Big News in a “Small” World

---

Before anyone had breathed a word about “dueling populisms”, we were approached by a newspaper concerned that their steeply declining readership was due to perceptions of partisan bias, and they were ready to launch costly initiatives to reduce this bias. Finding very little preliminary evidence of perceived editorial bias, we suggested that their problem was not “left vs right” but “big vs small”, a growing mistrust of establishment institutions. As CNN and MSNBC were hemorrhaging viewership, trusted new players were emerging from grassroots channels, (such as Alex Jones and Joseph Mercola) whose viewerships were growing to dwarf those of the media giants, and advertising dollars followed. Legacy media had a major blind spot, starting from the assumption that people should trust them because of their prestige, and they were unable to diagnose the problem as a lack of trust in “bigness”. By swallowing this pill earlier than most, our client was able to survive the legacy media purge by orienting toward local impacts of global events, delivered by “people like me” rather than unrelatable, distant talking heads. Newspapers who were not able to get ahead of this shift are no longer with us.

Understanding this root cause, the client was also able to action on recommendations for bringing their digital presence in to the new age of news and reworking their ad targeting.

Frameworks: Theory of media dynamics, Applied risk perception

Tools: Media listening/analysis, Concept mapping, Voice-of-customer survey

Case study powered by Firstsight

 As one of our interview participants said, “If you ever want to curse your enemy, wish them to have a pressure ulcer.” Imagine being successfully treated in a hospital, only to be readmitted a week later due to complications from a pressure ulcer acquired in your hospital bed. Now, imagine being the hospital, who loses a portion of its CMS reimbursement because of the readmission. Complications from pressure ulcers can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat, while our a meta-analysis of the efficacy literature found that our client’s product reliably reduced the incidence of pressure ulcers to virtually zero, for pennies comparatively. So, it should have been a no-brainer to get accelerated regulatory approval, except that there was very little political will to drive this approval under the old CMS. The fee-for-service medical model disincentivized healthcare providers from embracing cheap prophylactic interventions, and entrenched producers of downstream treatments had little incentive to cheerlead for the product.

We worked with our client to engage the ACA-retooled CMS with a coalition of stakeholders designed to match the administration’s political priorities and arm them with messages to encourage CMS to fast track the addition of this inexpensive device to their coverage determinations. For example, darker skinned patients are at special risk of undetected pressure ulcers, and health equity was an emerging priority for the administration. This was one of our favorite examples of helping clients do good while doing well.

Frameworks: Distributive politics, Public Choice Theory

Tools: Statistical meta-analysis, Stakeholder/influencer mapping 

Case study powered by Firstsight

Alcohol markets are very heavily regulated, creating a three tier system of licensed producers, distributors, and retailers, which looks a lot like the territories enforced during prohibition-era mob control, with extra steps. As the libertarian strain of the political right pushes for less “nannyism” and freer markets, some states have begun to crack in their support for the three tier system, opening exceptions for craft breweries and distilleries.

Our client recognized this shift as a potential threat to combat, and a potential opportunity to embrace. In states with public and legislative support for decentralization and disruptive innovation, the client took the strategy of partnering with craft distillers to fill the power vacuum soon to be left open by governments loosening three tier enforcement. When public sentiment clashed with legislative control, the client had the option of tipping the scale in either direction. In states with popularly accepted legislative control, the client fought to preserve the three tier system, from which it had historically benefited. This kind of state-level segmentation and sequencing continues to prove useful as US states become less socially and civically homogenous, but brands also need to be aware that top-level branding is very difficult to firewall geographically and any segmented strategy needs to be vetted for blowback potential in other segments.

Frameworks: Bi-dimensional political spectrum, Extended producer responsibility, Human motivation

Tools: Web analytics, Factor analysis and clustering, Regulatory monitor

Case study powered by Firstsight

Vermont is a small place, but even regulations passed by small places can have big domino effects on markets. This is especially true for standardized packaged foods, because a packaging change in one market often means a packaging change in all markets. When Vermont was set to pass mandatory GMO labeling, the packaged food industry took it seriously. Grocery Manufacturers of America signaled a high willingness to fight this law, and it signaled this very publicly. Unfortunately, being correct and having the resources to win legally is not the same as winning reputationally, and our packaged foods client was concerned about reputational damage done by its association’s efforts to act in its best interest. Associations operate on the principle that a rising tide lifts all ships, but our client was positioned better than most competitors on GMO issues, so this felt more like an anchor.

By defecting early from this coalition and launching its own self-regulatory labeling solution, the client was first to market with labeling language that set a standard for the industry, and we were able to structure this labeling language to underscore the client’s competitive differentiators. Other packaged food influencers followed close behind, but being first to market with a solution remains a strong advantage for the client.

