By Erin Norman, VP Public Policy
Key Takeaways
- Strategic language testing helps organizations ensure their messages resonate with target audiences.
- Word Equity measures the emotional impact—positive or negative—of specific words and phrases.
- Personal Vocabulary Fit reveals whether a word feels familiar and relatable to everyday people.
- Using negative or unfamiliar language can alienate audiences and weaken message effectiveness.
- Heart+Mind’s research confirms that political messaging often misses the mark with average Americans.
- Heart+Mind Strategies invites organizations to join its monthly language testing study to improve message clarity and connection.
The Power of Language: Why Every Word Matters
At Heart+Mind Strategies a core part of our strategy and message development is testing the language clients use in their campaigns—not just taglines and messages, but down to the specific words themselves.
- Is it more important that a policy is “just” or “fair?”
- Should we talk about what’s good for “workers” or our “employees?”
- Is it more important to highlight benefits of our ideas or drawbacks of our opposition?
Beyond the challenge of choosing from a wide range of words, client teams often fall into “inside baseball” language—terms that make sense to a core team but fail to resonate with key external audiences. Language testing is the most effective way to ensure your message is clearly understood by the people who matter most.
Given our love of testing language, we were intrigued by the recent memo from Third Way on words and phrases the Democratic Party should avoid. The authors of the memo had anecdotal experience driving their recommendations, but we wanted to use our custom language testing measures to get some deeper intel on today’s political words and phrases.
RELATED: Power of Words Roundtable
Word Equity: Measuring Emotional Impact in Messaging
Word Equity is Heart+Mind’s tool for understanding if a word or phrase elicits a positive or negative feeling among the target audience.
Our results show that most of the words from the Third Way memo are negative. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as strongly negative words can be used to effectively steer people away from certain policies and ideas. However, a lexicon with only negative words will only stoke negative emotions and not give people something positive to move towards. Over time, this is a failing messaging strategy.
Personal Vocabulary Fit: Speak the Language of Your Audience
Our Personal Vocabulary Fit is a measure of whether “people like me” use a word in their day-to-day life. Using words that are outside your audience’s typical experience signals that you are not like them, which prohibits real connection with a candidate or idea.
Our findings confirm the point from Third Way that words used by Democratic leaders are speaking to political circles and hyper-engaged voters – not the majority of Americans. The average person isn’t using words that often appear in communications from the party and that hurts the party’s ability to connect with the average American. If a messenger doesn’t resonate with its audience, the underlying message can only do so much.
Putting It All Together To Avoid “Out of Touch” Language
Positive words that most people use include core American concepts like “Freedom,” “Justice,” “Liberty,” and “Economic Opportunity.”
Words that evoke negative emotions and are also seen as out of touch include “Microaggression,” “System of Oppression,” “The Unhoused,” and “Implicit Bias.” Using words that fall into the “Negative/Not Like Me” category will both leave negative emotions and signal you have different priorities than your audience.
The graphs below show how words fall among Registered Voters, Self-Identified Republicans and Self-Identified Democrats.
We started with words commonly used by Democrats because other organizations started the conversation and provided a list of words they felt needed to be examined. Heart+Mind is planning to repeat this language testing exercise with words and phrases used by right-of-center politicians and organizations. We welcome suggestions of words you would like to see tested.
Your Words Matter. Let’s Make Them Count.
Heart+Mind Strategies believes in people and the power of choice. We champion people’s ability and right to choose the ideas, leaders and solutions that best reflect their needs, wants and values. The words organizations use to share their perspective carry tremendous weight—and can dramatically shape how ideas are perceived. Choose the wrong words, and people may choose something else. Moreover, word associations and meanings can shift quickly with changing demographics, news cycles, and pop culture. Regularly testing and refining language is essential to ensure messages continue to resonate as intended.
Connect with Erin Norman to learn more about Heart+Mind’s Language Measures or to add language to our monthly testing study.