Message discipline
Coordinating every speaker in an organization to repeat the same few phrases and avoid all others, so that the audience hears one voice from many mouths and takes the agreement for truth.
Repetition works on the audience; message discipline supplies the repetition at scale. A campaign, a ministry, or a company issues "lines to take," and every interview, statement, and speech is built from them. The public hears the same sentence from the minister, the spokesperson, and the backbencher and experiences it as consensus. Questions that fall outside the lines are answered with the lines anyway, which is why interviews under message discipline sound like a recording.
The practice was described from the inside in Joe McGinniss's account of the 1968 Nixon campaign and refined through the decades of the pollster-tested phrase. It is the organizational engine of repetition and slogan. Exploits Illusory Truth Effect and Social Proof.
Historical examples
McGinniss's The Selling of the President followed the Nixon campaign's television operation, in which the candidate's appearances were scripted around a small set of themes and staged as town halls with screened questions. The book's argument, that a candidate could be marketed like a product with a controlled message, was scandalous in 1969 and standard practice within a decade.
McGinniss, Joe. The Selling of the President 1968. New York: Trident Press, 1969.
Frank Luntz's memos to Republican leaders supplied tested phrases with instructions to use them and only them: "death tax," "climate change," "energy exploration," "personal accounts." The memos' leaked text shows the mechanism, a vocabulary chosen by focus group and enforced by repetition across every speaker.
Luntz, Frank. Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear. New York: Hyperion, 2007; Lakoff, George. Don't Think of an Elephant! White River Junction: Chelsea Green, 2004.
In advertising and commerce
Rosser Reeves's "unique selling proposition," one claim repeated without variation across every advertisement, became the doctrine of a generation of agencies, and corporate "key messages" documents apply the same rule to every executive who speaks in public. Crisis-communication training drills spokespeople to "bridge" any question back to the three approved lines.
Reeves, Rosser. Reality in Advertising. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961; Coombs, W. Timothy. Ongoing Crisis Communication. 5th ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2019.
In the archive
Posters and advertisements annotated with this technique.
Watch three interviews with different people from the same campaign or company on the same day. Write down every phrase that appears in all three.
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
Asked about the deficit, the housing shortage, and the strike, the minister answered each with "our plan is delivering for working families."
What to notice. One line applied to every question, regardless of the question, is discipline enforced on a single speaker.
Nine board members gave nine interviews; all nine used the phrase "a bold reset for the company" and nothing else.
What to notice. Identical phrasing across speakers on the same day marks a distributed script.
"I understand the question, but what I'd say to your viewers is this..." followed by the day's line.
What to notice. The "bridge," a taught move for returning any question to the approved message.
Sources
- McGinniss, Joe. The Selling of the President 1968. New York: Trident Press, 1969. ISBN 978-0140112467
- Luntz, Frank. Words That Work. New York: Hyperion, 2007. ISBN 978-1401302597
- Reeves, Rosser. Reality in Advertising. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961.
- Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. Packaging the Presidency. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ISBN 978-0195089424