Tell your stories

Anne McElhinney tells an audience (in this video I’ve posted before) that the more-freedom side of the aisle have better stories to tell than the left, but for some reason they don’t tell them often enough.

And John Ansell reckons they also don’t use the heart-strings enough (although unfortunately he equates “more freedom” with “the Right”).

    Why should the Left have a mortgage on talking to the heart?
    “The big problem with the Right is that they don’t understand the emotional power of a few short words and pictures.
    “Especially pictures.
    “They think the force of their logic should be enough to persuade people to make sensible decisions. Logic laid out in longwinded articles, speeches and press statements.
    “Maybe it should be. But clearly it isn’t.
    “Our long history of socialist governments making short-sighted decisions (both Labour and National) shows that.
    “I’ve made the poster [below] to show how a punchy pictorial message can trump the most elegantly-crafted 1000-word article on the same subject. . . ”

He’s got a point, hasn’t he.

So often the 1000-word articles are talking to the already converted. Ansell reckons they’d be talking to far more if they recognised the power of “easily-digestible, posterised morsels that can be fed to the general public one bite at a time.”  In other words, good old-fashioned propaganda to teach the freedom message.

Read his plea for a “teach tank” here: Think tank + teach tank = sea change.

Share this post :