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.
