Nam­ing & Fram­ing: Mas­ter­ing the Power of Words

Course content

Picking or creating the right words for something is crucial to how people will understand that 'something' and whether they will love it or hate it, believe it or reject it, fear it or desire it… or buy it. Dealing systematically with these matters is a vital part of the job in a variety of fields that span from marketing, branding, and advertising, through PR and political communication, to national and cultural identity building, public health promotion, and climate-change action.

In recent years, the phrase naming & framing has become increasingly used for referring to the totality of communicative and psychological mechanisms in play here. The present course offers an integrated introduction to naming & framing processes as they unfold in the domains mentioned, and in everyday life. An emphasis is put on bridging between complementary theoretical perspectives and, not least, between theory and practice.

The overarching rationale is that the power of words does not come down to one, but to four different, but tightly interwoven enterprises:

1. Giving things names (otherwise, no one will care).
2. Deciding on what name to give them (green tax works better than fuel tax).
3. Further shaping people’s understanding of these names through surrounding verbal and non-verbal cues (Apple® just means ‘apple’, but has been framed to success by other words, images, and immediate consumer experiences).
4. Selecting larger sets of names and supporting non-vebal cues for presenting a wider subject in a particular light (a coup against a government is bad, a rebellion against a regime is good – but the words may well refer to the same events).

The course combines general insights on persuasive and marketing communication with recent experimental findings on people’s real-time decoding of innovative single words (product and brand names, political buzzwords, etc. but also plain words) and whole “cocktails” of words, texts, colours, pictures, films, actions etc. that are served across a variety of platforms to promote a variety communicative agendas and goals. The course furthermore addresses psychological mechanisms such as stereotype thinking, mental shortcuts and biases, and cost/benefit tradeoffs in information processing that make us receptive to persuasive framing effects. Throughout, word-based framing is seen as both depending on and contributing to framing effects achieved through non-verbal communi­cative means (pictures, colours, symbols, shapes, tastes, etc.).

In addition to the theoretical curriculum, the participants will be introduced to selected methodological principles and tools suited for pinpointing the essence of concrete naming & framing challenges and for developing and pre-testing possible solutions to them. There will also be opportunities to try some of them out hands-on on a smaller scale. The hands-on aspects of working with naming & framing will be centred around a Live Case, as further described below. This work will also serve as a framing for the final exam.