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It would have been hard to miss all the media attention this past few weeks on Elizabeth Edwards' recurring cancer and her husband's plan to continue with his presidential campaign. While you may or may not have read all of the April 1st New York Times article by Jane Gross, I was struck by a few sentences near the very end.
In it, Gross writes that political consultants cite:
"...the current yearning among American voters for authenticity and character in a candidate, and agreed that Mr. Edwards, without exploiting his family situation, has a singular opportunity in a crowded field."
Mr. Edwards long ago got good at storytelling as a plaintiffs' lawyer. How else would you make a powerful case against a defective $1 widget, if you couldn't persuasively share the human story related to it?
In the same way, Mrs. Edwards also understands how human connection gives emotion and context to the straightforward political issues. As Gross reports on Mrs. Edwards' recent address to a Cleveland luncheon:
"She said every lost job in the state and every unsecured chemical plant should have been translated into a story about a real person unable to feed a family, pay for health insurance or feel safe in a world besieged by terrorists. 'Our storytelling,' she said, 'needs to improve.'"
This reminded me of the incredible work of Erin Brockovich - the movie about whom I just happened to see again on television. Unlike traditional lawyers in such a huge case against the PG&E utility, who might have gone about their plaintiff research on a more mass production scale, Erin went door to door to hundreds of plaintiffs - taking detailed notes about each of their individual stories. She was then able to humanize the "mass-ness" of the tragedy by quoting the many victims, chapter and verse (who was related to who, what their phone numbers were, which school the kids went to. and so on...). This, of course, blew the minds of both a) the victims who had been ignored for so long, and, b) anyone in court, judge included, who listened to even a few of those stories of disease and death caused by the large corporation's bad decisions.
One human story, even just fairly well told, can bring the abstract to real life. From there, voters (and, in the same way, consumers) feel they have more substance and more of a human connection from which to make their decisions.
For both politicians and marketers, take the words of Elizabeth Edwards to heart: our storytelling needs to improve.
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Comments
If you believe Seth Godin, "marketing is storytelling"! In tech marketing I find the need to get away from "speeds and feeds" marketing and get more aligned with the business and human impact of technology. Andrea, thanks for the reminder on the need for more effective storytelling.
Posted by: Paul Barsch | 04.04.07
Sadly, in the case of Edwards' legal career, the story doesn't even have to be true. It just has to be compelling.
Posted by: Cam Beck | 04.04.07
The human empathy factor can be quite powerful. Embellishment is a double-edged sword...better to put more weight on other speaking techniques and perhaps some NLP tactics as appropriate.
Posted by: Mario Vellandi | 04.04.07
Successful marketing campaigns always tell a good story. Consumers love feeling like they are a part of the product.
I am a staff writer at Deliver Magazine and recently we featured an article about Saab's very successful marketing campaign that brought the idea of storytelling to a very literal level with teriffic results. To read more, visit http://delivermagazine.com/case-studies/2007/03/19/a-saab%e2%80%99s-story/
Posted by: Nancy | 04.04.07
Interesting to note the power of storytelling as a compliance technique. It's easy to craft a heart-wrenching story about one guy losing his job in a booming economy and turn an entire audience of contented listeners with bright prospects into a room of angry voters.
Anecdotes always lose to facts, in my book -- but I was trained well on this subject by a boss early in my career and I look for them. Anecdotes are terribly powerful, though, in swaying the masses.
Storytelling works and it can be used for both good and evil.
Posted by: Stephen Denny | 04.04.07
I was born with rose-colored glasses (thanks mom), so I appreciate the comments reminding us that storytelling can certainly be leveraged for bad. I just assume that anyone reading MP Daily Fix, however, is on the good side. ;-) But seriously, what Dan Pink writes in "A Whole New Mind" is something to the effect that we live in this amazing world of abundance, so we human beings all have the freedom to look for more meaning in the things/purchases around us. However, we still each (as the savvy consumers we are) have the responsibility to be our own judges of what's true or not, good and bad.
Posted by: Andrea Learned | 04.04.07
A couple of years in the Carolinas has left me with more extra tonnage of "Edwards the Ogre/Lawyer" from his opponents, than most of you have suffered. So apologies, Andrea, because at first I thought you were going down that well-worn road. Your point is salient.
Obviously we need to get humans and humanity back into a world spinning way too fast.
Equally obviously, marketing is about good story-telling, as told to real people. It's what we repeatedly suggest to clients at Prism Ltd.
Recently, a Harvard sociology researcher wrote: ""We no longer have Friends. We watch Friends on TV."
Andrea, this topic isn't just about sound marketing. It's about real life. A. S. Prisant, COO, Prism ltd.
Posted by: Alexander S. Prisant | 04.05.07