Greg Power is president of the Canadian operations of Weber Shandwick. Throughout his 30-year career in communications, Power has been fascinated by the challenge of building the bridge between a message and an audience.
While in Austin for the SXSW interactive festival, I took time out to visit the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum on the grounds of the University of Texas.
The LBJ you meet at the library and in the pages of Robert Caro’s biographical series is a master of personal persuasion, a bare knuckles political operator and a brilliant legislator. He was also, from a PR perspective, a genius at the art of storytelling as a method to shape pubic opinion.
It’s a big year for LBJ as family and friends have chosen the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act as the platform upon which to rehabilitate the image of the 36th president.
On a bad day, LBJ is perceived as an arrogant warmonger who plunged the U.S. deeper into the war in Vietnam. On a good day, he is remembered as the architect of legislation that made America a more just and compassionate society, including Medicare, the War Against Poverty, Public Broadcasting, 60 education bills and the Voting and Civil Rights Act.
The library has many delights, but the most impressive exhibit, however, is a collection of recorded conversations between LBJ and other major figures on the most dramatic issues of his time.
The conversation that stood out most for me was a call with Martin Luther King on January 15, 1965 where LBJ advises MLK on his communications strategy to support the drive for the Civil Rights Act.
As someone who frequently advises senior executives on how to get the message right and why it is always best to share information in the form of a story, it was fascinating to listen to the approach recommended by LBJ.
As with most of LBJ’s recorded conversations, he does most of the talking. The first thing he advises MLK to do is avoid the traps that would polarize the issue into a zero sum game between races. Don’t give the other side the opportunity to paint your gain as a loss for someone else who holds a vote you’ll need later on.
Here are the highlights from LBJ’s comments that stood out for me.
I think it is very important that we not say that we’re doing this. And we not do it just because it’s Negroes and Whites. But we take the position that every person born in this country and when they reach a certain age, that he have a right to vote, just like he has a right to fight. And that we extend it whether it’s a Negro or whether it’s a Mexican or who it is.
…
I think that we don’t want special privilege for anybody. We want equality for all, and we can stand on that principle. But I think that you can contribute a great deal by getting your leaders and yourself, taking very simple examples of discrimination where a man’s got to memorize [Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow or whether he’s got to quote the first 10 Amendments or he’s got to tell you what Amendment 15 and 16 and 17 is, and then ask them if they know and show what happens. And some people don’t have to do that. But when a Negro comes in, he’s got to do it. And we can just repeat, and repeat and repeat.
…
LBJ wants the campaign to focus on personal stories. The simple, visceral, everyday outrages faced by people denied the right to vote based on colour, whether they are labourers or highly educated executives. Tell it as a story. Make people feel it.
If you take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, people accept it. If you can find the worst condition that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana or South Carolina, where—I think one of the worst I ever heard of is the president of Tuskegee or the head of the government department there or something being denied the right to cast a vote. And if you take that one illustration and get it on radio and get it on television and get it in the pulpits, get it in meetings, get it every place you can, pretty soon the fellow who didn’t do anything but follow—drive a tractor, he’ll say, “Well, that’s not right. That’s not fair.”
(There are a few small edits in the text above. If you wish to read full transcripts of LBJ’s recorded conversations, go to www.millercenter.org.)
The advice is clear. Build your campaign on individual, personal stories that everyone can identify with and showcase the injustice in a way that everyone can understand the universal wrongs and react to them.
It is classic storytelling to achieve an end, which raises the question why it is not used more often and more effectively on issues that matter today, whether it be building a new CEO’s executive equity, enhancing corporate reputation or selling a government program.
Information is not communication and complex rational arguments seldom shift public opinion or move people to act positively on behalf of an organization or a brand. Long, boring key messages and dry news releases do not engage. Stories do.
Stories are powerful because they are irresistible, believable and unforgettable.
The dramatic structure of a story draws in an audience. We are social creatures who experience the world through stories throughout our lives. We rely on stories to simplify complexity. We share stories that reaffirm our beliefs. And our brain stores memories in the form of stories that, once effectively told, are easily remembered.
I have come to believe you never really change someone’s mind, you just create conditions where your target audience can adopt a new idea into the way they already think. And the best path there is through a story.
In politics, the candidate with the best story always wins. Remember how “Gravy Train” made Rob Ford the mayor of Toronto and how effective he was in the opening mayoral debates with an equally simple message platform based on “respect for taxpayers.”
If you are LBJ and MLK trying to create an environment to receive the Voting Act and the Civil Rights Act, your job is to connect stories to ensure that “my story” combines with “your story” to become “our story.”
Said another way by former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, “Frame your argument in someone else’s objectives… and get there slice by slice.”
Or story by story.
