Persuading: The Technique of Tentative Talk
In 2004, Volkswagen’s retail theme was “Drive it. You’ll get it.” Consumers connected with the
double meaning. The line conveyed that to fully appreciate a Volkswagen’s performance features, you
had to sit behind the wheel. It also carried another message: if you take the car for a test drive, you’ll
love it so much that you’ll end up buying it. It was just one of a string of memorable campaigns from
Arnold Worldwide, Volkswagen’s advertising agency. But Don Lane, the man who generated the
clever “Drive it. You’ll get it” theme, never appeared in the credits.
Lane was a senior account executive, not a member of the creative department. His job was to
package and sell the creative team’s ideas. One day, while stuck on a strategic brief for the creative
team, an idea popped into his head. Instead of writing the strategy, he wrote a sample script that
ended with the line, “Drive it. You’ll get it.”
It wasn’t standard practice for an account person to come to the creative team with a solution,
instead of a problem to solve. In fact, it was forbidden for an account guy to contribute to the creative
process. So Lane had a dilemma: how could he get the creative team to listen? If he were a taker, he
might have stormed into the creative director’s office to pitch the line, lobby powerfully for it, and
demand full credit. If he were a matcher, he might have offered a favor to the creative team and hoped
for reciprocity, or called in a favor owed. But Lane leaned in the giver direction. He wasn’t
concerned about the credit; he just wanted to help the creative team and see a good line get
implemented. “In our business, creative people are gifted and deserve to get most of, if not all of, the
credit. Some account management people resent that,” Lane says. “I knew that my job was to help
creative people and provide space for them to come up with ideas. I didn’t really care if anyone knew
it was my idea. It didn’t matter where the idea came from. If it worked, we would all share in the
success.”
Lane walked into the creative director’s office. Instead of using powerful communication—“I
have a great line, you should use it”—he went with a softer approach. He presented a sample radio
script to show how it would work. Then he said to the creative director, “I know this is against the
rules, but I want to give you a sense of what I’m talking about. What do you think of this line? ‘Drive
it, you’ll get it.’”
The creative director got it. He looked up at Lane, smiled, and said, “That’s our campaign.” The
campaign sold many cars and won several advertising awards.
Alison Fragale, a professor at the University of North Carolina, is an expert on the form of
powerless communication that Don Lane used effectively. Fragale finds that speech styles send
signals about who’s a giver and who’s a taker. Takers tend to use powerful speech: they’re assertive
and direct. Givers tend to use more powerless speech, talking with tentative markers like these:
Hesitations: “well,” “um,” “uh,” “you know”
Hedges: “kinda,” “sorta,” “maybe,” “probably,” “I think”
Disclaimers: “this may be a bad idea, but”
Tag questions: “that’s interesting, isn’t it?” or “that’s a good idea, right?”
Intensifiers: “really,” “very,” “quite”