The essential link between message and messenger in American culture can be seen in the public behavior of elected officials. To be successful in the American political system a candidate often must embody their party’s political platform. The candidate is certainly more prominent than the party organization, and in some cases more so than its political platform.
The candidate is the Messenger-in-Chief, so to speak. Because they must connect with the voters on a personal level, the candidate’s character, personal life, their biography are examined carefully. American voters choose the candidate as person first, then the message as political platform.
At some point during the life of every American they hear the figure of speech: “You sell yourself first, then your product or service.” The presenter needs initially to get the audience to accept them as interesting, motivated, experienced, as a person with expertise, worth listening to.
This is Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2013 Martin Scorsese-film Wolf of Wall Street.
It is the initial hurdle the presenter needs to overcome, the first yes to be gained. The audience needs to be convinced of the messenger before being convinced by the message. Otherwise audiences ask themselves “If the presenter isn’t convinced of himself, why should I be convinced?”
In amazon.com there are 226 results when searching for “sell yourself first.” On YouTube 37,900 videos are found. The bookstore chain Barnes and Nobles sells 24 books related to “sell yourself first” with titles such as:
Invisible to Remarkable: In Today’s Job Market, You Need to Sell Yourself as ‘Talent’, Not Just Someone Looking for Work…, Good in a Room: How to Sell Yourself (and Your Ideas) and Win Over Any Audience…, or The One Minute Sales Person: The Quickest Way to Sell People on Yourself, Your Services, Products, or Ideas—at Work and in Life.
Celebrity endorsements help in the sale of many products in the United States. A famous person links themself personally to a specific product or service in an advertisement, explicitly or indirectly saying:
“I use this product. It is good. I like it. You will like it, too.” The hope is that potential customers will respond with “I like, respect, admire that celebrity. If it is good enough for them, it must be good enough for me. I‘ll buy.”
Golf champion Tiger Woods signed endorsement deals with General Motors, General Mills, American Express, Accenture and Nike. In 2000, Woods signed with Nike a 5-year, $105 million contract, which became the largest endorsement deal ever signed by an athlete at the time. Woods is frequently seen wearing Nike apparel during tournaments and has a building named after him at Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon.
Personal branding is not new. People have always taken into consideration how they are perceived by those they are trying to persuade. It is natural that the marketing techniques used to sell products are being applied to selling a person, or a person’s skills, experience, value.
Books, seminars and companies advise individuals on how to best manage their reputation in the Internet. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other forums and communities exert influence on how people are perceived. Perceptions are personal and subjective. Branding means presenting the messenger in the most positive light.
See what books Amazon offers on personal branding.
From Merriam-Webster: a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident. Synonyms: story, tale.
The artful placement of an anecdote is key to being persuasive in the American culture. Stories are convincing. They speak to our experience. Storytelling. Great leaders in business, politics, culture know how to speak to the imagination of their audience. Listen to former President Bill Clinton speak at the funeral service for Aretha Franklin:
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ambivalence as “simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action; continual fluctuation (as between one thing and its opposite); uncertainty as to which approach to follow.”
Attraction and repulsion. Germans are attracted by logical, well-researched and -argued statements. But they are also attracted by personal appeal, by a speaker who is both appealing and appealing to. Appealing to as in reaching out to.
Germans are repulsed by an imbalance between rational (objective) and personal (subjective) appeal. Mehr Schein als Sein, which translates into more appearance than substance, is a severe criticism. But they are also repulsed, perhaps moreso, by a sophisticated and effective appeal to emotions, to the less rational.
Germans are also capable of persuading by placing themselves front and center, by establishing a personal connection, by appealing to emotions. They choose not to, however. They choose not to teach, train or reinforce it. Ambivalence. They can and often want to, but are wary of the negative effects. Instead, Germans feel the need, the obligation, to constrain themselves, to not go there.
Why? Partly it is their strong scientific, rational, intellectually rigorous approach. Partly it is their belief that persuasion should not be deceptive. Appealing to human emotions – pushing all of the right buttons without the listener being aware of it – is a form of manipulation.
For if the listener is not aware that their thinking is being steered by their emotions, she is not in a position to freely choose to accept or reject the arguments presented. That person is reduced from subject to object. Deception. Manipulation.
San Diego. 1996. Political advertisements of every kind must pass the objectivity test in Germany. The Germans expect substance and convincing arguments. And although the private and personal is seeping more and more into German politics, due to the influence of American politics, politicians in Germany are still identified directly with the stands they take on specific issues. They represent the political platforms of their respective parties.
Political party conventions in Germany are held once or twice a year. Their purpose is not to nominate candidates before elections, but instead to debate and formulate policy. At the conventions the stage is dominated by the party, with up to three or four rows of ten to fifteen seats per row occupied by the party elite. Until recently the speaker’s podium was to the side. And even though it has been moved to the center, the thirty to fifty colleagues occupying the stage send a clear signal: “Sure, we have different speakers during the convention. But make no mistake, the party comes first, the individuals politicians and office-holders come second!”
