This is the second in a two part series on the fundamentals of effective activism, adapted from my book The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way, and written in response to a posting by Kos about how people who whine about how their candidate isn’t given fair exposure on Daily Kos, “[do] neither you, nor your favorite guy any favors. It does the opposite -- it turns people off from your guy.” UPDATE: Granny Doc just posted a powerful diary along the same theme here.
In the previous diary, I discussed the fundamentals of persuasion, focusing on two “bitter truths:” (1) “The success of your venture depends much less on the quality of whatever it is you are selling (including political candidates and social causes) than on the quality of the marketing and sales you use to sell it; and (2) "People buy a product (or candidate or cause) not because of its intrinsic qualities or characteristics, but because they believe it will either solve a problem or meet a need that they have."
This diary is about Bitter Truth #3.
In How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book all progressive activists should read, Dale Carnegie writes, “If out of reading this book you get just one thing—an increased tendency to think always in terms of other people’s point of view, and see things from their angle—if you get that one thing out of this book, it may easily prove to be one of the building blocks of your career.”
Bitter Truth #2 says that people buy to fill a need, with the implication being that you need to sell to their needs. This can be hard to do if we succumb to the all-too-human temptation to place our own needs front and center. Most people have a tendency toward that kind of egocentrism—to be “the star of the movie,” as I like to put it—but serious activism demands that you learn to subordinate your needs to your customer’s, at least during the sale.
Here’s Carnegie again:
Thousands of salespeople are pounding the pavements today, tired, discouraged and underpaid. Why? Because they are always thinking only of what they want. They don’t realize that neither you nor I want to buy anything. If we did, we would go out and buy it. But both of us are eternally interested in solving our problems. And if salespeople can show us how their services or merchandise will help us solve our problems, they won’t need to sell us. We’ll buy.
And here’s Harry Beckwith in Selling the Invisible, another essential book:
The most compelling selling message you can deliver in any medium is not that you have something wonderful to sell. It is: “I understand what you need.” The selling message “I have” is about you. The message “I understand” is about the only person involved in the sale who really matters: the buyer.
And so, we arrive at our final Bitter Truth: In any sale, the customer’s needs and viewpoints count far more than yours. In fact, yours hardly count at all.
Here’s how Bitter Truth #3 plays out in a business context:
*A “fashionista” opens a clothing store and stocks it only with clothing she likes—and is surprised when her sales are meager.
*A chef opens a restaurant whose menu consists solely of his favorite dishes, which tend toward the complex and esoteric. He also refuses to compromise his culinary standards and therefore uses only the most expensive ingredients, even in dishes where his customers can’t tell the difference. His restaurant runs at a loss until, less than two years after it opened, it is forced to close.
*A freelance programmer takes pride in her elegant and “tight” code. Only, her projects frequently take too long and go over budget, so her customer list is dwindling.
Each of these entrepreneurs has put his or her needs—or ego, if you prefer—before the customer’s. The fashionista’s shoppers want to see clothes that they like in her store. The chef’s diners want comfort food—and don’t bother with the truffles. And the programmer’s clients don’t care about elegant code, or code at all: they are not buying code but an inventory-management program. They just want it delivered on time and within budget.
Placing your needs ahead of the customer’s is a common reason for business failure—and also for activist failure, as we’ll see in the next section.
Why You’re Not Getting Through
Have you ever spoken to someone with utter passion and conviction about your cause and watched helplessly while his eyes glazed over? Beckwith explains why this happens:
A salesperson has something to sell you. ‘Blah, blah, blah,’ you hear. He continues. Same thing. You hear the melody but not the lyrics…You know why his pitch failed. Because the person did not talk about you. His entire pitch was about him and what he had, not about you and what you need. It was all about him. But what you cared about was you.
Like Bitter Truths #1 and #2, Bitter Truth #3 applies just as strongly, if not more so, to activism as to business. Even when what you’re selling is the most unambiguous social good, you always need to keep the customer’s needs front and center. If you do, you’ll be able to accomplish astounding feats of persuasion. It you don’t, your activism won’t be nearly as effective.
