TJ Walker tells how a southern politician lost his campaign by refusing to narrow his message. The candidate had hundreds of talking points instead of three core ones, couldn't deliver consistent soundbites in interviews, and never rehearsed. Walker argues you need strict discipline: pick your top three messages, craft them into repeatable lines, and practice them until they stick.
Chapters
I was working with a very well known politician. He had been the speaker of the legislature of a major southern state. He was now running for another office and was about to announce in the next couple of days. I was brought in as his media consultant and media trainer. We're sitting there in his home going over a standard media training, what I always do, getting comfortable on how you look on tv, then talking about the messaging. So if you're running for office, part of your message has to answer the question, why are you running for this office? So I asked him that question and he said, well, it's because I want to do this and I want to do this and I want to do this, I want to do this and I'm trying to keep up writing it down, we're putting it on poster boards, we're writing it down. Before you knew it, the House was practically covered with messages as to why he wanted to run. Now, he fancied himself a very serious public policy person, very intellectual. But when I asked him, why are you running for office? He had to say hundreds and hundreds of things. Now, once you're in office, there are hundreds of things you have to do, maybe thousands. But you can't run on a platform of doing hundreds of things for candidates and for all the other voters in your district. It just doesn't work that way. So, and this was my fault as a trainer, it was fairly early in my training business, my training career, before you know what, we had spent five, six hours brainstorming on messages. So now we had to do the compression down to three messages quickly. And he wouldn't do it. And he wouldn't do it. And he wouldn't do it. We almost had to just arbitrarily pick the. And then we had about five minutes to practice. Interviews and practice. His three messages did not end well. What happened during the campaign when he was interviewed, his announcement and every other time, every time he spoke, he said something different. Every time someone asked him, why are you running for office? He said 10 new things. Nothing ever resonated and he lost his bid for public office. Now, I'm not proud of how that training went. I like to think I've learned a lot since then. I now impose a very strict discipline on how much time you could spend on brainstorming messages. But a lot of times people have this mistaken notion that, oh, I don't want to dumb things down, I'm a smart person, I want to respect the audience. All that's great, but it actually takes more intellect to put your messages in priority than it does to just dump them all out on a table when you have 500 messages. There's really no difference between that and having no message. So why do I tell that story? I want people to realize you don't get extra credit as a candidate or anyone trying to communicate to the public by more, more, more, more, more. You cannot spend a disproportionate amount of your time in the brainstorming mode. That's the easiest thing to do for most people. It's fun, it's intellectually interesting, but it doesn't help you actually communicate. You've got to spend as much time, if not more time, narrowing your messages to the top three, coming up with sound bites, leaving time for rehearsal. You. If not, you're going to end up losing, whether at the ballot box or at the cash register.
