Language Research
Stop guessing what your audience hears. Measure it.
Every strong opinion in your conference room is a hypothesis. Michael's research puts your actual language in front of your actual audience and records the verdict — second by second.
Why language needs its own research
Conventional market research tells you what people think about your category, your brand, and your competitors. It rarely tells you what happens in the four seconds after a customer reads your headline, hears your disclaimer, or listens to your CEO explain a fee. Yet those four seconds are where trust is won or lost. Language research is a different discipline: it treats words — individual words, phrases, sentences, and sequences — as the unit of analysis.
Michael pioneered this approach in practice over two decades of testing corporate, financial, healthcare, and public-policy language. The method's core insight is deceptively simple: people cannot reliably tell you why a message fails, but they reveal it instantly in how they react. The research is designed to capture that reaction before the rationalizations begin.
The toolkit
- Instant-response dial sessions. Participants react to messages in real time, turning a dial from 0 to 100 as they listen or read. The resulting trace shows exactly which sentence built credibility and which one destroyed it — a level of precision no survey can match.
- Qualitative deep dives. Moderated groups and one-on-one interviews that explore the "why" behind the dials: the associations, suspicions, and misreadings your language triggers.
- Quantitative message surveys. Large-sample studies that pit alternative framings against each other across segments, so you know not just which message wins, but with whom and by how much.
- Language audits. A structured review of your existing materials — websites, scripts, disclosures, executive communications — scored against the principles of credible language, with rewrites included.
What you receive
The deliverable is never a chart deck that gathers dust. Every study ends in a language playbook: the tested messages that won, the words and phrases to retire, the answers to the hardest questions your audience will ask, and the rationale behind each recommendation so your team can extend the findings to new material. Research findings arrive as sentences you can say tomorrow, not abstractions you have to interpret.
Where it delivers the most value
- Before a launch, campaign, or repositioning locks its messaging
- When legal accuracy and audience comprehension are in tension — disclosures, terms, pricing
- When a message that "should" work keeps underperforming and nobody can explain why
- When internal factions disagree about tone and someone needs an impartial referee: the audience
"Watching the dials drop on our favorite sentence was painful for exactly one minute. Then it was the most useful thing we learned all year." VP of Brand, national retailer
Commission a study
Research engagements are scoped to the decision you need to make — from a single-market qualitative sprint to a multi-phase national program. Tell Michael what you're trying to decide, and he'll propose the lightest design that answers the question with confidence.