn a profit. On the flip side, if I think of airlines that might get a shiny gold star, I don’t work for them. I’d love to, but generally I feel like JetBlue has a pretty good reputation, and JetBlue does a lot of things right, but among their efforts to bolster their reputation as a company, they were the first to take the massive contract of carriage, legally speak about what you’re entitled to as a customer, and they turned it into a one page customer bill of rights that is very readable.

Some of it, yes, is in fine print about when you’re not gonna get direct TV when they’re over too much ocean water, but (laughs), it is really easy to read. It’s clear, and that is a symbol of their commitment to great customer service.

Michael Maslansky:

What JetBlue does well in that example is there’s an underlying insight that they recognize maybe more than the competition, what the 800 pound gorilla is in the room when it comes to airline. The reputational baggage that an airline must overcome in order to establish itself firmly in the minds of consumers as having a positive reputation. For them, it was we want to have a reputation that’s different. We identified an underlying narrative and we flipped it on its head. They did something symbolic that makes it really clear that they are not the thing that you think that they are, and that’s what makes it powerful. Lee, we do a lot of work with this idea of narratives and it’s something that we see in lots of different types of narratives and lots of different situations.

Lee Carter:

Yeah, I think understanding the narrative underneath what people believe is often uncomfortable for our clients because it’s actually having to lean into the worst thing that people think about you. Think back to some work we did in the financial crisis, 2008, 2009, the whole world’s collapsing in finance, and Americans were really ticked off at financial services companies. There was this underlying narrative that financial companies put profits before people. The worst of the worst stories came out. Poor people got stuck with these mortgages that they didn’t understand, and they ended up losing their homes losing so much, and the stories were everywhere. The narrative underneath it all was rarely really clear, profits before people. Instead of embracing that, we had financial service clients who are like, “Our job here is to separate ourselves from the pack to show we are not those guys.” So what ended up happening?

We are not the bad actors. There were some bad actors in the financial service. It wasn’t us. Or, we never took bailout funds, or we paid back bailout funds. But everything people were doing was trying to use facts to distance themselves to the problem because they wouldn’t say, “This is us.” When as, all Americans thought, it was the entire financial services ecosystem that cause this unhealthy thing to happen. One of our clients had gotten in the middle of a mess. They acquired a company that had been at the intersection of a lot of bad stuff, and they wanted to distance themselves from the problem. We tested all these different approaches and what we heard is that they could just acknowledge the narrative, not take total responsibility, just acknowledge the narrative. They had permission. What we ended up getting them to do is to say, “There’s so many factors that led us to the financial crisis.” We’re not here to debate them, but we are here to do is talk about how we’re gonna fix things moving forward and make things right going forward. The acknowledgement of the underlying narrative gave them permission to talk, but if you don’t do it, you’re dead in the water.

Michael Maslansky:

Absolutely. I mean, again, it is not what is it that people inside your organization think, but what does the outside world think? What are the stakeholders that you’re trying to persuade think? And how do you identify that narrative and go after it as opposed to hoping it goes away, or thinking that you can redirect attention to someplace else. Sometimes you can do that, but most, most often you have to address things directly.

Lee Carter:

Michael, when you were building our crisis response tool dynamic response, and you started to understand how to categorize those narratives and say, “There’s basically some narratives that we see happening over and over and over again.” And if instead of making threatening to identify, it was like, “Oh, which, is like pick from this list.” And I remember when you first taught us all, I was like, it blew my mind. Can you just walk us through that whole process? Cause that was awesome.

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah. The credit really goes to Jonathan Haidt, and the work that he did on moral psychology, which suggests that particularly in the political spectrum where he focuses people from the right and left look at the world very differently. Some of them prioritize caring, while others’ prioritized liberty, but the application to the corporate world is that we as a society have adopted this morality, this standard that we hold companies to, and that we often penalize companies for if they don’t live up to, and the biggest one is caring. So when you say profits over patients or profits over customers, you’re basically saying that money is more important than people and companies get criticized and build a bad reputation as a part of that. Another one has to do with liberty versus oppression. You’ve got big companies who are taking advantage of consumers and they’re imposing their will on them.

It’s too big to fail. There’s another one that has to do with honesty, and that’s where you get into lying and a sense that there’s no transparency. There are these specific underlying narratives that if you were to analyze every crisis out there, every element of kind of reputational baggage that we see companies have, it falls into one of these categories, and only by identifying those categories, we believe, can you effectively address what may be holding a company back, then you can start to either flip it on a TED or find a different way of reframing the conversation.

Katie Cronen:

Lately, I’ve also been thinking that if it’s a reputation challenge, it’s about mental shortcuts. Whoever your audience is, they make mental shortcuts about companies, brands all the time. You have to be brutally honest with yourself to understand what those shortcuts are that people are making, and which shortcut do you want them to be making instead. I love that.

