In Question 3, we explored the messages that our target audiences need to hear before we can persuade them to support our policy objectives. But in advocacy campaigns, a message needs to do much more than persuade or present an argument.

Ethel Klein is a leading scholar and practitioner of political communications—which is what tobacco control advocates are unavoidably engaged in. She cautions that an effective advocacy message must be "at the same time logically persuasive, morally authoritative, and capable of evoking passion. A campaign message must speak at one and the same time to the brain and to the heart."

Tobacco control advocates draw on many skills and disciplines to make their messages effective, including political communications, public relations, social marketing, and public health education. Recently, advocates have also looked to new fields of academic research for tools to create better messages, including media-effects research and cognitive linguistics.

Here we introduce some of the tools from these disciplines that seem most useful for message development. We also provide links to some practical guides to their use.

Develop a Simplifying Concept

Susan Bales, director of the Frameworks Institute in Washington, DC, applies communications research to advocacy. Effective advocacy messages, she finds, must embody a "simplifying concept."

These phrases or labels capture the essence of a scientific concept, and are simple and 'catchy' enough to spread through the population of non-experts." Examples are the "ozone hole" and "greenhouse gases."

Tobacco control advocates have developed several simple phrases that convey such concepts with great success. Here are some examples.

Tobacco-free Children

Some tobacco control advocates express concern about focusing on children and tobacco, rather than on all tobacco addicts. This is a valid concern when the term "tobacco-free children" plays into the hands of company propagandists. These propagandists then (falsely) claim that they, too, are deeply concerned about youth tobacco use—and only youth tobacco use.

But many of the most powerful messages for tobacco control advocates focus on youth and tobacco, even when the goal is to build support for comprehensive tobacco control policies that will protect adult smokers.

Politicians appreciate the power of simple, hard-hitting messages. That is why, when comprehensive tobacco control legislation was being debated in the US Senate, virtually every senator who sought to persuade others to support this legislation began by reciting a version of this message: "Every day in America, 3,000 children start smoking; 1,000 of them will die early from the diseases smoking causes."

This simple message presents scientifically sound logic. It is morally authoritative: Every society recognizes the moral imperative of a government to protect defenseless children. And protecting children has always been an issue that evokes passion.

The term "tobacco-free children" speaks to the mind and the heart, as Klein urges. It brings to mind the idea of freedom and brings to the heart feelings of protectiveness toward children.

This is why one of the most sophisticated and renowned US organizations that advocate comprehensive tobacco control laws—laws to protect not only children—named itself the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Fairness to Workers

As advocates in the United States developed messages to support smoke-free restaurants and bars, they had difficulty countering messages from the tobacco companies. The companies argued that smoke-free laws were "unfair" to smokers. Nonsmokers could simply avoid bars and restaurants whose patrons chose to smoke.

But tobacco control advocates gained strong support, including that of labor unions and ethnic minorities, by shifting their focus. Instead of targeting restaurant and bar patrons, they shifted their message to target the rights of restaurant workers.

The simpler message was not "smoke-free restaurants" or "smoke-free bars," but "smoke-free workplaces."

As advocate Joe Cherner says: "The health of ALL workers is EQUALLY important. . . . ALL workers deserve a safe, healthy, smoke-free work environment. No worker should have to breathe something that causes cancer to hold a job, or have to give up a job just to prevent getting sick. Clean indoor air is a basic right to which all workers should be entitled."

This message is logically strong: Laws against smoking in the workplace in cities like New York were already in place to protect most workers from having to do their jobs in a smoke-filled environment. Why should workers in restaurants and bars be treated unequally?

The message also carries strong moral authority. Restaurant and bar patrons can choose not to go to restaurants or bars that allow smoking, as the tobacco companies argued. But workers do not have that choice. In these workplaces, they must accept involuntary exposure to smoke to earn a living.

Ultimately, the message that all workers deserved equal and fair treatment was quick to arouse public passion. This support sped the passing of stronger laws—much more quickly than messages that raised concerns for restaurant or bar patrons.

Design Effective Messages

Experienced tobacco control advocates have built a toolkit of techniques to help them design effective messages. We list some of those tools here, along with references and links to more extensive guidance.

Numbers That "Sing"

Tobacco control advocates can develop motivating messages by presenting statistics in ways that convey scientific truths and also move an audience emotionally. This technique has been called "creative epidemiology" or "social math"—mathematics applied for a social purpose.

