What does... "framen" actually mean?
In his column "What does... actually mean?", Benno Maggi looks at terms from the marketing and communications sector. This time he deals with the term "frame".
Advent, Advent. As excessively as calendar doors are being opened and window frames decorated for Christmas, frames are currently being opened and thematically decorated in meetings. But it's not just in the run-up to Christmas that the verb "frame" has found its way into the lingo of advertisers, marketers and "communicators". It has been haunting meeting rooms for some time now and, according to the Duden dictionary, means to classify, categorize or assign something. Doing this seems more important today than in the past.
There is no other explanation for its almost excessive use. The word has been around for a long time. It was the sociologist Erving Goffman who coined the term "framing" in the 1970s and launched it within what is known as frame analysis. This is a kind of interpretation scheme that helps people to classify everyday experiences and categorize social experiences and events. In times like these, a good thing. The more complex everything becomes, the more we want to put situations into existing schemes of experience or frameworks in order to understand them. We can only answer questions such as "What is actually going on here?" in a reasonably satisfactory way if we place them in the context of what we have already experienced, otherwise a situation is neither meaningful nor comprehensible to us. So it's understandable that everything is being framed at the moment. And still difficult.
It's all about marketing
It was framed in sociology and psychology and from there it went via theater and film studies into our industry. And as it happens, our industry craves new words and then uses them in abundance.
If we question the elections in the USA, the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, climate change, migration, violence, housing shortages and other topics in order to understand what is going on, that makes sense. When political organizations and actors in the foreground and background frame issues to the point of manipulation in order to influence us, it becomes difficult. In a country like Switzerland, where the media is almost exclusively owned by billionaires, we have to deal with the question of how and by whom public opinion is shaped and major topics and news are framed.
Why should we also question campaigns, subjects or advertising texts in marketing meetings? Can't we simply judge them as good, bad or semi-successful in our meetings? This is only about marketing, not about society or even life and death.
Let's leave framing in the fields of psychology, politics and media analysis. Let's only use it in marketing and communication when it comes to consciously or manipulatively influencing or questioning perceptions. Let's be more careful about where something is being framed and where it is being judged objectively. Otherwise we will be like Truman Burbank in the film "The Truman Show", who only realized that he was not in real life but in a TV show when a spotlight fell in front of him. So, question the big frames and stop framing marketing decisions - please. Instead, open and decorate doors and windows not only during Advent, but also in your mind.
* Benno Maggi is co-founder and CEO of Partner & Partner. He has been eavesdropping on the industry for over 30 years, discovering words and terms for us that can either be used for small talk, pomposity, excitement, playing Scrabble, or just because.
