You can never say it enough to your client: "Stay on message… Remember to bridge back to the message… Repeat the message... Say it again and again."

Clients hate this. They get bored repeating the same messages over and over. They start to ad lib. The next thing you know you have a new, bigger, more complicated problem on your hands.

So the next time you are advising a client to stay on message and keep repeating the messages you can point to three studies highlighted in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 96(1), Jan 2009, 32-44. Here is the abstract:

Repeated statements are perceived as more valid than novel ones, termed the illusion of truth effect, presumably because repetition imbues the statement with familiarity. In 3 studies, the authors examined the conditions under which and the processes by which familiarity signals from repetition and argument quality signals from processing of message content influenced agreement with persuasive arguments. Participants with low or high motivation to process information were presented persuasive arguments seen once or twice. In all 3 studies, repetition increased the persuasiveness of weak and strong arguments when little processing of message content occurred. Two of the studies used a process dissociation procedure to reveal that both greater controlled processing (which reflected argument content) and the greater automatic influence of familiarity (which reflected repetition) were associated with increased acceptance of strong arguments but that greater controlled processing dissipated the benefits of familiarity for agreement with weak arguments.

Repeat after me: “Repetition increased the persuasiveness of weak and strong arguments…. .”

I believe that this research also validates the recommendation to engage in a broad campaign of so that the audience are hearing the messages from multiple sources. Apparently, the echo chamber works.

Hat tip to JuryVox at Twitter for bringing the blog post at Crime & Federalism to my attention.

Updated 2/8/2009 11:23:40 PM

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