One of the most crucial aspects of effective messaging, sales, advertising, etc… is telling a story - creating a narrative. A story is able to get across concepts that are often difficult to explain in academic, scientific language. Good narratives can evoke emotions that create connections in the listener or viewer’s mind that statistics, charts, and figures cannot.
The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words has truth because a picture can immediately establish a scenario. It provides context that literal descriptions can never hope to achieve.
Stories do the same thing. Yet in the world of political messaging, progressives lag way behind their conservative counterparts in this area. Progressives, probably because the right attacked them for so long for being idealistic, have erred on the side of statistics. Progressives have to prove everything, and when asked why they support a particular policy, they whip out charts and graphs.
While having facts and analysis to back up your case is necessary, statistics, science, and cold hard logic means nothing to most people. None of those things tell why you really believe something. And besides, factual details make for terrible messaging.
As mentioned above, stories and narratives tell a different kind of truth. Call it intuition if you will, or even faith. But narratives strip away the details to get to the soul of a person or the issue at hand. Try explaining to a group of people the problems of our health care system using statistics and findings from various scientific studies. Try explaining all the nuanced pros and cons of reforming our health care system. See how far you get.
On the other hand, tell empathic stories about how our health care system has destroyed the livelihood of a single mother of three without health care, or of the elderly person who died because Medicare did not pay for their needed drugs, or of the relatively healthy person who is now maimed for life because of some incompetent doctor. The group’s response will be overwhelmingly in favor of reforming our health care system.
The point here is that people do not relate to facts. They relate to other people. They do not connect to statistics; they connect to emotions and intuition. They do not understand the intricacies of policy, but they do understand personalities and the human spirit.
And most importantly, they understand faith. This is ultimately why conservatives are better at creating narratives. Conservatives as a group are more religious, i.e. faithful, than progressives. As such, they are more comfortable telling stories. What are the Gospels? Stories. All religions are based on stories. Whether they are true or not is beside the point. The point is they create a narrative that touches our hearts and minds.
So when conservatives try to sell their view of the world, they do so by using themes, narratives, stories, emotion, and intuition, not facts. Why do you think Stephen Colbert satirically claims he makes all his decisions by his gut and not facts, since ‘facts have a well-known liberal bias’? Because that is the hallmark of conservatism.
Progressives need to take a page from the conservative book. Tell me your story. Create a narrative that connects to me emotionally. Who really are you? I want to know how you think, not what you think. What do you believe, deep in your soul?
In other words, what is your faith? Tell me that.