Molding Prospect Opinion

Reframing negative views to instil buying behaviour.

One of the most frustrating things about building a startup is coming up against biases and misconceptions which prevent prospects from being attracted to and adopting your solution.

It feels like they aren’t seeing the situation clearly for what it is. Dismissing it quickly.

Often, their views are being filtered by a series of unfavourable perceptions in the vicinity of your value proposition.

Views that aren’t all that logical and have seemingly been formed by hearsay and not objective and critical thought. Their minds are “made up”.

I’ve encountered this many times. You’re on a back foot before you have even had a chance to communicate why you can genuinely enhance their lives in some capacity.

Changing this circumstance to a favourable outcome is tricky.

Why? Fighting it head on doesn’t work.

Al Ries — the ‘father of Positioning’ — famously said "You can’t change a mind. You can’t win just by being right.”

Once you accept this precedent, the situation becomes much more actionable.

How so?

Minds can’t be changed, but they can be molded from existing beliefs.

Edward Bernays — the ‘father of PR’ — converted the minds of billions with this exact principle.

But, where do you start?

With Walter Lippmann theory.

Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann

To put Walter Lippmann into context, he is the OG of public opinion doctrine.

He literally wrote the book Public Opinion -- a seminal text in the fields of social psychology and communication theory that are still wildly influential today.

Where did this thinking originate? It was a product of:

  1. His role as a prominent political journalist.

  2. Extensive study with ground-breaking psychologists — including William James (who wrote The Principles of Psychology and helped establish psychology as a serious scientific discipline).

  3. Experience as a founding advisor to the Committee of Public Information (CPI) and a key operator in a military propaganda unit.

The CPI was a government agency specially created to influence public opinion to support the US participating in World War I (spoiler: it was highly effective).

It became a handsomely funded lab for experimental methodologies in shaping public opinion, utilising new and existing mass communication tools on an unprecedented scale.

Lippmann’s experience in the military propaganda unit provided practical experience to test communication theories and techniques.

After the war, Lippmann published Public Opinion. It packaged together key learnings from his psychological research and insights gleaned during WW1.

The book explores the complexities of how public opinion is formed and the significant influence of the mass media and messaging techniques in shaping public perception.

There’s a core concept from Public Opinion that we are concerned with today.

It provides the psychological foundation from which to design a communication program to mold the opinion of prospects in a new, favourable direction.

That is? Pseudo-environment.

Pseudo-Environment

One of the key observations that Lippmann identified was that people's understanding of the world is extensively based on second-hand information that informs opinion. For example: information gleaned from radio, newspapers, cinemas, word-of-mouth.

This second-hand information gets mixed around with first-hand acquired information in the mind, from which perceptions and opinions form from.

A “pseudo-environment” is the collective cognition of all of this amalgamated information, perceptions, and imagery from which an individual lives inside their mind.

It is their unique interpretation of the world. In other words, a “personal reality”.

Each person carries about with him a large and varying collection of images which in some way or other reflect, rearrange, simplify, elaborate or distort the real environment with which he is connected.

Since knowledge extends beyond first-hand experiences and is so abundant, engagement with the world is heavily influenced by second-hand formed views and notions. It is based on mediated representations.

Therefore, people behave and make choices influenced by what is told and shown to them. Which, the volume of over time is only increasing.

When Lippmann was writing about this in the early 20th century, society was reaching an inflection point where the fundamental nature and function of the “pseudo-environment” in the mind was changing.

Prior to the industrial revolution, the source of second-hand information was largely limited to word-of-mouth, sparse literature, and whatnot.

With the advent of mass communication devices like newspapers, radio, and billboards the proportion of knowledge that people source from second-hand information had grown radically. Today, with TV and mobiles, etc another 100X that.

All of this noise and data creates infinite complexity from which the mind is unable to objectively process and reconcile effectively.

To cope, the mind increasingly relies on the "pseudo-environment" -- a subjective reality of events, places, people, situations, and objects.

Lippmann saw pseudo-environments as psychological spaces that simplified the complexity of the world. Where opinions were formed, influenced, and evolved.

They are mechanisms for processing the scale, speed, and transience of modern society.

But, the trade-off for this is inefficiency.

