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The first conference I attended early on in my career was held in Portland, Oregon, and it featured a handful of brilliant speakers from different design studios and ad agencies across North America. These were accomplished and impressive people. I heard fascinating presentations, thought-provoking ideas, and endless amounts of indiscriminate swearing. It was riveting stuff. But there was one moment I still recall all these years later. It came from an ad man turned meditation teacher. His talk covered a lot of themes — mindfulness, sleep, clarity of mind, etc. — but at one point he lobbed out this memorable non sequitur regarding caffeine: “coffee doesn’t give you energy, it just masks your tiredness.”

To this day, I don’t know if this is statement is even true, scientifically speaking. I’ve never had the urge to Huberman its validity. But the fact it’s stuck with me all these years later, proves it was an effectively ‘sticky’ statement. And it’s this type of messaging that works wonders in the world of marketing. We call it a reframe.

Reframing, as the name suggests, simply means to change the context, or frame, with which something can be viewed. Great marketers use it instinctively. Others sometimes struggle to fully appreciate its potential. But they should. Because sometimes solving the biggest challenges in business doesn’t require reimagining the product, adding new features, finding a new market fit, or bringing any sort of wholesale change to whatever it is you’re already doing. Sometimes, it’s just as easily solved by simply shifting the way people perceive something in the first place.

REFRAMING IN THE REAL WORLD

A classic example of reframing comes from the 1984 Presidential Debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. When the event’s moderator pressed Reagan on his age and the fact that he was, at that time, the oldest candidate in American history to run for president (ah, the good old days), Reagan quickly retorted, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign, [and] I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The audience laughed. His opponent did, too. And just like that — at a critical campaign moment and on the biggest national stage imaginable — Reagan averted one of his biggest criticisms and emerged more formidable than ever before. A metaphorical mic drop, if there ever was one.

The reason reframing can be so powerful is because it creates what psychotherapists refer to as a “second-order change.” It doesn’t just create an incremental shift or provide some additional information to consider. Instead it introduces a fundamental flip in how we understand, perceive or evaluate something. It resets our reflexive first impressions. It provides a new perspective on how to react to something. It’s also a remarkably flexible strategic device that can be put into practice in a variety of ways.

REFRAMING OPPORTUNITIES

In the first half of the 20th century, the legendary PR man Edward Bernays was working on behalf of the American Tobacco Company. His goal was straightforward enough: to get more people to take up the habit of huffing down cancer sticks. Bernays — that brilliant, unscrupulous bastard — identified a business opportunity in getting more women to smoke cigarrettes, still a relatively untapped market at the time. But Bernays knew he’d first need to upend the social taboo that women shouldn’t smoke. Naturally, he set out to reframe cigarettes themselves: from a symbol of masculinity to the apotheosis of feminist emancipation. “Torches of Freedom”, he called them, launching a nationwide movement that would portray smoking as a glamorous, rebellious and empowering act for the time’s progressively-minded women [1].

It was a total public relations coup. Bernays launched a highly-publicized march in the Easter Sunday Parade in New York City in 1929, along with some of the time’s most prominent female activists, all advocating for women to smoke — openly and unapologetically — as a way of fighting yet another outdated gender stereotype. And it worked. No longer a social taboo, smoking cigarettes became a badge of honor. In less than a decade, the smoking rates among women in the U.S. more than doubled. So, cool, I guess?

REFRAMING PROBLEMS

When done well, reframing can work wonders. Problems assumed to be unsolvable can be overcome, sometimes seemingly overnight. Take, for instance, when the British ad agency AMV began working with Guinness in the mid-1990s.

Guinness had never been an ordinary beer, but at the time, many were annoyed with how long it took to properly pour a pint. For bartenders in particular, serving Guinness just meant slower service, more time and less turnover [2]. The brand knew this, and was more than a little self-conscious about this aspect of their product. Leadership insisted, “the extended pour time shouldn’t be mentioned, as the dwell may well be a potential barrier to a younger demographic.” To which AMV said, “hold my beer.” They decided to reframe the stout’s slow and protracted pour into something worth accentuating, rather than something to be avoided. Slowness connoted specialness, the thinking went. It also signaled quality and a conspicuous point of difference compared to all the other beers behind any bar. “Good things come to those who wait” became the tagline of Guinness’s new campaign, a platform that would run for years to come and remains seen as one of advertising’s most influential campaigns of all time.

