The Importance of Framing Your Message

Marketers and advertisers spend a lot of time thinking about how to best convey the message they want. If you've watched Mad Men, you know that Don Draper has a knack for messaging:

The context here is the federal government's move in the early '60s to publicize the now well-known health risks associated with smoking cigarettes.  How could a tobacco company effectively counter that messaging?

Consider Pete Campbell's attempt: "So what if cigarettes are dangerous? You're a man. The world is dangerous. Smoke your cigarette. You still have to get where you're going."

Then consider Don Draper's approach: "It's toasted. Everybody else's tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike's is toasted."

And in the real world, Lucky Strike did use the tag line "it's toasted":

From the vantage point of the 2000s, when this TV show aired, the discussion is farcical and absurd. But from the vantage point of the '60s, when tobacco companies were contending with new research about the health risks of tobacco, and a newly aggressive federal response to those health risks, this exchange makes a lot more sense.

Pete Campbell is giving the kind of cerebral argument that libertarians love: people should be free to make their own choices, even if the consequences of those choices are bad.

Don Draper is playing an entirely different game, and the difference here is critical. He dispenses with the intellectual abstraction of "people should be free to do what they want, and deal with the consequences of that decision." Instead, he observes that the federal government has done Lucky Strike a favor. By taking health claims of tobacco off the table, the field is wide open for Lucky Strike to develop its own messaging. Ignore the health issues. Part of the tobacco production process requires toasting the leaves. What is more homey and redolent of family intimacy than "toasted"? Your bread is toasted. You toast your daughter at her wedding. Your tobacco is toasted.

Messaging is important. How an argument is framed goes a long way to determining whether people are receptive to it.

So if you have a message that you want to convey to the public you need to consider its framing. There is a claim among certain researchers that aging is a disease, and that, like other diseases, its malign effects can be mitigated, and, eventually, that it may even be "cured".

But that's not great messaging. Here's Aubrey de Grey, one of the more prominent of these researchers, claiming that someone who is alive today will be alive 1,000 years hence:

If you're predisposed to agree with Aubrey, or if you're familiar with his and others' research, perhaps that claim is not outlandish.

But, if you're an average person out there, unfamiliar with research on aging, hearing the claim that someone alive today will live for 1,000 years would seem absurd. Everything you know about the world argues against it. The oldest person ever to live, you reason, only lived to be 122 years of age. Why, then, give any credence to a crackpot who claims that someone who is alive today will live ten times longer?

And--if you're an elderly person hearing this claim, consider the context in which you hear it. Your eyesight may be failing. Your bones are increasingly brittle. Your friend just broke her hip from slipping on some ice. Another friend is in the hospital with intractable pneumonia--an infection which the doctors say he could have easily beaten had he been thirty years younger.

Old age, as it presently exists, is no fun, and old people don't like to contemplate the prospect of living even longer lives, because their context for life is dim.

David Sinclair is another prominent researcher in the field of aging.

David recognizes what Aubrey perhaps does not: if you want to convince the public about your general claim that the ravages of age can be attenuated, you need to frame your argument in terms that are relevant to your audience. Framing is important.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Aubrey is correct that someone who is alive today will be alive 1,000 years hence. I think it's an absurd claim, and unlikely to happen, but again, let's just assume it is true. So what? It's an abstract and cerebral claim. And people are terrified of growing old, and 1,000 years is certainly old!

People are afraid of growing old because when they think of aging they don't think of it in the context that Aubrey or David or their fellow researchers think of it. They think of it in terms of people they know, or themselves. And the picture is not pretty. Aging has, for all of the time that people have been walking around, meant a gradual deterioration in function. Given that context, one can hardly be blamed for being averse to claims about longevity.

People don't want to be reminded of health problems. And if you just say that "in the future people will live longer lives," a lot of people will dismiss you. They will either dismiss you because they think you're a crank, or they will dismiss you because they don't like the idea of living a longer life in poor health.

But if you frame your message about longer lifespans as being much healthier, for much longer periods of time, people will have a much different response.

Messaging is important. And you have to frame your message in a way that will make people receptive to it.