{"id":545,"date":"2015-02-20T01:30:05","date_gmt":"2015-02-20T01:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=545"},"modified":"2015-02-20T10:13:52","modified_gmt":"2015-02-20T10:13:52","slug":"schhh-an-image-that-was-too-successful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=545","title":{"rendered":"Schhh …. An Image That Was Too Successful ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"recycling<\/a><\/p>\n

The Friends of the Earth (FoE) \u2018bottle dump\u2019 in London, 1971. This became a famous image and helped establish FoE as a leading campaign group of the time.<\/em><\/p>\n

I am not alone in advising anyone starting out in campaigns, that it is essential to be able to communicate the campaign in both pictures and stories. Blindingly obvious as that may seem, it\u2019s not how people from many walks of life get trained to think, for instance in science, law, business, economics or politics.<\/p>\n

But ask most people how they think a campaign is going, and they will tend to use a heard-of-it\/ seen-it shortcut. As in, that must be a success \u201cit got so much publicity\u201d, or \u201ceveryone\u2019s talking about it online\u201d, or less positively, \u201cyou don\u2019t see much of them these days so \u2026\u201d.<\/p>\n

In other words they use Kahneman<\/a>\u2019s heuristics<\/a> to create an opinion using limited information. What\u2019s easy to recall<\/a> seems more convincing. What can be recalled may be taken to be representative<\/a>. What we see is taken to be all there is<\/a> to see. This is one reason why images are so \u2018powerful\u2019: they prompt us to instantly \u2018make up our minds\u2019 on this basis. After that, the \u2018consistency effect\u2019 kicks in and we stick to our initial conclusion.<\/p>\n

Fame is Right<\/strong><\/p>\n

A famous image creates its own credibility. People tend to assume that more prominent or famous organisations are the more successful ones, for example that higher profile companies will be richer<\/a>. We also tend to assume that when \u2018an issue disappears from the headlines\u2019, any problem associated with it has more than likely been solved or at least got better (a bias to positive inference on closure<\/a> \u2013 or \u2018no news must be good news\u2019).<\/p>\n

As anyone involved with campaigning throughout the duration of a \u2018disaster\u2019 may have experienced, this is often compounded by the media\u2019s tendency<\/a> as a story-teller to want to justify no-longer telling the story, leading to excessive reassurance (the seas are once again blue, the oil has gone; the people are eating again, the aid is flowing, rebuilding has begun, etc).<\/p>\n

Winning the Media War, Losing the Campaign<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is also widely known amongst campaigners, who often sit upstream in the story-flow, that it is quite possible to win the media war and lose the campaign.<\/p>\n

What looks like huge success early on, may make this more likely, particularly if it either \u2018derails\u2019 the campaign from a critical path it needed to follow, or convinces potential supporters that they are \u2018not needed\u2019. (Of course if you don\u2019t have a critical path leading to your final objective, in which one step has to be to be achieved, to reach the next, you may not notice this is happening). I would be interested to hear about any cases you may have come across (chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Social media prominence \u2013 the number of tweets, likes etc \u2013 is essentially the same as \u2018news media\u2019 coverage in this respect because both imply \u2018attention\u2019. It is human nature (ie Kahneman\u2019s \u2018system 1\u2019) to rationalise, or back-fit a rise or fall in attention, to reasons<\/em> that can plausibly, and just as important satisfyingly<\/em>, explain it.<\/p>\n

Because \u2018the public\u2019 will not understand \u2018the issue\u2019 as policy communities and campaigners do, it is in the interests of campaigns to try and avoid this because the reasons that people use to \u2018fill in the gaps\u2019, come from beliefs they already hold as immutably true (eg values or values laden). As Walter Lipmann<\/a> pointed out, people make up their minds before they define the facts (System 1 not 2), and once they have made up their minds, it is very hard work to get them to change (asking them to use System 2 to overturn System 1).<\/p>\n

Schhh \u2026 you Know Who ?<\/strong><\/p>\n