What we do here

Most everything we do here that is clearly better than what you’d get elsewhere is based on a researched-to-death observation that is quite simple to type but is pretty revolutionary:

Introductory Graphic 1

This isn’t a completely new idea. If you go back and read the first half of Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (originally published over a century ago in 1922), which laid the groundwork for George Gallup and the polling industry, you might be shocked to see just how skeptical he was about the value of public opinion. He openly mocks the notion you would conflate the common consensus with the truth, and is at best ambivalent about people’s ability to explain why they think what they think.

A couple generations of market and public opinion research slowly began to conflate “what people want” and “what people say they want,” until a new era of behavioral research, represented most notably by Daniel Kahneman or Richard Thaler, began to prise them apart again.

But the System 1/System 2 dynamic you may be familiar with still essentially works from the premise that all our decisions (or the wanting of our wants) should be based on sound logic. It’s just that we’re lazy or it’s impossible to do that all the time, and so we have heuristic hacks to get by.

This is not our view. While initially tempting, it is contradicted by many, many details and instances in our careers of researching opinions and behaviors and the reasons people give to explain them. Our updated understanding of how these things work is more influenced by branches of cognitive science, most notably the work of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, as explained in many papers or compiled into the very excellent The Enigma of Reason.

In a nutshell, there are unconscious and irrational mechanisms in the brain which do the wanting and deciding and liking. “System 1” if you like. “Lizard brain.” Sure, ok, fine. But they are both separate from and influenced by a primarily social mechanism which develops reasons we could use to explain ourselves to others. Philosophers and mathematicians learned to hack this social mechanism to create the intellectual technology we call formal logic, and this is all to the good. But that’s not what the brain was intended for. When someone comes up with a reason (or more often repurposes a successful argument they’ve heard before) to rationalize their gut-level choices, they’re not being lazy or doing it wrong. They’re putting a social layer on top of individual choices.

One thing this means is: the reasons people give for their beliefs and actions are intertwined with their behavior, but are neither the same as nor fully separate from their “real” beliefs or desires or behaviors. Another thing it means is in more cases than not, “being logical” is a feeling or emotion in the rhetorical sense: being perceived as logical is equally persuasive whether or not you’re actually being formally logical.

This has real implications for how you study these things and what they mean when you observe them. TRL is in a sense a bet that we are better at translating those implications into useful real world research insights.

Now let’s take off the tweed blazer with the leather elbow patches, put this briarwood pipe on the shelf, and drag this lecture into the real world. There are nearly infinite ways to explain what we do here. But people like rhetorical triads. You can think of our process as requiring three pieces.

Introductory Graphic 2

While we offer these services start to finish, you don’t necessarily need to buy them all from us. You might already have a lot of behavioral or survey or business data and a good understanding of your audience today, and just need lab work on what might change the narrative. You might already have plenty of current state and experimental data and be stuck making decisions about what to try first in the real world. Other organizations have full faith in their tactical marketing, public affairs, and communications teams but just need the key insights to have them build campaigns and strategies on. All of these are fine.

But there are some typical use cases for what we do around here.

Get unburied

Make sense of All The Data

“We have a lot of raw material that is supposed to be leading to specific things we can take action on.
But it’s…not? What gives?”
–You say more about this

There are lots of places you can buy data science services, ranging in price from “Freelancer in Estonia” to what we might euphemistically call “The Full McKinsey.” Even formless AI robots are getting in on the action now, we’ve heard. So when are we the right choice? There are a couple scenarios:

  • A lot of the data is about the relationship between what people actually do and what they claim are the reasons for what they do. This often comes in the form of survey data (“To what extent do you agree with the statement, I know I should have done what you want me to but I stubbornly refuse…”), open-ended comments (“I liked it because it was good but when it’s bad I didn’t like it…”), transcripts of interviews or focus groups with your audience, etc. And this is often paired with metadata like who bought or didn’t buy what, or clicked on something, or gave us a high or low NPS score, etc.

    You feel like you should know what to do with this but all the definite conclusions take the form of tautologies like “It turns out people who gave us higher scores are leaving more positive sentiment comments and buying more.” And what are you supposed to do with that, really? That’s bupkis. We have gotten pretty good at asking better, more specific questions of data like that. Sometimes they lead to conclusions, sometimes to hypotheses we can experiment with in the lab.

