The power of word-of-mouth
How to use it to keep neighbors from being shut out of decisions
November 8, 2003
Paul Ryder, Ohio Citizen Action
Of all the kinds of media out there -- newspaper, magazines, radio, broadcast TV, fax, cable, cellphone, VCR, email, web, and on and on -- marketing experts agree that the most powerful is word-of-mouth, the one we use in canvassing door-to-door.There are many reasons why word-of-mouth is always ranked at the top:
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The word "media" comes from the word meaning "middle". A medium -– a radio or whatever -– is in the middle between you and the person you are communicating with. With word-of-mouth, nothing is in the middle.
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It is a two-way medium; the participants are equally able to contribute. By contrast, you can talk back to your radio if you want, but no one’s going to hear you on the other end.
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Word-of-mouth can’t be controlled or censored.
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Word-of-mouth is self-propagating. Given the right message at the right time, the person receiving it can and will pass it on in the same way. And this happens only if the person at that step judges it worth passing on. It is highly democratic in that way.
Politicians know that if they become the target of late-night jokes by Jay Leno and David Letterman, their career is in deep trouble. Why? Not because of their direct influence: only 10 million people watch either show, in a nation of 292 million.
Instead it's because the monologues are 'water cooler' material: they are suited for people to pass on the next day on a work break. In other words, they are influential because they can easily become word-of-mouth, and in that form propagate themselves through the society.
The two people who best understand the power of word-of-mouth are Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. It didn’t matter how much money Sony spent on advertising their movie Gigli -– and Sony has $56 billion in revenue to spend every year -– it was flattened by word-of-mouth.Hollywood used to promote their movies with word-of-mouth. They would show their new movie to newspaper critics a week before it opened, with the idea that the reviews would create a good buzz which would bring people into the theatre.
They discovered that word-of-mouth can also kill a movie in a hurry, so Hollywood shifted to Plan B: "buying the gross." Now they spend a fortune on ads before the new movie opens, and they don't let the critics see it. If the ads create a big enough opening weekend, it takes awhile for bad word-of-mouth to spread. If the gross drops gradually enough weekend by weekend, the movie can still make enough money to satisfy the studio.
The rule of thumb is that if the box office revenue drop from the first weekend to the second is less than 50%, the movie will probably make enough money in the end. In 1998, the average drop-off was 40%. In summer 2003 it was 51%. Charlie's Angels Full Throttle and 2Fast2Furious both dropped by 63%; The Hulk dropped by 70%, and Gigli went down 82%.
Hollywood blames young people. Sitting in the theater on opening night, they are sending instant messages to their friends on the outside, warning them about the movie. Instant messenging speeds up word of mouth, and box office revenue drops faster. Of course, if the movie were any good, audiences would be sending instant messages from the theater telling their friends to rush over.Door-to-door canvassers prove the power of word-of-mouth every night. The TV is on in roughly 80% of the houses we canvass, and yet we still succeed. That’s word-of-mouth battling TV, and winning, over and over.
This is an answer for anyone who daydreams about "What if we had a lot of money and didn’t have to beg for it, and we could buy TV time and really get somewhere. . ."
OK, let's assume my uncle Cedric died and left me $56 billion. We'd have a meeting and say, "Now that we can afford to use any medium, let’s use the most powerful one out there. What is it? Word-of-mouth. So let’s break out the clipboards and turf maps and get going."
In other words, we don't canvass because we're poor, we canvass because we're smart.
How to use word-of-mouth to keep neighbors from being shut out of decisions
The problems we work on are all 'political,' not in the sense of candidates and elections, but in the general sense of 'Who’s making these decisions?'
In every one of our issues, there are the people who have been making the decisions and the people who have had to live with the consequences. They are different groups. Had they been the same, these problems would not exist, and we would be living in a democracy.
Every campaign is about the neighbors pushing their way into the decisionmaking, and the polluter and the government trying to keep them out.
Here are four ways they try to keep us out, and four ways to foil them:
1. The in-crowd
One of the ways they try to keep people out is to speak a language no one can understand. They want people to be intimidated and bewildered and say, "I’m just not qualified to make this decision. I can’t even figure out what they are talking about."
For example, there’s a federal garbage law. Its easy to figure out what "federal garbage law" means. That's why no corporation or government bureaucrat will describe it that way.
First, they don’t call it "garbage," its "solid waste." This is supposed to distinguish it from "hazardous waste," but "garbage" would do as well. And since hazardous waste can come in solid form, its more confusing. It also helps cover up the reality that garbage has plenty of hazardous waste in it.
This is not confusing enough, however, so they refer to it by the name of the legislation, the "Resource Conservation and Recovery Act." That’s a 12-syllable mouthful, so they shorten it to the acronym, "RCRA." Of course, "RCRA" still has four syllables, so they say "Rek-ra."
They’ve created a verbal garbage dump, with "Rek-ra" lying on top of it. If you dig down through the muck, you can find out what they're talking about.
Then you might ask yourself: Is this the best use of my time when I could be organizing?
I can’t stress this enough: the company and the government talk like this for a specific purpose. It is not general perversity -– it is to keep us out.
There’s a long list of words and phrases designed to confuse. Here are just a few:
| Enviro-speak | Plain English |
| adverse impact | harm |
| adversely impacts human health | makes people sick |
| carcinogenic | cancer-causing |
| endocrine | hormone |
| bioregion | region |
| mortality | death |
| economically disadvantaged | poor |
| brownfield | abandoned factory site |
| regulated community | polluters |
And there are other words -– like "sustainable" -- whose meaning is a mystery to everyone.
