“You can have the best message in the world, but the person on the receiving end will always understand it through the prism of his or her own emotions, preconceptions, prejudices, and pre-existing beliefs."
That’s Frank Luntz at the top of Words That Work. He adds:
"It’s not enough to be correct or reasonable or even brilliant. The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listeners’ shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart. How that person perceives what you say is even more real, at least in a practical sense, than how you perceive yourself.”
Now, let's be honest. How many of us have been on the wrong side of this?
I’ve certainly had that moment. I write what I think is a perfect message. Clear, accurate, well-supported. I bake it into all of our campaign materials. And yet, it fails to get the traction I wanted. People heard something I didn’t say. They reacted to a meaning I didn’t intend. They filtered our words through beliefs I didn’t account for.
Actually, this is true well beyond campaign design. I regularly encounter this friction in my day-to-day interactions with friends, family, and colleagues. Landing a clear message, one in which the recipient takes on the exact meaning you intended, is much harder than we give it credit for.
Luntz puts it in a way I keep coming back to: “The act of speaking is not a conquest, but a surrender.”
Luntz spent decades studying exactly this problem. His career was built on one observation: communication is determined by the receiver, not the sender. The quality of what you said is measured entirely by what the other person did with it after your words left your mouth. It has nothing to do with how brilliant it sounded in your own head. If it's a message that needs to make contact with another human being, you need to put yourself in that person's shoes.
That’s a hard idea for people in our line of work. We think of communication as projection. We build messages, we push them out, we measure impressions and reach. Luntz' book serves as a good reminder that we're wrong in this approach.
The moment we speak, we’ve handed our words over to someone else’s brain. We’ve surrendered control of what those words mean. People process our words through their existing beliefs before those words arrive as meaning.
- In our first episode, we looked at Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, which established that people respond to the pictures in their heads, not to reality itself.
- In our second episode, David McRaney’s How Minds Change showed us the cognitive science behind why those pictures are so resistant to change — and that questions work better than arguments for shifting them.
Luntz takes both of those insights and builds a practitioner’s toolkit. He’s the bridge between understanding how opinion forms and knowing how to work with that formation process in real time. Lippmann diagnosed the problem. McRaney explained the science. Luntz shows us what to do about it in the campaign office.