REFRAMING (ALMOST) ANYTHING

The thing that makes reframing such an indispensable tool is that it’s such a widely applicable technique. You can reframe products, audiences, expectations or behaviors. You can reframe opportunities, challenges, and entire categories, too.

You can reframe functional product features into more compelling product benefits — like when Apple famously launched the iPod by shifting the focus of its technological achievement away from 5GB of storage and instead to “1,000 songs in your pocket.”

You can reframe expected product benefits into more provoking consumer motivations — like when Listerine devilishly devised its “often a bridesmaid, never a bride” slogan as a way to recast its mouthwash from an oral hygiene product into one playing off people’s fears of social and romantic rejection [3].

You can even reframe noble causes into beautiful campaigns — like when the American Cancer Society transformed its heroic (but sometimes scary sounding) mission of “saving lives” through cancer research, and reframed it ever so slightly to become “the official sponsor of more birthdays” — a move that managed to show people how cancer research can be cause for celebration, transforming a sobering mission into one of hope and joy.

Reframing is especially useful for those trying to create positive change in a stubbornly resistant world. One of the classic examples comes from the Lone Star state.

In the 1980s, the Texas Department of Transportation had a real problem on its hands. For years, litter had continued to pile up alongside the state’s thousands of miles of highway, costing Texas upwards of $20 million per year in continual clean up efforts. It didn’t seem like anything could kick the bad habit, but it wasn’t due to a lack of trying. Plenty of non-profits, businesses, and government agencies had teamed up over the years to try and change the cultural attitude around littering — most notably a rather finger-wagging ad campaign from a group called Keep America Beautiful which featured some heartfelt calls for solidarity and the now infamous image of a Native American shedding a tear. The ads were plastered across print ads, radio commercials, even billboards alongside the roads they were intended to rescue. But nothing worked.

That is, until the Texas-based advertising agency GSD&M decided to take a different tact entirely. Instead of convincing Texans to abstain from littering as some earnest act of environmental stewardship, they reframed it all as the ultimate symbol of state pride [4]. It was brilliantly simple: to litter was to disrespect the greatest state that God ever did create. “Don’t Mess With Texas” became the campaign that would run for over three decades, and would be appropriated by celebrities, college football fans, U.S. presidents, and everyone in between.

WHY REFRAMING MATTERS TO EVERYONE

Once you start to recognize the basic mechanisms of reframing, it’s hard not to see it at work all around us. It’s on full display in journalism and politics, entertainment and education. It’s done on podcasts, and in Parliament, and from pulpits the world over. Wherever there is opportunity to shape public perception and influence behavior, reframing probably isn’t too far behind. We are — as Viktor Frankl reminds us — meaning-seeking creatures, desperate to make sense of the world around us. Reframing is a way of molding perception to fit our strategic aims.

But here’s the thing. While reframing holds obvious utility for marketers, entrepreneurs and other species of Corporatus Enthusiasticus, it provides plenty of practicality for all the rest of us, too. Reframing lets us turn past failures into personal lessons. Perceived weaknesses into unique strengths. We recognize there may actually be some kernel of truth in all those cheesy social media posts imploring us to flip our negative “I have to” thinking into more positive “I get to” thoughts. Reframing is a mental martial art, and it can help us achieve a higher quality of life once we master the right moves.

Ultimately, much of this boils down to building strategic literacy and better critical thinking. Because as a tool of persuasion, reframing can be powerful stuff. It can be wielded by us, or it can be weaponized against us. It can be used positively, or it can be deployed more deceptively. It could work to galvanize support and spark important conversations, just as it could be used to avoid scrutiny, evade attention and erode social contracts.

Either way, “reframing” — and the many ways it can be used — is an important technique for all of us to better recognize, appreciate and understand. May we start to see it less as just some esoteric outgrowth of stuffy boardrooms and business schools, and more as a powerful development tool to shape our minds, our work and the world around us.

Reframing the reframe, if you will.