One Bad Beef

Own the language, and you can own the thought. It’s the essence of spin, persuasion, or any of the rhetorical arts. Word selection seems so simple, but far too often we use the first words that spill out of our brains and neglect the denotation and connotation of those words.

Denotation: What a word explicitly means.

Connotation: What a word implies.

You could think of those two as the flip sides of a definition. The intended and the unintended. Both of them play a significant role in how a message is absorbed (or rejected.)

You might think manipulating others through language is difficult, but for the most part an unthinking and uncaring public will meet you more than halfway. Place the unfamiliar word in the proper place, and the reader or listener will attach meanings based on context that could play to your benefit.

Let’s say you’re a fast food chain, and you wanted to sell a lot of dishes that had poor cuts of meat. You’re up against more upscale competitors that tout “100% Black Angus Beef” or “Ground Sirloin” in burgers. You have no desire to actually upgrade your ingredients, but to compete you need to sell a better culinary experience. What would you do?

Good salesmen don’t sell the steak, they sell the sizzle. Steak is just meat, and meat is just something that provides sustenance. Ruth’s Criss doesn’t sell you a slab of meat in the commercials — it’s the ambiance, and that 1800-degree thick cut steak that pops and hisses as it comes to your table. The sizzle and the smell associated with it are the visceral hooks that make your mouth water. The steak? Well, it had better be good, but that’s not what is being promised.

Which brings us back to the fast food chain. Make the most out of what you have, Taco Bell. Your ads for “Carne Asada Steak” promise a fiesta in my mouth, whether you’re packing it in a grilled burrito or a Border Bowl. But what is “Carne Asada” anyway?

Literally translated, it means “marinated meat.” In some recipes, the meat is marinated overnight. And as I recall, the cuts of meat you have to marinate the longest aren’t exactly the ones at the expensive end of the meat counter.

What Taco Bell has done is brilliant in terms of selling the sizzle, instead of the steaklike-substance. The use of a fancy (albeit exotic and foreign sounding) term allows the potential customer to fill in the final blanks. “Carne Asada” sounds more upscale than it really is, which makes us feel like we got more value for our dollar. But at the end of the day, we’re still talking about making the most out of a less-than-choice cut of meat.

Own the words, and you can own the world.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Communication, Language, Persuasion, Business, Sales, Taco Bell, Carne Asada[/tags]