Peter Singer, in Ethics Into Action, says:
Too many activists mix only with other activists and imagine that everyone else thinks as they do. They start to believe in their own propaganda and lose their feel for what the average person in the street might think. They no longer know what is achievable and what is a fantasy that has grown out of their own intense conviction of the need for change…[Activist] Henry [Spira] grabs every opportunity to talk to people outside the animal movement. He’ll start up a conversation with the person sitting next to him on a bus or train, mention an issue he is concerned about, and listen to their responses. How do they react? Can they feel themselves in the place of the victim? Are they outraged? What in particular do they focus on?
Later, he writes:
When Henry wants to get someone—a scientist, a corporate executive, a legislator, or a government official—to do something differently, he puts himself in the position of that person: “[The question to ask yourself is:] If I were that person, what would make me want to change my behavior? If you accuse them of being a bunch of sadistic bastards, these people are not going to figure, ‘Hey, what is it I could do that’s going to be different and make those people happy?’ That’s not the way the real world works…you want to reprogram them, and you’re not going to reprogram them by saying we’re saints and you’re sinners, and we’re going to clobber you with a two-by-four in order to educate you.
Once you’ve used Socratic questioning to learn the customer’s viewpoint, it’s your job to rise above your own viewpoint and biases and put the information you’ve gotten to use. In the vegetarian/animal rights movement, for example, our primary goal is to convert as many people as possible to a vegetarian lifestyle in which animals are not used for food, clothing or other purposes. This has four main advantages:
*It alleviates cruelty to animals, many of whom live lives of unspeakable suffering in factory farms.
*It offers profound environmental advantages, since factory farms are notorious polluters.
*It also helps on the labor/human rights front, since factory farms and slaughterhouses tend to be extremely exploitive employers. And, finally,
*It offers enormous health benefits to the individual involved.
More information on, and citations for, these points may be found at http://www.lifelongactivist.com/....
So, the vegetarian activist has many angles he can use in communicating his message to his customer. Many activists choose the “cruelty to animals” angle, perhaps because the depth of suffering the animals experience seems so immediate and awful. I, too, am moved and angered by what the animals endure—in many cases, for something as frivolous as fois gras—but in my experience many people are simply not moved by the cruelty argument, or at least not moved enough by it to give up eating animal products. The reasons for this are complex, and probably include the fact that the animal industries operations are so far removed from most people’s daily experience that they can’t viscerally “feel” the problem of animal suffering.
The one pro-vegetarian argument that does work for many people, in my experience, is the health one—probably because everyone experiences their health and health problems viscerally (literally!). While activists who argue for vegetarianism based on anti-cruelty, environmental, or labor grounds do important work, so do the many activists—and the huge numbers of non-activist doctors, nutritionists and other health experts—who are convincing people to eat less meat, dairy and eggs so that they can avoid illness and live longer.
Here’s another example of selling to the customer’s needs instead of your own. Let’s say you’re giving a talk on climate change at a local church. The audience looks bored: they’ve heard it all before. Then you mention the word “stewardship” and everyone snaps to attention because stewardship (a.k.a., “taking care of God’s creation”) is a fundamental obligation under the Christian faith. The topic may not have changed, but by simply adopting your audience’s language, you’ve made it extremely relevant to them.
As Saul Alinsky says in the classic activist guide Rules for Radicals, “[The organizer] learns the local legends, anecdotes, values, idioms. He listens to small talk. He refrains from rhetoric foreign to the local culture.”
No matter what your field of progressive activism, you must sell to your customer’s needs, and not your own. Sometimes, those needs may strike you as unacceptably narrow and parochial, but you must avoid casting judgment on them, as that will only alienate your customer. (Even if you don’t voice your judgment, people can usually tell…) Casting judgment on others’ motivations also signifies a certain naiveté about the fact that people’s motivations are usually reasonable—if not optimal—given their situations.
Adapted from The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way (Lantern Books, 2006).
For more information visit www.lifelongactivist.com