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Bad guys aren't what they used to be
I was reading one of the right-leaning opinion writers I track (I try to read from all sides) and it occurred to me that bad guys really aren't as sharp as they used to be.
What does a nuclear madman have to do to get America's attention? On Memorial Day, the North Koreans detonated "an underground atomic device many times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki," as my old colleagues at The Irish Times put it. You'd think that'd rate something higher than "World News In Brief," see foot of page 37. But instead Washington was consumed by the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, who apparently has a "compelling personal story." ...
Not impressive. Perhaps a hat would help.
Let's face it: Kim Jong Il just isn't that persuasive as a evil maniac. He looks more like a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. Or somebody from American Idol. And now our next contestant Kim will sing "Born Free"
We used to have a much higher quality of bad guys.
Take the Nazis. You can't tell me these guys were happening. They had cool uniforms, they had their own kind of salute, heck they almost conquered Europe.
Check out the cool uniforms. The Luger was even awesome-looking
They were truly evil.
Nowadays what do we have? Aside from Kim, we have terrorists, who can't even seem to get their own dress code down. Some have beards, some don't, there's an inconsistent wearing of hats. It's just a fashion disaster, I tell you.
Looks like somebody who might come and paint the house. Check out the $5 wristwatch
I'm tempted to blame it all on hats. Ever since guys stopped wearing hats a lot in the 1960s there's just been a loss of gravity. But instead I'll pivot and make a serious point: Steyn is right. Nobody cares about evil maniacs. It's all about compelling personal stories.
Perhaps it's always been this way. After all, from WWII, do we remember Hitler as much as we do the compelling personal stories of the millions he killed? Even during the Iraq war (pick one), people were more interested in compelling personal stories from the soldiers and civilians than figuring out what made the villains tick. Remember the Lusitania? Remember the victims of 9-11?
Got a company you want to promote? Come up with some compelling personal stories and get those out to the right people. In the business world we think of leaders as representing their companies: Bill Gates for Microsoft, Steve Jobs for Apple, etc. But as consumers we make decisions based on the amount of -- you guessed it -- compelling personal stories we've been exposed to.
That's why something like FaceBook should be such a great marketing tool, once the business model is perfected: there's nothing more persuasive than having people you admire personally recommend something for you to purchase based on their own experience with it.
Chip and Dan Heath make this point powerfully in their book "Made to Stick". If you have a few minutes, drop by and read an excerpt. (Buying the book would be even better)
Like it or not, public opinion runs on compelling personal stories. If you think you can build a cool product and just drop it out there in the world, you're mistaken. Whatever your product is, you have to have a story that other people can relate to.
Bad guys aren't what they used to be, but people are still persuaded the same way they've always been.
And that's something that bad guys and good guys both can use.
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s/Lugar/Luger/
Thanks Celc.
Fixed.