Listening before talking

Why campaign research so often fails to change minds, and what we’ve learned about doing it better.

Anyone who has spent time around campaigns will recognise the moment. The research is in, the debrief is done, and the message that emerges is… fine. Nobody hated it and it tested reasonably well, but it doesn’t feel like the thing that will shift how people see an issue, and if you’re honest, it isn’t very different from where you started.

We think that’s a real waste. Polls are good at telling you what people think, but campaigns that hope to change attitudes succeed or fail on how people think – the deeper, shared patterns that decide whether a message is welcomed, shrugged off or turned against you – and only qualitative work really gets you there.

We start with the wrong inputs. The people inside a cause are, almost by definition, the least typical audience for it. Making the case for more generous income support, the most “helpful” fact we tested – that fraud is only a tiny share of spending – backfired, because it quietly conceded that there is a category of undeserving people.

The research isn’t set up to hear anything new. Put eight strangers in a room with a moderator and people present a tidier version of themselves, and on the issues charities care about, it’s often the acceptable answer that hides the real barriers.

Ideas get tested in ways that reward the mediocre. Messages shown as a list of lines and rated one by one by mixed groups tend to lose anything distinctive, and the group settles on whatever offends least.

Nobody shares the vision. A debrief deck, however good, changes very few minds, and within months the old language creeps back.

We listen before we talk. People film themselves at home talking with a partner or friend, and rather than judging a message, they wrestle with a Conundrum: a statement that holds two things they’re likely to believe at once. Because neither half is the wrong answer, there’s nothing to defend, so people think out loud.

We group people by mindset, not demographics. On income support, the key divide wasn’t left versus right but how certain people were. On farmed fish welfare, supporting an animal charity told us almost nothing; what mattered was whether people had started to rethink their own diet.

We build whole stories and put them under pressure. We bring rounded narratives to life and expose them to the counter-arguments people will really hear, often in a KSBR HotHouse where the campaign team puts them to groups several times in an evening.

We put your team in other people’s shoes. We pair members of the team with individual participants and ask them to project themselves into that person’s life. It’s where teams finally let go of their own language, and because they’ve built the narrative themselves, they own it.

Start where people are, not where you are. For people who had made their peace with eating farmed animals, appeals to suffering bounced off, but the quality of the salmon on their own plate got their attention.

Talk about “people like us”, not “those people”. Talking about phases any of us might go through, like caring for a parent or retraining, made support feel reasonable rather than reckless.

Build on common ground, and offer hope, not decline. Describing “successful industries with the potential to be more so” gave people something to believe in, where talk of saving an industry only confirmed their pessimism.

By the end of a project, the team hasn’t been told what works. They’ve seen it, felt it and helped to build it, and they leave with a story they believe in enough to tell for years. It’s simply what happens when you treat research as a way of changing your own thinking before you try to change anyone else’s.

KSBR Brand Futures. Building narratives that energise, persuade and drive change.