The ownership gambit

Scott Adams writes,

When Donald Trump ran for president he put his clear, simple message on the front of bright red hats. The message was perfect. The choice of a hat instead of a t-shirt or other garment was perfect. The color red was perfect for his message – bold, sexy, and important. The hats were a master class in branding and influence. Political historians will be referring to Trump’s hats for ages.

Compare that to the Million Woman March. They chose pink because – I assume – it is a bit of an ironic color for women who are fighting for their rights. Women are “owning” pink to rob it of its power to brand them as the so-called weaker sex. At least that’s why I assume they picked pink.

We’ve seen that kind of ownership-gambit work before. African-Americans successfully took over the N-word and robbed it of its historical power. Gays successfully turned the chant “We’re here, we’re queer. Get over it” into ownership of the Q-word.

We also saw Trump use a version of this ownership-gambit during the campaign. The media accused him of being a whiner and he responded by saying he was the loudest voice for change. Trump owned the accusation and weaponized it.

So we know this idea of embracing the insult and flipping it into a positive – or at least a neutral – is good persuasion. It works quite often. But let me tell about you one of the rare cases where you should NOT use that persuasion technique.

...The choice of pink hats predicts that the movement will fizzle out in time (probably months). The color alone is powerful enough to drain the movement of energy over time.

Color matters when it comes to branding. You already knew that. What you probably didn’t know is how much it mattered. I’d put color toward the top of the persuasion stack because we are visual creatures and color is the main thing we see.

When Trump came up with his red hat idea he was operating in the persuasion and branding dimension. And he nailed it.

When the pink hat organizers decided on their branding, they appear to have been operating on what I call the word-thinking level. As I mentioned earlier, the hats are literally a pun about cats and vaginas. That’s too conceptual to persuade. Just because the words fit together in a clever way, that doesn’t make it persuasive. And if you plan to take ownership of an insult, make sure the insult is strong. The N-word was a strong insult. The Q-word was weapons-grade too. Trump turned “whiner” into the strongest voice for change, which is also strong. If your enemy has a strong weapon, it makes sense to grab that weapon and use it for defense.

But if someone associates you with a weak color, such as pink, and the science says the color influences people toward weakness, don’t take that as your brand. Run away from pink unless you are trying to persuade people to drink some herbal tea and take a nap.

If you are the new President of the United States, and you see hundreds-of-thousands of protesters marching in the streets, what do you do? Well, in most cases you would treat that as the nation’s top priority. You don’t want it to escalate to social collapse. I can think of only one scenario in which such a large and vocal movement should be ignored until they run out of steam. That rare situation is when the protesters all wear pink hats. You can pretty much ignore that movement. It will fizzle out on its own. Unless they get better hats.

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