Over a decade ago, public health economist Ken Warner used this technique in a message on the death toll of smoking: "Smoking kills more people than heroin, cocaine, alcohol, AIDS, fires, homicide, suicide, and automobile accidents combined."

This message is logically sound; it is based on scrupulous scientific data. But it conveys much more than facts.

First, the message compares deaths from tobacco with deaths from other causes that readily command public action throughout the world, such as illicit drug use and AIDS. This comparison carries the "moral authority" that smoking merits at least the same level of public action. Second, the message associates death from smoking with death from other terrible scourges that arouse our compassion and fear. It thus meets all of Klein's criteria for an effective advocacy message: It is logically persuasive, morally authoritative, and capable of evoking passion.

Here are a few more examples of health messages that take the cold numbers from statistical studies and make them "speak to the heart."

A particularly effective message comes from Tony Schwartz, an advocacy genius who has made more than 500 anti-tobacco television and radio commercials:

The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India recently churned out some interesting sound bites from epidemiological research:

Words That Connect with Underlying Value Systems

Tobacco control advocates have also drawn from research in the academic field of cognitive linguistics to create useful messages.

A leading scholar in this field, George Lakoff, has an important lesson for advocacy: People generally do not come to their feelings about political issues by analyzing them in the context of a political philosophy—liberal or conservative. Instead, they form these preferences unconsciously: They relate political issues to familiar words and images that carry imbedded values and feelings.

For instance, Lakoff observes that we almost all speak—and, unconsciously, think—of our country and our government as our "family." As a result, we apply the same moral standard to questions of governance that we apply to the raising of children.

Conservatives elevate the moral value of the strict father within the family, Lakoff notes. They deeply believe that children develop character and virtue only through building moral strength, individual responsibility, self-reliance, and discipline. Virtue comes only from respect and obedience to authority, tradition, and heritage. Grown children can survive in a harsh world only through hard work, competition, common sense, and earning.

For conservatives, then, "freedom" means the capacity for an individual to be justly rewarded for hard work—or to be reasonably punished for dependency, self-indulgence, decay, or degeneracy.

As Lakoff writes of this belief system: "An important consequence of giving highest priority to the metaphor of moral strength is that it rules out any explanation in terms of social forces. . . . If moral people just have the discipline to say no to drugs, . . . then failure to do so is moral weakness."

What does this mean for tobacco control advocates who are developing messages targeted at conservatives? The words we choose to support our policy objectives must speak to their highly esteemed positive family values. Also, we must speak of those who resist our policies, such as the tobacco companies or politicians, in words that evoke negative conservative family values.

For example, a tobacco control advocate might say to conservative parliamentarians on the need for smoke-free workplaces:

What about liberals? Lakoff noted that liberals give highest place to the moral value of the nurturing parent. They deeply believe that children are strengthened by their parents' concern, caring, help, health, safety, and nutrition. Children flourish if they are allowed free expression and basic human dignity.

Therefore, tobacco control advocates can motivate liberals to support policies in which the role of the government is that of a nurturing parent. The key terms for liberals are social responsibility, free expression, human rights, equal rights, concern, care, help, health, safety, and basic human dignity.

Liberals are motivated to oppose policies and their advocates who are characterized by words that threaten the nurturing family/nation: oppression, deprivation, big corporations, corporate welfare, and pollution.

You might present social democrats and other liberals with the following argument:

George Lakoff's Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't can be ordered online at: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13121.ctl

Responsive-chord Messages

Advocate Tony Schwartz uses a technique in his message development that he calls "responsive-chord" communication. That is, the message strikes a "responsive chord" in its audience. Schwartz finds that an electronic message is delivered through the connection between its medium and "the stored information in the minds of those who receive the communication."

A good illustration of a responsive-chord message is an advertisement run by tobacco control advocates in California. Philip Morris had initiated a campaign to force a public vote in favor of Proposition 188, a proposed law that would have lowered California's high cigarette tax.

The tobacco control ad did not openly urge citizens to vote against the proposal. It simply displayed two columns under the heading, "Who is for? And who is against Proposition 188?" Under the "For" column, the advertisement listed all the US tobacco companies. Under the "Against" column were the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association, and the American Medical Association.

Proposition 188 was overwhelmingly defeated. The advertisement worked because the public trusted the cancer, lung, heart, and medical societies. By contrast, the names of the tobacco companies evoked untrustworthiness in viewers' minds. The ad struck a responsive chord, even though it did not analyze the content of the proposed law.

