When I first told my parents that I’d been offered an intern position at maslansky + partners, they asked what exactly that entailed. I mumbled something about it being for public relations, or maybe even advertising, though truthfully I wasn’t quite certain.  

By the close of my first day, I had started to piece it together. No, this wasn’t PR, and certainly not advertising. That night, I gave it another stab: “They basically specialize in one thing,” I told my parents. “Language Strategy. That’s what I’m doing; I’m a Language Strategy intern.” They immediately asked what that was, to which I responded by muttering something akin to “strategizing… language.”

We all knew that wouldn’t cut it. So I set out on a very short, in-office journey to find an answer. By the end of my first week at m+p, I was able to muster up a better explanation—one that came straight from our website:

It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.

This deceptively simple line sits at the core of Language Strategy, and it dictated everything I did at maslansky + partners in my internship. Companies will come to us with messaging they think is absolutely foolproof. Then it’s our job to tell them this: perhaps it makes sense to you, but your audience is hearing something entirely different.

Encoding & decoding messages

I often find myself returning to the words of Jamaican scholar Stuart Hall. His seminal work Encoding, Decoding was one of the first texts I studied at NYU. Published in 1973, Hall’s book discusses how media messages are created and understood. There is a “lack of fit,” Hall suggests, between the moment of production of a message (encoding) and the moment of its reception (decoding). Put another way, there is a gap between the intended meaning of a message and the meaning understood by its audience.

This gap has infiltrated my mind and everything I see. When I look at advertisements on the subway, I cock my head and wonder if they could have framed it another way. When I hear of corporate crises, I consider the slew of factors that resulted in an audience perceiving a message in a manner capable of damaging reputation.

From intention to reception: when a message goes wrong

In one of my interviews for this role, I was asked, “What’s an instance in which language has been used for good, or for bad?” I immediately had an answer for ‘bad,’ albeit maybe a bit unprofessional. With bright-lit eyes, I told my interviewer about Kelly Osbourne. In 2015 on the talk show The View, Osbourne brazenly told the audience, “If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump?”

Of course, this was met with a symphony of disappointed “oohs,” and even a “that’s not…”. But interestingly, I understood what Osbourne was trying to say. She was pointing to the fact that many immigrants in the United States, in this instance Latino immigrants, often perform jobs others want nothing to do with. People like Trump, she was arguing, directly benefit from the work that immigrants contribute. But they still want to “kick every Latino out.”

This was the most infamous instance I could think of where someone said something which made sense in her head, but ended up sounding deeply misguided. Osbourne’s message did not survive the trip from intention to reception. It resulted in a gasping audience that (justifiably) figured Osbourne thought every Latino immigrant in the United States scrubbed toilets for a living. If only she had read Stuart Hall, or perhaps even our website. Then she might have known that you can never, ever guarantee that an audience will perceive a message the same way you do.

While I had thought of this instance long before I started my internship at m+p, I’ve found that Osbourne’s ill-fated words have held up fairly well to that tagline, “It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.” Though in this case, it was also partly what she said. Sorry, Kelly.

This line has been crucial in the way I view, experience, and explain what it is I did here. It’s a line that will quietly linger in the back of my mind for the rest of my life, whether I’m drafting a text or creating a deck. Because any piece of communication can be broken down to “It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.”. And any strategy can begin with identifying a gap in communication. And now that I’m aware of this formidable, all-encompassing gap, I can’t help but try to close it.

Call me optimistic, but I think Stuart Hall would agree.

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