The Listening Con

The Listening Con
How the powerful learned to launder their reputations using focus groups
link:https://thebaffler.com/latest/listening-con-featherstone

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………Walmart simultaneously created a new demographic category and cast itself as a friend of America’s struggling women with its bipartisan “Walmart Moms” focus groups. This only ratified what most Americans at some level already understood: that politics and consumerism had become one and the same. Both required the participation and opinions of ordinary people, yet granted big corporations the power to make the important decisions. Just as significantly, it showed that a company beseiged by criticism—in this case, for its treatment of working-class women—could easily change the subject by listening. With the creation of these focus groups, and by labeling them “Walmart Moms,” Walmart deftly re-branded itself from oppressor to champion of the nation’s hard-working women.

Most of all, the Walmart Moms group—and the public relations campaign surrounding it—enacted one of the central political paradoxes of our time: ordinary people are listened to more than ever, even as they have less and less real power. Only in this sort of political environment could a company notorious for rendering working-class women powerless and exploited, then turn around and theatrically display their voices, one in which elites ignore the actual needs of the masses—in this company’s case, for living wages, healthcare, and equal treatment—but listen to them endlessly.

How did we get here?

While the early, mid-century focus group had….
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……Reagan’s “policies aren’t popular the rhetoric surrounding them can be.” This was a critical shift in the use of the focus group: it could be used, not to find out what people wanted, but how to get them to accept things they didn’t want at all.

Wirthlin arranged for viewers to watch TV with a dial device, that they could use to indicate whether they liked or didn’t like a particular passage of speech. Similar to the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer, these devices had been used to test political campaign ads since the 1960s. Wirthlin, however, was the first to integrate the technology into a sitting president’s communication strategy.

“You persuade by reason,” said Wirthlin, “but if you want to motivate you have got to do it through emotion. You do that by tapping into people’s values.” He made “caring maps” to chart how the American people felt about things.

Wirthlin used focus groups at some key historic moments. For example….
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…..Both Democratic and Republican consultants in this period were clear that the focus groups did not shape the policies; rather, leaders knew what they wanted to do and used focus groups to figure out how to sell these policies.

The political focus group took off in this period in part because it was needed more than ever to bridge the widening gap between masses and elites. With the experiences of the haves and have-nots increasingly diverging, so were their political agendas, meaning that the goal of the focus group became, increasingly, not to find out what the people need but to determine how best to sell them on policies at odds with their interests…….see link