An enemy is crystallizing.  It’s motivating.   “Rally the mostly satisfied, even-keeled moderates to storm the bastille.”,  said nobody ever.

Does your organization have an enemy?  The rich, the establishment, the pro-this or con-that, the anti-whatever you stand for?

Or maybe there’s just a big, prevailing message that has lots of air time, exposure or shelf-life that undercuts the resonance of your message?

What if you could use that weight and heft of the opposition message to make your message stand out more and do its job better?  That would be the equivalent of Jiu-Jitsu with the smaller opponent using the size advantage of his opponent against him.

A very cool experiment did just this.  It was in the world of candidate politics where everybody has an enemy.  But, the application for many situations is there for the creative, enterprising group.

There are four ads, A-D, each representing a different test condition.

• Control:  The top left (A) was lifted directly from the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary and Gretchen Whitmer’s campaign.
• Traditional:  Top right (B) was run in response by Shri Thanedar, one of Whitmer’s primary opponents.  It’s a traditional counterpoint without ever explicitly referencing the opponent’s ad or message.
• Half Jiu-Jitsu.  Bottom left (C).  This ad was created by researchers to test the theory of a counterpoint message from Thanedar being able to use the “enemy” (Whitmer’s) message’s exposure, salience and memory associations against Whitmer.  You can see it includes most of Whitmer’s original ad and offers up key counterpoints included in Thanedar’s Traditional response ad.(B)
• Full Jiu-Jitsu.  Bottom right (D).  This is a literal merging of Whitmer’s original and Thanedar’s counterpoint, traditional response ad with header copy and the visual delineation.

People in the two Jiu-Jitsu conditions rated Whitmer as less trustworthy and expressed less interest in voting for her and donated less to her when given the chance.  And the full Jiu-Jitsu did better than the partial in driving down positive sentiment toward Whitmer and also in lowering donations to her.

Perhaps most important, the Jiu-Jitsu ads had more staying power than the Traditional ad.  The sentiment toward Whitmer remained much lower after two weeks than those in the  Traditional group whose sentiment toward Whitmer was only slightly below the Control group who saw nothing but the positive Whitmer ad.

What’s going on here?  The “enemy” ad has exposure and that exposure gets stored in our memory banks.  The Jiu-Jitsu ad takes advantage of the enemy ad being stored in memory, conjures it up and creates a new linkage between the memory and a direct, counterpoint.

This is a way to give your message extra salience and exposure without having to pay for it.  It’s a way to turn an enemy’s strength into a weakness.

In a prior life I did work for Budweiser.  Come to think of it, I still sort of work for Budweiser, I just don’t get paid and it’s a stretch to call it work.  Most people would call it drinking.

At any rate, we found out that Budweiser had so dominated the airwaves during NFL football games that consumers believed every beer ad they saw was Budweiser, even when it was a Miller or Coors ad.  The associative memory was football = beer = Budweiser.  That’s powerful.

I don’t think the Miller folks were necessarily thinking about Jiu-Jitsu when they decided to go directly after Budweiser in their ads but that was part of their answer to breaking through.  Up until that point, they were advertising for Bud.

Kevin