Every brand has an earth-shaking story underneath, you just have to dig around for it. Here, I needed to find a connection between ANZAC Day and Guardian Funerals. A few days in to the project, I realised that our diggers had changed the way that, today, seems like the normal way to honour an individual life, right around the world. I’ve always loved the possibilities of long copy. I won my first award for long copy (and this piece won accolades too.) And while we don’t often see it in print, it does live on. After all, that’s what great video content is. People are as hungry for a good story — with a crisis, a hero, a guide and resolution — as ever.
Ending modern slavery with long form narrative
Occasionally, my passion for Australian history connects with a pressing issue of justice. Helping Minister Alex Hawke prepare his speech on Modern Slavery was has been one of those moments. The Australian Modern Slavery Act was passed in late 2018. It forbids any Australian company from using any product or service in its supply chain that may have come from a contractor using forced labour. And it’s shockingly common. Fish supplied to our restaurants can come from boats in the Philippine archipelago where the men are never allowed off. Just in December 2019, Cotton On Group discovered that part of their supply chain is a Chinese printing firm suspected of using forced labour, possibly using political prisoners.
Locating this reform in the traditions of Australia helped make passage of this bill very smooth. Few Australians realise that one of the very first laws ever made by decree was the banning of any kind of slavery. It’s a powerful story that connects the imagination of the Australian people with the reforms that we need to make today.
Kahneman and Tversky discover that data doesn't persuade, stories do. (The data proves it.)
Shortly before he died in 1996, Professor Amos Tversky ran an experiment that showed that people aren't rational, and the way we persuade them doesn't work. Alongside Lyle Brenner and Derek Koehler at Stanford University, they confirmed everything he suspected about human decision making.
It was kind of a mock trial where a union organiser has been arrested for trespassing at a pharmacy. It later becomes clear that he had done nothing wrong. What the experimenters found was that key information often didn't change the minds of the jurors. If the story was told well enough, if it was coherent enough, it didn’t matter when a key piece of data shows someone’s innocence or guilt. What matters is the shape of the story. That’s what lingers in people’s minds.
Professor Tversky had learnt something similar when he worked with Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s (days when they were want to wear hibiscuses behind their ears, as the above shot taken by Barbara Tversky suggests).
Tversky and Kahneman’s discovery was a shock to economists: that we're not nearly as rational as we like to believe. Marketers are kidding themselves if they think a single proposition will persuade a customer. Lawyers are crazy if they think a “smoking gun” will alone persuade a jury. And data won’t change the mind of even the most proudly rationalist policymaker.
Of course, Kahneman and Tversky knew something about the power of the story from their own lives. They were both grandsons of Rabbis - those teachers of the world’s most famous and most enduring stories. And, in 1973, they both fought in a war where all the data showed their side should have lost - the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
But the power of story over data was something that became clear later. In 1975, Israel’s Foreign Minister, Yigal Allon, asked Kahneman to do some research on the likelihood of war with Syria. His paper, which he wrote with the head of Israel’s intelligence unit, Zvi Lanir, held what should have been shocking information about the dangers of upsetting Syria. They found that certain moves Israel made in its dealings with Syria could increase the likelihood of war with Syria by 10%. But when Kahneman and Lanir presented their data to Israel’s Foreign Minister, Yigal Allon, he sniffed at it. The numbers meant nothing. Minister Allon preferred to trust his instincts.
As Daniel Kahneman revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair, this was his epiphany on persuasion. “That was the moment I gave up on decision analysis. No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” Or, as Kahneman explained in The Scientific American, “[we] build the best possible story from the information available… and if it is a good story, [we] believe it.”
Robert MacNamara, the brilliant US Secretary of Defense may have been right. You shouldn’t make a decision until you “Get the data”. However, you should never expect that data to persuade the people. Stories change minds. Not one-off experiences. Not information. Not propositions. And certainly not data.
Cryptocurrency and the Commander
Very occasionally, you meet a client whose personal story coheres almost perfectly with the story of their brand. One such person is Rob Wilson. You can see him here on exercises in the Mediterranean in the warship he commanded, HMS Somerset.
Like all senior officers serving Her Majesty, Rob took to sea with a strong conviction that, somehow, he was keeping the cause of liberalism alive across the globe. From the belief in personal freedom right through to the deeply western conviction in private property — that people should be able to grow their wealth and make decisions for themselves.
Then something changed. In 2008, around the time this shot was taken, Rob began to see that the mass financialisation of global markets meant it was going to be all but impossible for the next generation to build up any kind of wealth. Liberalism was tearing itself apart. And no warship could prevent it.
It’s here he began dreaming of Incent, or Incent Loyalty by its full name. A cryptocurrency which Rob’s team launched here in Australia in 2017 (it’s actually Australia’s first blockchain-based alternative cash). Incent provides people with a whole new way to generate wealth. It’s a crypto you can earn as you spend cash on daily expenses. The dream is to give people, especially young people, autonomy. Letting them set a direction by their own compass (which the logo handsomely evokes).
Working with Rob and the guys at Incent, figuring out their core story, was one of the great privileges of my early months in consulting. Giving a client a story that ends up motivating them to keep up the good fight is actually a bit of an honour.