[I know I reference my mom quite frequently in my writing here about communications, politics, and whatnot, and it’s because she’s such an interesting audience member to me – highly-educated, raised under certain cultural circumstances (wartime Korea), extremely proficient in English, a wholehearted subscriber of the old forms of broadcast journalism, and a centrist to right voter until Trump came along. Anyway.]
When my parents’ health started to decline due to age and disease, I found myself doing a lot of research on their behalf having to do with where and how they would live, and what services they could access, and what in the Sam Hill was going on with my dad’s dementia and my mom’s various conditions and ailments. I often found myself in the role of imparting information to them, in other words, and having to explain different options and how things worked. Despite the fact that my mother, who is now in her late eighties, was and is still very much “all there,” I learned that over time that I have to explain things to her again and again, until she grasped what I was trying to convey to her and was able to make a more informed decision, one way or another.
It struck me, the other day, how much my interpersonal communication with my mother correlates to many things I’ve been taught about strategic communications, as a professional enterprise. One: trusted messenger. Even though I’m one of the only non-doctors in my family, my mom eventually came to respect my abilities to research lots of different topics for her, including health-related topics, and she also came to trust my motivations in sharing information with her, because I love her and want her to be safe. Two, message tone: my mom responds far better to gentle, encouraging delivery of information than she does to anger, frustration, or an “I know better than you” tone. Three, something a leadership coach once called “effective receipt of the information,” meaning, you may have delivered the message clearly and consistently, but you’ve also got to establish that the messages were heard and processed, which is a different thing. Sometimes I ask my mom to repeat back to me what I just told her, to check whether I’ve been heard. And finally four, message discipline and repetition – you’ve got to deliver the messages consistently, over time, more times than once. (Usually, many more times than once: it frustrates adult children so much when their parents appear to be stubborn for the sake of being stubborn, when I think in actuality, they are processing things bit by bit.)
It’s that last one that I want to spend a little time on, here, because I was thinking about whether those of us who are fighting back against corruption, disinformation, and bad acts are doing a good job these days with message discipline and repetition. First, a brief refresher: there is a boatload of social science out there about the cognitive capacities of human beings to hear and absorb information. In short: there is only so much information we can absorb at one time and oftentimes, we don’t understand what we hear when we first hear it. This is one of the prime reasons that the Orange Diaper-Baby and his minions have been so successful – they have flooded the airwaves with so much shit, we are not only struggling to process the important information, we are struggling with the overwhelm of it all.
This is why, when I was learning the theory and practice of strategic communications, I was told that a message needed to be repeated seven times before it took hold. (Fun fact: the seven times theory apparently originated with the 1930s film industry, when movie marketers believed audience members had to see a trailer seven times before they would buy a ticket.) This is also why communications professionals like me care so much about finding the right “sticky” messages, especially the taglines and slogans that stay in people’s minds forever. Advertising has many memorable examples – there is the famous “Think different” from Apple, the “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” from the United Negro College Fund, and the much-beloved tagline from a great organization I worked at, Earthjustice, which had the tagline: “Because the Earth needs a good lawyer.”
In other words, you’ve got to start with the right message and you’ve got to put it out there consistently, across multiple platforms, and you’ve got to make sure everyone allied to your cause are also putting the messages out there consistently, across multiple platforms. Your messengers, in other words, have to be in lockstep with each other, and the Republicans, unfortunately, have demonstrated quite a bit of understanding of message discipline and they are fairly disciplined about dodging questions on why they fail to do anything in terms of advancing this country’s progress. Think about it: failure to prevent gun violence became, “Thoughts and prayers.” Experts weighing in on end-of-life healthcare decisions became a “death panel.” Reproductive freedom and autonomy became “pro-life.” I actually think the Orange Diaper Baby’s slogan “Make America Great Again” could have had more legs had he not deteriorated further into a rotten, shambolic sack of shit.
But: I don’t want to devolve this conversation by making it about It and Him. What I want to noodle on here is how the rest of us who actually care about positive and equitable social change and stability and economic prosperity for America might think differently about message discipline. I think we need to be better about practicing message discipline, and we need to broaden our definition of what message discipline encompasses, beyond consistency and repetition. Here’s what I mean by that:
- We have to be more disciplined – and faster – about finding the right messages for the right moment, issues, and audiences. We should be investing more, not less, in research and development for messages and narratives to advance progress on the issues we care about. We should be taking stock of our messaging needs, like, at least weekly if not daily, and we should have a master playbook as to what the best and most updated messages are on issues like climate change, conservation, education, healthcare, etc. Every time we update messages on a particular topic, we should a) disseminate as broadly as possible among our allies and partners and target audiences and b) practice consistency and repetition for a period of time until we can tell what’s hitting or not hitting for target audiences.
- We have to practice the discipline of continually putting ourselves in our target audiences’ shoes. Part of the problem with our highly polarized discourse is that we are incredibly furious at the opposition and we are ALSO prone to getting furious at each other. This is not how battles are won, people. We have to think about what keeps the converted engaged AND we have to think about the people who are not necessarily die-hard MAGAs, but may be fluid and open to changing their perspectives on issues and don’t necessarily subscribe to any one political ideology.
- Finally, we have to think about message discipline as a tool to be wielded in a fight (I can’t quite bring myself to say “weapon,” but I’m getting close. Jon Stewart on his podcast recently talked about why he didn’t understand why people advocating for causes that matter just ceded the fight when the opposition outright lied about evidence or facts. He was arguing that information should be fought with information, period – and I agree with his take wholeheartedly.
It feels to me like too many people out there have gotten disillusioned, skeptical, and cynical about the possibility of change and progress. An encouraging exception to this are the No Kings protests – the third wave happened yesterday, March 28, 2026 – and people are continuing to rally behind this slogan and brand. “No Kings” has become an umbrella term for all the atrocities and injustices we feel are happening without our consent, in disregard of our Constitutional rights, and the signs carried by the protesters have gotten wonderfully specific and creative in outlining many of those atrocities and injustices. I am glad that so many Americans are stepping up to practice message discipline. I want those of us who actually get paid to do messaging for a living to do better. Because messaging and message discipline help to remind us of who we are and what we care about so we can utimately win back our country.
Minna Jung Consulting 