Frameworks: Food psychology, Distributive politics, Game theory

Tools: Media analytics, Message testing, Wargaming

Case study powered by Firstsight

Anyone who grew up with Crocodile Dundee, Riverdance, or vague Chinese tattoos knows that Americans periodically become enamored with another culture. These fascinations are not random. They are driven by geopolitical forces, trade flows, popular media, risk perception, and other factors. It is easy to predict trends that are already in motion, but predicting a perfect storm of factors that cause trend reversals or acceleration requires that we identify each of these forces and how they are causally connected. 

We worked with a large food client to identify which cuisines would gain momentum in the United States, using signposts like ingredient taboos, superfood fascinations, health and wellness trends, regulatory positions, trade flows, cultural mega-events, and tourism trends. For some trends, like Indian, the client wanted assurance that existing trends would not likely reverse. Some trends, like Peruvian cuisine were flat, but signals pointed to acceleration. Others, like French and Italian cuisine, were poised to reverse their downward slides as the low carb craze died down and anti-inflammatory Mediterranean diets took on a health and wellness halo. The ability to anticipate these trends enabled the client to position its ingredients and messaging for the next five years, instead of the last five.

Frameworks: Cultural assimilation, Taste perception, Moral psychology

Tools:Regulatory and trade monitor, Linguistic analysis, Game theory

Case study powered by Firstsight

When cultural trends align to demonize your product, and this movement is based on emotion rather than fact, fighting back with facts is often the wrong approach. Realigning your product with a new set of concepts can sidestep the stigma and reframe the discussion on your own terms.

We encountered this with a large wheat producer, whose product had been battered by alternative health media, environmental activists, diet gurus, and celebrity trends. The stigma surrounding wheat gluten and celiac disease had spilled from a niche medical audience into a mainstream anti-wheat movement, and consumer activists were making all manner of spurious associations between wheat and pesticides, GMOs, and other perceived technological risks. Trying to put out all of these individual fires would have fueled them further, but this confluence of negative messages opened up opportunities for indirect countermessaging. For example, wheat had strong “real people” and “real food” competencies, and was positioned to ride the incoming wave of anti-elitism and mistrust in reductionist science. Even the color scheme of wheat messaging could be tweaked to signal life and the flourishing of human civilization. In this case, reframing the discourse encouraged opportunistic dogpilers to move on to the next outrage.

Frameworks: Human risk perception, Color theory, Psychology of certainty, Haidt’s moral foundations theory, Theory of activist choice

Tools: Spectral analysis, Media analytics, Audience segmentation

Case study powered by Firstsight

Institutional entrepreneurs create new rules for changing games, and they are not always sensitive to whose toes they step on. While the rise of pharmacy benefit managers created pricing signals to standardize negotiations between drug distributors and insurance payors, their presence also created concerns about preserving the sovereignty and integrity of physician prescriptions. Because PBMs use drug price as one input to determine which drugs are included in insurers’ drug formularies, this means patients don’t always get the same drug that their doctor prescribes for their condition when there is a similar drug available at a lower cost, a practice called non-medical switching. 

However, the active pharmaceutical ingredient in a drug is only one consideration drug companies face in formulating a drug for a patient population. They also consider inactive excipients, synergistic compounds, and adjuvants to increase the performance of their therapeutics in their target population. Our client had spent significant resources tailoring its formulation to the needs of its patients, and needed a campaign to curtail the practice of non-medical switching when it had the potential to harm patient outcomes. They needed to convince key influencers that the cause was worthy and arm them with the right messages, disseminated through the right channels, in order to build support for their policy recommendation.

Frameworks: Medical ethics, Drug chemistry, Patent law, Risk perception

Tools:Influencer vetting and mapping, Message testing

Case study powered by Firstsight

Anyone who has read draft regulatory guidance is left asking, “So, what are we allowed to do?” The truth is that you don’t find out exactly where the boundaries are until someone crosses them. But, we can contextualize official guidance by pivoting it against 1) what we know about the people issuing the guidance and 2) what is actually being enforced.

In this case, we had a pharmaceutical client who needed to know what they could and could not do in their marketing materials, and what they could expect from marketing enforcement in the near future, as the agency was undergoing major structural and philosophical changes. Monitoring enforcement warnings letters, and comparing the content of the letters to the marketing copy and imagery, showed us what was being enforced. Understanding the surrounding institutional context showed us the “why”, and allowed us to successfully infer future enforcement boundaries that had not yet been revealed by enforcement action.

For example, when the FDA assembled social scientists into a risk communication committee, this signaled that enforcement was going to move away from objective fair balance in risk disclosure and toward the subjective perception of risks and benefits by people who use cognitive shortcuts rather than statistics to make treatment choices.

Frameworks: Public choice theory, Routes to persuasion, Iron Triangle

Tools:Image/text analysis, Stakeholder proximity mapping

Case study powered by Firstsight