How so? With simplification comes distortion.

Pseudo-environments are a skewed filter of world, particularly as the ratio of second-hand derived information increases (it is more vulnerable to distortion).

The line between first-hand experience and second-hand experience gets blurry. People internalise and utilise second-hand information as if it were obtained by first-hand experience.

In other words, we may think we ‘know’ something enough to form a decisive view; but, under scrutiny, this cognition is shallow and largely formed by the opinions and concepts of others — i.e. what has been communicated to us.

Lippmann argued that while people have direct experiences, their overall perceptions are increasingly shaped by what they learn through the media, which often serves as a filter and interpreter of information.

This filtering process can distort, simplify, or otherwise alter the ‘raw data’ from the actual environment.

The result is that media — whether it be newspapers in Lippmann's day or social networks today — play a pivotal role in crafting pseudo-environments by selecting what information to present and how to present it.

This applies to any form of communication from which the individual is populating their “personal reality” with information.

The consequence of this is that mental shortcuts and biases are increasingly used as heuristics to make decisions in the lived world.

My point?

This is a major contributing factor to the propagation of misconceptions and negative opinions that deter prospects from viewing a newly introduced solution favourably.

Actionability

Today, companies spend a lot of time and money crafting messages that shape perception within a defined target audience (to varying degrees of success).

This can mean emphasising certain detail, omitting others, or presenting information in a specific light to influence how the audience perceives a product, service, or situation.

It's in the mind's tendency to build a pseudo-environment — to oversimplify and fill in the blanks with mental leaps — that lie the opportunity for a third-party (like a government body or a company) to insert a message and mold perception in a new desired direction.

In other words:

  • To initiate mental leaps.

  • To mobilise existing opinions in a new direction.

  • To tie together existing perceptions to form a new opinion.

It’s particularly effective for second-hand derived information, which can be more easily moldable or circumvented to form a new opinion because it can lack a depth of consciousness and understanding.

This is what Walter Lippmann aided with at CPI for the U.S. government. This is what Edward Bernays did extremely successfully (another graduate of the CPI) for corporate America throughout the 20th century. This is what companies all around the world do today.

So, how do you do it?

First you need to understand the pseudo-environment of your prospects. That is, the shared collective understanding and opinion overlap between them.

Not in totality, but specifically the perceptions that:

  1. Influence the opinion towards your solution negatively.

  2. Could be leveraged to mold a new favourable opinion.

You can think of this as mapping the mind of your prospects. Understanding the mental filter to which they see the world.

Research tools to collect this information are:

  • Surveys

  • Interviews

  • Focus groups (guide here)

  • Behavioural experiments (e.g. A/B or multivariate testing)

From this, you can categorise what opinions are formed primarily from first-hand experience and those that are formed primarily from second-hand knowledge.

It’s not an exact science, but you get enough of a sense of it for it to be actionable and material — it’s intuitive.

Then, you can be strategic in choosing which of these perceptions can be leveraged to instil a new favourable opinion. The key is to enlist the established point of view, utilising perceptions gleaned from second-hand information.

Example

I recently wrote about how B2B adtech startup Blockthrough learned that its target prospects — digital publishers — had a negative opinion towards a certain proposition (Acceptable Ads) that would inhibit them from buying.

The problem? Publishers didn’t like the idea of paying adblockers to whitelist their ads under the Acceptable Ads program. It was perceived to be a mafia-style racket.

This view was largely informed by second-hand information, and was loaded with emotion and bias. Challenging it directly would have been costly and futile.

Additionally, Blockthrough also understood that digital publishers viewed paying for ‘technology’ as perfectly OK. This view was largely informed by first-hand experience and precedent — the most powerful perceptions emanate from this.

So, Blockthrough reframed their solution (legitimately) to “paying for technology” as oppose to “paying for Acceptable Ads”. It worked.

This seems like fluff and semantics, but words have meaning. It’s triggering a different filter from which to interpret the proposition.

In other words: Blockthrough took a favourable view the prospect already had and leveraged it to reframe a negative view, instilling buying behaviour.

As a result, prospects converted to customers.

👉 For a playbook on how do to this, head here.

That’s it for today. I’ll be back in your inbox soon. 🤘

Martin

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