Responsive-chord messages often appear in the form of questions that will evoke feelings already present in the audience.

As in the case of the California ad campaign, effective responsive-chord questions often stir up public distrust of large corporations, especially the transnational tobacco companies. One might ask:

Or:

Here are other effective responsive-chord messages:

Shoba John, an Indian advocate and organizer, recently heard this statement at a workshop with tobacco farmers in India:

Focus Groups

The advocates' concern always is that their messages will move their target audience. To this end, advocacy professionals routinely hire specialized firms to select and bring together focus groups. These groups consist of randomly selected "typical" citizens who have not thought much, or systematically, about political issues. They commonly harbor contradictory feelings about issues that advocates consider self-evident. Their conversation helps advocates gain a sense of how "ordinary" people think and talk about particular issues, and what messages they are most likely to respond to.

Most tobacco control advocacy groups have no money to hire a specialized firm to organize a focus group. But they can easily reach out to friends and neighbors who are not involved in tobacco control and invite them to come together to sit and talk for a few hours (perhaps over a good dinner).

In the United States, focus groups reacted strongly against advertisements that were plainly meant to appeal to young children. They were not impressed by messages that emphasized the need to protect teenagers. Many people considered teenagers to be rebellious and beyond the reach of reason. This discovery led advocates to an important understanding about how to target their messages.

And, again, this understanding guided the leading tobacco control advocacy coalition in the United States to call itself "the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids," not tobacco-free teenagers.

Tobacco control advocates in the United States recently looked for ways to involve the US public in international advocacy on behalf of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. They spoke with focus groups in several large cities. The advocates found that ordinary citizens were not generally interested in helping to strengthen tobacco control efforts internationally—until they saw the advertising by US-based tobacco companies in developing countries. The ads clearly target children in those countries.

Advocates who met with community groups in Indian towns and villages also heard opinions useful for revising their tobacco control messages: The female participants resented only messages that detail tobacco's harmful effects on women. Apparently, Indian men used these details as an excuse for their own addiction. Instead, both genders would prefer messages that cordially discuss the economic concerns tobacco causes to the family and immediate community.

Further information can be found in "Getting the Message Right: Using Formative Research," Advisory #3, Blowing Away the Smoke: A Series of Advanced Media Advocacy Advisories for Tobacco control Advocates, which is available online at: http://www.strategyguides.globalink.org/guide04.htm

Use Cultural and Political Tact

Finally, we need to remember that an effective message is one attuned to the social and political cultures of a society. For example, Nigerians still harbor deep resentment against colonialism and its human rights abuses. With that resentment in mind, tobacco control activist Akinbode Oluwafemi created a powerful message: "Aggressive marketing by multinational tobacco companies violates Nigerian human rights." He explained:

Mira Aghi from India highlighted the "family values" of Indians to stop the advertisement of MS Cigarettes in the print media: "I asked the proprietors of the paper if they would want the girls in their family to take up smoking. That is definitely not an accepted norm in our culture, not the least for a woman from a respectable business house. And it worked. No more ads of this brand were ever seen around."

When British American Tobacco began to heavily publicize its Voyage of Discovery yacht in Bangladesh, local advocates countered with a poster that pictured a boat and made pointed references to colonialism—the underlying message was that the British first came to politically and economically colonize our country, and now they're back again to do so economically.

Cultural and political feelings can also limit the use of messages that have succeeded in other societies. Some countries, thanks in large part to aggressive reporting, view tobacco companies as evil. But many other countries consider the tobacco industry benevolent. Smokers view the transnational tobacco companies as welcome contributors of "quality" cigarettes. Even nonsmokers view them as a welcome source of economic investment and jobs. In these nations, a media advocacy campaign based on messages that evoke negative feelings about the tobacco companies may not prove effective.

Similarly, advocates need to be cautious with messages that emphasize religious values in support of law and regulations. These may be persuasive in religiously homogeneous societies but may be seen as inappropriate in secular and pluralistic societies.

We also need to be aware that cultural differences can influence the effectiveness of the messengers we choose to carry our advocacy message. For example, in the United States, many admire young people who openly criticize political leaders for accepting gifts from tobacco companies. They are commended for an idealism that both the U.S. media and politicians respond to favorably. But many other societies consider outspoken criticism by young people rude and disrespectful behavior, at the very least. Messages they deliver will not be heard with favor.