Lee Carter:

If you think about back after auto companies took the bailout money and then they went down to testify on why they needed more money or whatever it was they were doing. All of those auto manufacturers, executives got their separate private jets, what down to Washington DC to ask for more money. The mental shortcut you made was this private jets, greed, awful profits for people, it was instant. You think about pharma right now, it’s the expensive drugs. It’s profits before people. There’s baggage. There’s these mental shortcuts. You have to understand them so that you can create a new mental shortcut that overcomes the last one that they had in their minds. We have done a lot of work on this. Do you have an example of how do you create a mental, or how do you rewire somebody’s brain with a new mental shortcut replaces the old one?

Michael Maslansky:

When we think about how we create a mental shortcut, if we look at the process, often companies go through to counter the negative narrative they wanna build a reputation narrative, and the reputation narrative ends up being a place that everything that they can say positively about the company goes into a one-pager that becomes the corporate narrative. The hardest part about this is to recognize that you have to leave 90% of it on the cutting room floor. The only way to create a mental shortcut is to do something that’s simple and easy for people to associate with. For us, is it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.

It’s kind of remarkable how many people who are connected with us know that that is what we stand for, who we are. It happens to be our tagline, but it is the thing that we want people to connect with us. And for big companies in multiple lines of business, with lots of internal stakeholders, it’s really difficult to say, “We wanna be known for only this one thing, and we’re gonna make sure that every story that we tell ladders up to this one thing so that people say this, “This company does something in a way that is distinctly theirs.”

Katie Cronen:

One of the early shortcuts that people have been making is that for a very long time, pharmaceutical companies didn’t do a lot to attach their company name to their successful brands. Even if you gave a certain product a lot of credit, unless you were a physician, you probably didn’t really remember off the top of your head who made it. But where you did hear the company names was on the sales earning calls or when you saw certain sales reps coming into your office. To give you a detailing, and one of the things that we worked with a company to help them understand is that too often the shortcut for their audience when they thought about pharma companies was corporate suits and sales reps, and it really needed to be lab coats. Nobody was giving these companies credit for the actual research and development that they were doing that was quite significant.

This is definitely more true pre COVID, and COVID has helped kind of change this perception, but the perception was that tiny biotech firms or the government or nonprofits where you’re racing for cure, build the money and the research for new drugs and discovery of new cures. And pharma creates them and makes money off of them and markets them when… that’s usually not the case. By helping them refocus all of what they do through the lens of it’s not just our company, it’s our scientists and researchers. That was a big first step to appreciating how you begin to change the narrative and the reputation of your company. The second step that a lot of companies are now facing, because we see like the lab coat stock imagery quite a bit, is how do you actually separate yourself out from the crowd and define specifically what your contribution is or what it is about the way you approach discovery and development that you wanna be known for.

Michael Maslansky:

Really that last point, in particular, is the hard part. It’s the part that has operational implications and, and kind of business strategy implications as much as it is about language. Because if every pharma company wants to be seen as an innovator, then you’re gonna distinguish yourself either being the one that is able to develop the biggest pipeline, which suggests that you’re gonna translate more candidates into approved treatment options. You are the fastest in terms of your development cycle. You are the best able to address unmet needs. You are the leader in something that clearly distinguishes your approach to innovation.

Katie Cronen:

You focus way more on prevention than any, any of your competitors.

Michael Maslansky:

Right.

Katie Cronen:

You care more about these quality-of-life improvements. Obviously, it’s not your whole portfolio, but it’s a big part-

Michael Maslansky:

Mm-hmm.

Katie Cronen:

… of the question all of your clinical researchers ask themselves. There are ways to do it. It’s very hard, more to your point because of the strategic and operational implications, but it is doable.

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah. In some ways the challenge for communicators and the need for them to have a seat at the leadership table, which many do, is to advocate for, “Look, if you want us to have a good reputation, then from a business and strategy perspective, we have to make some strategic choices that support a direction. We have to be at least willing to communicate one as our north star, our tip of the spear.” There aren’t many companies that are known for three things, so either you’ve gotta find the red thread that brings those three things together, or you’re gonna end up with a reputation as a, a leading pharmaceutical company, which means that you’re, you’re in the Peloton but you’re not at the front.

Katie Cronen:

Totally.

Michael Maslansky:

Let’s talk a minute about the relationship between brand and reputation. There are some companies that will say that what matters is the company brand or the product brands, I’m gonna go sell cars. It’s about the individual car, it’s about what that car stands for, what the car brand stands for. Why should I focus on reputation?

Katie Cronen:

Well, since you used a car example, I can, I can think of one in the case of Toyota where they went through a period of recalls and a safety crisis. Up until that point, they were doubling down on their quality, their dependability, their reliability. They wanted the product to stand for itself and they were shy about bragging about themselves and talking quite a lot about themselves as a company. And I think they saw that even after they navigated the initial hot waters of the crisis and a couple of years passed, they still came across this challenge where at a certain point, if the product itself isn’t a sure thing anymore, you have nothing else to lean on. You have nothing else speaking for you, and that’s where reputation can really matter. If you stake everything on whether or not your product speaks for itself and then it wobbles, you got nothing else to speak.