In the summer of 1996, while a political adviser to the CDU/CSU Parliamentary Group in Bonn, I – John Magee – attended the Republican National Convention in San Diego. My job was to accompany and assist Peter Hintze (then Secretary General of the CDU), Jürgen Chrobog (then German ambassador to the U.S.) and Ruprecht Polenz (then Member of the Foreign Relations Committee). Bob Dole and Jack Kemp were nominated, then in the general election beaten badly by Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
Along with meetings with leading Republicans, Peter Hintze was especially interested in observing the details of the convention. Part of his job was organizing and preparing the CDU conventions for Chancellor Helmut Kohl. It is well known that American party conventions serve the primary purpose of presenting to voters a high level of unity, in terms of the ticket and the substance of the party’s platform. Political debate does not take place, and certainly not in full view of the American public. Germany is different. The conventions are televised from start to finish. And the Germans debate, openly, directly, harshly. The German public can follow it blow by blow by television or radio.
The great sensation of that 1996 Republican National Convention was Colin Powell’s speech. Many had hoped that he would be their party’s candidate. Immediately after his 1992 election, Clinton asked Powell to be his Secretary of State, hoping to prevent a Powell-candidacy four years later. Powell had declined respectfully. The arena in San Diego, fifteen thousand strong, exploded in applause when General Powell walked on stage, in civilian clothes, and proceeded to speak directly to the hearts and minds of the American people. From his heart and with great intensity.
Like any and every truly persuasive speaker in the American context Powell used anecdotes, figures of speech and several brief, but very personal stories to convey his message. He wanted to move the people emotionally. Hintze and Chrobog turned to me time and again asking for an explanation of these stories. Was meint er damit? What does he mean? What is he trying to say? The atmosphere in the convention center was electrifying.
Sitting behind the two Germans, and due to the noise level, which had even surprised me, I had to stick my head forward between theirs and literally scream my responses to their questions. It was clear to all three Germans – Hintze, Chrobog, Polenz – that the convention, and General Powell’s speech, were all about emotions.
Older Americans know the names Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings. They were the most famous news anchormen of the historically dominant television news broadcasters ABC, CBS and NBC. For generations they informed the American people at six o’clock in the evenings about national and world events.
Sunday morning political talkshows are also linked to household names such as Tim Russert, George Stephanopoulos, Bob Schieffer. In style and tone these news shows were tailored to those respective individuals. It was, and still is, a question of branding, with the networks seeking to establish an almost personal relationship between news moderator and the audience, with the hope that viewers would trust the moderator with supplying them with critical news in precise, objective and investigative way.
And it’s no different in American politics, where it is often less about substance and more about personality, character and values, such as marriage, family, love of country and faith. Question marks in those areas mean questionable credibility. Americans first size up the candidate as a person, then they consider his or her politics.
Robert H. Goddard, now considered the American father of modern rocketry, was often mocked and ridiculed by his fellow Americans during his lifetime, but was well-respected in Germany, largely because of his persuasive techniques.
Early in his rocketry research, Goddard funded his own testing, but as his work grew in scope he began to seek outside funding. However, as a publicity-shy man who tried to keep media-focus on his work instead of himself, most of his attempts to solicit financial assistance failed, with the exception of the Smithsonian Institution, which agreed to grant Goddard modest funding.
In 1917, Goddard made several proposals to the U.S. Army and Navy about the possibility of his rocket research being used in the military. Although both organizations were interested, the only one of Goddard’s proposals that he was allowed to develop was his idea for a tube-based rocket launcher to be used as a light infantry weapon. This launcher became the precursor to the bazooka.
After WWI, Goddard returned to researching rockets, and in 1919 he published a book titled A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. As part of this book, he mentioned the possibility of sending rockets to the moon. At the time, this was considered an outlandish and impossible suggestion. Although this was only a small part of the book, Goddard was soon subjected to what David Lasser, the co-founder of the American Rocket Society, called the “most violent attacks.”
In 1926, Goddard successfully launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket. Partly due to Goddard’s poor reputation and partly due to his media-shyness, this launch was largely unnoticed. In 1929, following one of Goddard’s rocket launches, a local newspaper mockingly printed the headline “Moon rocket misses target by 238,799.5 miles”
Although Goddard had difficulty convincing Americans that his ideas were useful, his work was very persuasive to Germans, and it wasn’t long after his book was published that Goddard began receiving queries from German engineers asking about his work. Initially Goddard answered these queries (his help is even acknowledged in Hermann Oberth’s 1923 book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen) , however, increasing aggression from Germany began to worry him, and by 1940 he had stopped responding to the engineers’ questions.
Realizing that he may have inadvertently assisted in German development of long-range missiles, Goddard attempted to warn the U.S. Army and Navy about a potential German threat from rockets. Although Goddard was not able to sell his idea that long-range missiles were a possibility (both organizations considered his warnings too far-fetched to be worth contemplation), he was able to sell himself well enough that between 1942 and 1945 the Navy employed him as Director of Research in the Bureau of Aeronautics, where he worked developing experimental engines.
The safest way to win an NBA championship is to land one of the league’s few unstoppable players. But even superstars require the right surrounding parts. They are the Australians. And every team in the NBA could use one.
Australian players tend to be the opposites of most American players. They don’t seek superstardom. They actively avoid attention. They excel in the egoless roles that most players reject.
Aussies can be so obsessed with their teams, in fact, that individual awards make them uncomfortable. They want to win more than anything else. “The kids in the U.S. are told from the time they’re 12 years old that they’re the next Michael Jordan.”