Forget focus groups, polls, and studies with control groups. If you, or at least if we pros in public affairs and marcom, want to know if something will work: USE THE GIGGLES TEST. It's cheap, fast and is devastatingly on the money. That's exactly what I did with the Rhode Island's $2.4 billion abatement plan which will import 10,000 construction workers into the state and toss out thousands from their apartments and This Old House. Where will the Newport mansion set store their antiques?
Well, over the weekend I old-lady bobbed to where the teenagers hang in our neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut.
"Want to make a few bucks?"
I had more than enough takers. I explained in sixth-grade concepts and language the cost, logistics and supposed results of the $2.4 billion Rhode Island lead-paint abatement plan. I kept a straight face.
Their faces went into puzzlement, then a glaze-over. [If they were my Gen they would have asked, "Is this 'Candid Camera?'"] The situation was so weird that it never triggered giggles.
"So what would you do if you were the government officials in Rhode Island?" That's what I asked them. They said they would paint over the flaking paint.
The last time I used the giggles test was to help a client, who heads sales for a financial-services outfit, out of a slump. On Tuesdays, those coin washers and dryers are free in a laundromat just off New Britain Avenue In Hartford, Connecticut. I told him to give a brief version of his salespeople's pitches to the Tuesday crowd. He got it. And I got the assignment to develop the new marketing communications and sales scripts. [This case study got published as a letter-to-the-editor in ADVERTISING AGE.]
Question: Will the 12 jurors in "Thomas" - who are getting selected starting tomorrow - giggle when they hear Motley Rice plaintiff attorneys Fidelma Fitzpatrick/Jack McConnell gush about the wonderful finding of "thousands of documents" on the history of lead paint, health hazards and that alleged nefarious cabal the Lead Industries Association [LIA]. If not, then the giggles might rip if Professors Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner describe in painstaking detail their alleged objective analysis of those thousands of documents. ...
As one general counsel, not associated with "Thomas," sighed, "Oh to be in Milwaukee." In a Midwest setting this caricature of a trial could descend into total cartoon.