  • You have access to a ton of potential things, plus, you know, the internet, but are paralyzed by choice. Take a deep breath, this is actually pretty common. It’s one of the early symptoms of data psychosis. The trick here is to limit what you are trying to get from all the available information, rather than believing all the answers will emerge from the cloud of data like Botticelli’s Venus on the halfshell. That almost never happens. Develop specific hypotheses, which can be proven or disproven by the available data. Test. Refine. Repeat.

Enquire about All The Data Services
Achieve coherent clarity

Explain how something works
so other people get it

“We know something for sure, but whenever we try to explain it, people’s eyes glaze over, or they start arguing about something else before we even finish, or they drag a bunch of red herrings across the trail.
Why won’t they listen?”
–You say more about this

Few things are more frustrating than being sure of factual information and not being able to make other people accept it as a fact. It’s especially hard now that the digital world is a perfectly indexed wonderland of reasons to prove or disprove just about anything. As our culture’s obsession with personal satisfaction intensifies it’s more and more tempting to conflate disliking something with being sure it must not be true.

What’s an ethical rhetor to do? By understanding the underlying assumptions and values your audience is working from, we can inoculate your explanation against the antibodies that attack it before it has a chance to work. And we can build your case in the right order so each link in the chain follows for your audience and not just for you.

Enquire about Explaining Stuff
Gain agreement and support

Increase support and minimize
or neutralize opposition

“I am advocating for something. More people should support it and take action! And some of those people who disagree with me should come see the light! Or at least get distracted or stop caring.”
–You say more about this

First of all, wow. You are super passionate about Your Thing. Guess who isn’t. No, seriously, take a guess. Unless you know already, because that’s the first step. One thing we specialize in here at The Rhetorical Lab is thinking about the different categories people in your potential audience might fall into, and how to draw lines between them and people who are really not reachable right now. If you think there is some Platonic Form of the best message or narrative or campaign that gets 100% of people to agree with you, you might make a good cheerleader, but you won’t be very persuasive.

Our methods here are built on a foundation of rhetorical ethics that is, lucky for you, also tactically useful. What can you offer someone who doesn’t already agree with you that will assuage their concerns, or give them a fair trade for changing their conclusions? Those are the kinds of things we’ll experiment with in the lab, after understanding their current state today.

Enquire about Building Agreement & Support
Reveal what's underneath

Change how people understand the
general narrative of Your Thing

“Right now people think of My Thing in a certain way, but that’s got to change. [It’s outdated and no longer true / We’re tired of being reactive and letting others define us. / It’s newish and people don’t appreciate it yet.]”
–You say more about this

This is the category that a lot of branding, rebranding, or general reputational reboot needs fall into. It is in some ways the best position to be in, because you’re thinking ahead. In other ways it can be a weird morass if you just wish people liked you more but you’re not sure of what you should do differently to get there.

In general the best way to start is to think about the combination of your audience (who likes you today, and why, and who is on the fence, and why) and what actually makes you different from Other People’s Things. It’s hard, but don’t lie to yourself. “Our differentiator is that a commitment to excellent service is our core brand value,” is, uh, I mean it’s possible but unlikely. When’s the last time you asked a friend if they had a widget they liked and the answer had anything to do with “core brand values?”

There are actually a lot of ways to differentiate yourself, and we can help you find the believable ones (or help you get to a place where they’ll be believable) for the audience you can realistically pursue. But it’s usually going to require at least a teensy bit of courage. “Differentated” is a synonym for “not doing the safe thing everyone says they’re doing.”

Enquire about Narrative Re/Development
Hurry up and answer

Time-boxed issues messaging,
proactive or reactive

“I’ve got something coming up that I know will be tough to communicate or explain, and I want to get ahead of it.” Or, “Something just happened and I need to react, to know the best message, and quickly.”
–You say more about this

Often called “crisis comms,” or we've evern heard “event-specific messaging playbooks,” if that’s your kink. These are narrow, targeted needs that have to account for a lot of details and circumstance. There are specialized crisis comms PR firms that are staffed and set up to throw a lot of resources at a problem quickly, and if the building is on (metaphorical) fire, you should call them – and sometimes they will call us, or you can ask us to work with them. (For literal fires, fire departments, obviously.)

But, if there are infrequent but recurring events that you’ve noticed you haven’t had great responses to in the past, we can use the lab to tune up how you react to get the most out of it or minimize the damage. If your initial crisis response didn’t do as much work as you hoped, and now you need to unwind it, or adjust it, and you’re willing to be up front about the fact that you’re learning as you go, then we can help, often on relatively short (week or three) timelines.

Enquire about issue-specific messaging