Acronyms are another favorite device for cutting people out of the process. There are a few well-known acronyms, like "US," "EPA," and "FBI." Beyond that, industry and bureaucrats have created thousands of obscure in-crowd acronyms, like "HMS" (highway mobile source), "NAA" (non-attainment area), and "BACT" (best available control technology).
They also use sentence structure to confuse people. For example, the passive voice converts "I made a mistake" into "Mistakes were made." Poof! Whoever made the mistake just disappeared.
Here's a double-passive sentence: "The document was ordered to be shredded." It’s a double cover-up. We know neither who gave the order, nor who shredded it (nor whether it was shredded, for that matter).
Its clear why companies and the government talk like this. Unfortunately, too many environmentalists talk like this too.
Why? Some are just showing off. Many, however, do it because they have fallen into the trap. Their lack of confidence leads them to think, "I'll show them I’m as smart as the in-crowd. I'll match them acronym for acronym." With every acronym they use, they are cutting neighbors out of the discussion.
When we insist that everyone speak plain English, then everyone can have a say.
2. Science and values
Corporate and government officials try to convert every issue into a scientific debate, a battle of experts, sparring over obscure points. They know they have won when, for example, it becomes a dispute over whether 2 parts-per-billion or 3 parts-per-billion of a chemical is safe.
They've won because then only experts are left in the discussion, and the neighbors are, once again, left on the sidelines. As above, environmental activists who try to be junior scientists and debate point after point are unwittingly helping the polluter do this.
There's a better way. Good-neighbor campaigns are really about 'values,' which means deciding what's most important to us. Science has nothing to say about values. You are the world expert on what is important to you. Who else but you can answer, for example, "Is a higher risk of my baby getting lead poisoning more or less important to me than a higher risk of losing my job?"
Science, which is about understanding how the world works, can often be very helpful to us. When the issue comes down to values, however, science can't help any more. That's for the community to decide.
Similarly, in a trial, jury members listen carefully to all the witnesses, including the expert witnesses. Once they've heard all the testimony, however, the jury retires to the jury room to decide.The expert witnesses might want to join them in there, but they aren't allowed, for good reason.
3. Dominance and submission rituals
When a meeting with a company executive might be helpful, neighbors often send a letter to the CEO or plant manager, and the letter usually starts something like this:
"We request a meeting to discuss our concerns. . . "
This sentence seems OK until you examine it. Let’s start with the word "request" That is a word a subordinate would use with a superior. Between equals, it would be, "We invite you to meet with us," "I propose we meet," "I think we should meet," or more familiarly, "Let's meet."
Let's say your neighbor tossed an old toaster-oven into your yard. Would you go over there and say, "I request a meeting"? Of course not.
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There’s an old-fashioned word "supplicant" -– from the word "ply," meaning "to fold" or "to bend". And what’s bended is your knee. To be a supplicant is to go to someone on bended knee.
Remember that scene from The Godfather? He sits in a darkened room, people approach, hat in hand, requesting an audience, kissing his ring, asking for favors. They are supplicants. These are dominance and submission rituals. Like a TV nature show, where the alpha male stretches out his spine to glower over a cringing subordinate.
Of course, corporate and government officials don’t mind being treated this way. They like it: supplicants don’t make decisions, they put up with other people’s decisions.
For the same reason, we cannot be supplicants.
Good neighbor campaigns undermine this whole sick psychology by approaching company management as equals. We make it clear that the managers are neighbors just like us. We don’t throw tons of soot over the back fence into their yard, and we expect the same courtesy from them.
We show company officials all the respect any human being deserves -- regardless of what they’ve done –- but we don’t go to them or anyone else on bended knee.
4. Sexual politics
The fourth way they try to keep us out comes from that same sentence: "We request a meeting to discuss our concerns. . . " The phrase "our concerns" takes us into the arena of sexual politics.
To see why, let's take a hypothetical domestic problem. A man and a woman live together. He won't pick up after himself. She reminds him patiently over and over, to no effect. After weeks of this, the woman says, "We need to talk." Being perceptive, she realizes that there are now three problems, not one. First, the house is a mess. Second, their relationship is a mess, since he has been ignoring her for weeks. Third, she is furious.
He doesn't want to discuss any of the three problems. He thinks, "Maybe if I can do something about her emotions, I can get a pass on the other two problems. Maybe I'll get her some candy and flowers, or take her out for dinner. . . ."
A good-neighbor campaign has some of the same dynamics. CEOs are almost always men. Leaders of neighborhood groups are usually women. Most CEOs would rather not meet with neighbors at all. By the time of the first meeting, there are the same three problems: pollution, a bad relationship, and anger.
And too often, the company executive does his level best to change the problem they are discussing from chemical pollution to female emotionality. "We want you to feel good about living near the plant." "We want you to be comfortable about what we're doing." "We want to understand your concerns." Etc. In other words, we in management live in a world of realities and practicalities. You neighbors live in a world of emotions. We are willing to come down to your world and help you stabilize your emotions, so we can get back to business.
The way to counter this is to guide the executive back to the topic, politely, firmly, and repeatedly. And the topic is not our emotions, but the reality that his chemicals have found their way into our internal organs.
So if this tactic is worth deflecting, it is also a good idea not to bring it up in the first place. Why start our first communication with the company by identifying the issue as a "concern"?