When I started in this business, everybody said the Democrats were the better communicators because they sounded like social workers, and Republicans were awful because they sounded like morticians. In some cases. they actually dressed like morticians.
We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.
Preserving parks and open spaces is a winner because it doesn't need to be explained to everyday Americans.
There are words that work, that are meant to explain and educate on policies that work, on products that work, on services that work. I'm not going to ever try to sell a lemon. I don't do that.
I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before.
There's a problem with political polling in that you have so much pressure to do what your client wants you to do and say what your client wants you to say. I've never felt that pressure. I am independent of the political parties.
We decide based on how people look; we decide based on how people sound; we decide based on how people are dressed. We decide based on their passion.
One of the things that you have trouble with politicians, particularly in Washington, is when you get mad at them and you can't touch them; you can't punch them; you can't yell at them.
People like me have to have the discipline only to work for clients, corporations, political people, products, services, networks that we believe in and we want to see succeed.
So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean.
The advantage of working for a corporation is that it has only one message, because a product or a service doesn't speak; it's just there, and you can advertise it.
I don't understand why people whose entire lives or their corporate success depends on communication, and yet they are led on occasion by CEOs who cannot talk their way out of a paper bag and don't care to.
Ideology and communication more often than not run into each other rather than complement each other. Principle and communication work together. Ideology and communication often work apart.
The principles behind explaining and educating the product or the elected official is similar, even though the actual execution of it is very, very different.