Lee Carter:

So many people say the product should stand for itself. It often is… It doesn’t. It only works when everything’s going perfectly. When you think about the relationship between brand and product and reputation, I always say brand is what you say about yourself, what you deliver. Reputation is what others think about you. I love this example of a reset. Starbucks is the brand, the reputation of that, Starbucks equaled a great cup of coffee every time. They set the standard for what it meant to have great coffee because the whole language that they introduced to the world was a new language of coffee, sophistication and it elevated coffee to the place that Starbucks was the one that knew it. You knew if you went to Starbucks you’re gonna have a great cup of coffee. It’s a brand and their reputation were lined because the experience lived up to that.

But what happened when the product started to suffer, and you didn’t go to your local Starbucks, you were traveling to Chicago and the coffee was bitter? The experience wasn’t the same. It… the reputation then became actually the coffee’s bitter. It’s not that great. It’s not that consistent. So how do you reset that? When Howard Schultz came back that first time to reset, he did such a brilliant night job because it wasn’t just about saying, “I have a renewed commitment to coffee.” He understood the underlying problem and then he understood what he needed to communicate and then he identified a symbolic gesture that he needed to do to say something that was bigger than just what the words by themselves could do, which was close the doors for the afternoon and then train everybody… every barista on how to make the perfect cup of coffee. There was a great message, a symbolic gesture, and that was like language strategy coming together in such a great way because it allowed this reset to happen. It gave us permission and gave a reason why to rethink what we thought about them wasn’t true anymore. It was a really start… reset (laughs).

Michael Maslansky:

Absolutely, and it’s another example of the importance of symbols of kind of recognizing that reputation is not about everything that you are. It’s about the thing that you want people to say about you. That’s the point where it’s often a, a difficult strategic trade off to make. Sometimes it’s true at the industry level as well. The work that we’ve been doing over the last couple of years with the Edison Electric Institute, EI has been all about shifting the reputation of the broader electric industry. At the core, it was a recognition that for many stakeholders, the industry is on the side of the clean energy transition and not opposed to it. If we could just get people to recognize that the industry wants to get as clean as as they can, as fast as they can in their case without compromising on affordability and reliability, then all of these other positive outcomes will endure to their benefit. Because it’s simple and it puts them on the side of their customer and on the side of their other stakeholders.

That was that one simple idea that we wanted to communicate and there many symbols from different member companies of what they were doing. Whether it was a commitment to reduce emissions or a new installation of of renewable energy, but it all laddered back to this one idea as clean as we can, as fast as we can.

Lee Carter:

Good work (laughs).

Michael Maslansky:

It’s work from the companies that are part of it. They had to do the heavy lifting, which gets to the last piece, is it’s gotta be true and it’s gotta be something that you are willing to commit to talking about for a long period of time. Cause reputations do not change overnight and they require a lot of storytelling and a lot of substance that go along with them in order for people to shift their perception.

Katie Cronen:

Yeah, and a lot of discipline about the story that you’re gonna tell over and over and over and over and over again. It’s such a natural temptation to say, “No, look. Like, we’ve been beaten that drum for a while. Let’s talk about some other cool thing we’re doing now.” What happens when you do that is that the overall takeaway gets diffused and diluted and then it’s… you lose, you lose the memorability of it all, which is what you were going for in the first place.

Lee Carter:

We have been asking our guests this season, what is your favorite example of framing in the wild that you’ve seen this year? If framing done well changes our perceptions, can you think of something that you’ve seen this year or worked on this year that you have found to be impressive?

Katie Cronen:

I thought this was cool. We worked for a school that was having trouble enticing parents to send their children to the school because it’s a school where students live on campus year-round. Part of our whole challenge was, if I can only tell you a couple of things about the school, what- what’s your appetite and gets you interested in learning more knowing that, yes, it would in fact require you to send, send your beloved child away. And one of the benefits of this school is that it is free. So it’s a good competitor with the public option on that front. But when you say that this school is free or even that it is cost-free, everybody suspects that there’s a catch.

Maybe the tuition is free, but I’m still gonna have to pay for equipment and books and all of those other ancillary expenses. Or this underlying bias that cost-free education can’t really be all that good. And instead of talking about the education being cost-free or the school being cost-free, we reframed it so that they would talk about how all costs were covered. So there are still costs cause it’s a really good school and they provide a lot, it’s just that somebody else is paying for it.

Lee Carter:

So smart. I, I enjoyed that. That’s really smart. You’re under keep on that one, Katie. Well done (laughs).

Katie Cronen:

Thank you.

Lee Carter:

Well, I just wanna thank everyone for tuning in, and thank you, Katie for joining us today. For more language insights in if you are a loop on all the other fun stuff we’re doing, follow us on LinkedIn @Maslansky-Partners and join our mailing list at Maslansky.com/connect. If you’ve got questions, feedback, or ideas for us, please reach out to us at podca[email protected]. That’s all for now. Join us next time on HearSay because when it comes to truly effective communications, it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.