Every day we are bombarded by an astonishing number of marketing messages, most of which are designed to interrupt us. We've got better at ignoring them, but apparently that only serves to make the marketers even more inclined to yell at us, louder and in more places. Most of these messages do not contain very many honest, vitally important facts about the product or service that they are attempting to sell. Most marketing messages are exaggerations and hollow, sanitized versions of the truth. Spin.
At the other extreme, many people and companies, when trying to bring an idea to the community around them, try to do it with facts alone. We humans base our decisions on facts to an extent, but we are feeling as well as thinking creatures and facts alone are rarely enough to sway us, even when that swaying is good for us.
Since I am a dentist, I will mention that dental education often makes this error. I find that dental students and residents (I teach part time in the fine residency program I attended) do not have a firm grasp of the rationale behind various treatments. This occurs across many schools; I have to conclude that it is the system, not the individual students. They were taught mountains of facts. They were not, however, given the inspiration, the coaching, and the mentoring to use those facts to actually help people. They seem left to figure this out on their own. Which, to their great credit, most of them do, and with good and noble hearts.
If they had been told a story, though, a compelling one, an inspiring story, and one that contained the verifiable facts, then they would have understood the reasons behind what they need to do, right from the beginning.
Seth Godin's book All Marketers Are Liars http://sethgodin.typepad.com/all_marketers_are_liars/
-deals with this issue in non-fiction form, as do many of his other works. I wanted to explore this concept in The Man Who Wore Mismatched Socks. The idea of telling a story with honest facts in its fabric occurs many times in my novel. The following is the most direct passage, however, and my favourite, because flying at an altitude of 43,000 feet, with its extreme and immediate dangers, has an ability to focus one's mind on what's important...
From 1951, in TMWWMMS:
A few weeks later, Gack was on a training flight with Adam Rundage over the North Sea. That was one of the excellent things about his lot in life- he could devote rather a bit of time and energy to the RAF Reserves, since his father, not to mention brother and sister, could manage the brewery in his absence. It was quite good for his father, actually. There was a fine balance between cutting back and fading away, and Archibald St. James Spottisworth-Gack was not ever going to be one to fade away! Gack smiled behind his rather sinister-looking goggles and oxygen mask as he thought of his parents and all the wonderful things they had taught Susan, Reg and himself about life and business.
They were cruising along in their PR.34 Mosquito at a fuel-conserving 300 mph true at 43,000 feet, Gack in the navigator’s seat, training the much younger Rundage in the intricacies of long-range high-altitude navigation over water. So strange how the world changed so rapidly. This was hostile airspace just a few years ago, as any aircraft venturing over these waters would face the violently hostile Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts of the Luftwaffe. Now they were contending with a different enemy, a supposedly colder one, in the massive impersonal construct that was the Soviet Union. The North Sea was essentially peaceful once again, though not the weather! Yet in spite of media phrases like “Iron Curtain” and “Cold War” the skies over Korea were proper hot. Once his training was over, Rundage was likely to be posted to operations around Suez, or, perhaps, to Korea itself. The Mosquito was still one of the world’s finest photo recon planes, but the new Russian MiG-15 fighter jets would make short work of any piston-engined kite if there weren’t Yank or Canadian Sabres, the only jet that was currently the equal of the MiG, around to protect them. Gack couldn’t believe what the politicos were calling the Korean conflict: a “police action.” Each and every day, men of several nations were getting killed in all the varied and violent ways that modern warfare held in store for them, and the holders of power in the world had named it a police action, not a war. Marketing, thought Gack, was a fascinating thing indeed.
Still, all the chaps in 210 Squadron were extremely excited about the new English Electric Canberra that was coming into service. A jet, it was much faster than their beloved Mossies, topping out at nearly 600 mph and with higher altitude capabilities to boot. Still not able to outrun a MiG-15 the way he had left Focke-Wulfs in his dust back in the war, but he felt confident that the RAF would figure out the most effective way to use their new mount. And he couldn’t wait to get his hands on one! Soon; it would be soon.
The only problem with that was, it meant their lovely Mosquitos would eventually be retired. His last flight in the Wooden Wonder would be a bittersweet occasion indeed…
Looking out the spotlessly clean Perspex of their canopy- Perspex-cleaning being a habit he had picked up from Whittaker and never let go of- Gack watched the high-altitude sunlight flash off the windows and control surfaces of their wingman. He thought of the Cuyp that hung in The Pig & Trebuchet, and took a rather silly moment to imagine the Dutch Golden Age artist brought forth into the present day, carried aloft to paint two machines that were far beyond his imagining as they made their way across the North Sea high above the clouds that Cuyp had so often rendered.
Gack laughed out loud a little, drawing the attention of Rundage for a moment. The thing was, it came down to the fairly hilarious prospect of the long-ago artist being known for all the high-performance aircraft he had painted, in lieu of “Oh, right, Cuyp- he did rather a lot of cows, what?”
That particular thought impelled Gack to check his oxygen. His judgement might be slipping if he was ruminating about Cuyp’s cows. Ha! Ruminating about cows! Sure enough, there was a problem with the oxygen flow which he pointed out to Rundage and promptly adjusted, his thinking processes returning to their normal clarity. He told Rundage the tale of how a Mosquito had carried the famous physicist Neils Bohr to safety from Stockholm in 1943, just as the Nazis were about to arrest him. Bohr’s political activities had been instrumental in effecting a mass rescue of Jews from Denmark. On his rescue flight, ensconced in a special passenger compartment in the bomb bay of a modified Mosquito, Bohr did not put on his oxygen equipment as instructed, and passed out. Gack told Rundage how the great scientist would have died had not the pilot, unable to reach Bohr on the intercom and guessing that his passenger had lost consciousness, descended to a lower altitude for the remainder of the flight. His careful actions had saved the life of a human being, not to mention given the West one of its greatest scientific minds.
Gack relayed this tale to Rundage for a very interesting reason. When it came to ascending into this alien and dangerous realm of flight in the stratosphere, facts and figures alone were not enough to teach headstrong young pilots what they needed to survive.
You had to tell a story.
Powerful, Visceral stories with the facts honestly nestled within. That was the way to get your point across. If you only wanted to give someone a pile of facts to digest, you could simply send a memo. If you wanted to get them to actually do something, to behave in a certain way- you had to tell a story. The more compelling, the better.
Rundage performed flawlessly on this flight, and Gack simply couldn’t wait to go up even higher and faster with him when their new Canberras arrived.
Self-referential. Love it. Telling a story about how you have to tell a story, in which the main character tells a story.
Fine weaving, Rick. The information, the teaching, does not get in the way of the story, it hones it, polishes it.
Posted by: Joel | 11/29/2011 at 10:55 PM