My brother sent me this entry from Seth Godin's blog. The entry has a really powerful anaysis of negative political messaging. I think it's a terrific addition to the other one I posted earlier this week. Here's an excerpt and some commentary from me.

"Every person in the market has a worldview when it comes to what you're selling. It might be, "I don't care about that," or it might be, "all big companies are evil" or it might be, "I love new stuff."

"When your story aligns with my worldview, we have something to discuss. When it doesn't, you're likely to be invisible.

"A worldview is a lot like the strings on a piano or the cables in a bridge. When it hits something that is of the same frequency, it resonates. The cause and the effect embrace each other and the story sticks, and spreads.

"It's essentially impossible to tell a story to an entire population and have it resonate with all of them. The global warming story, for example, has influenced some people a great deal and been dismissed out of hand by others.

While most marketers spend their time telling stories about themselves, politicians spend a lot of time telling (negative) stories about the competition. It's illuminating, because . . ."

Politicians tell negative stories because they work. Analyzing political candidates and their policies is hard, time consuming work. Human nature is you look for short cuts. Political marketers know if they can cause you to associate a candidate with a negative term, then you will be less likely to vote for that candidate. You will be only too happy to say to yourself, "Oh, if candidate A is an __________, then there's no need to continue. Their opponent is the one I will vote for." This is further perpetuated when you feel there are only two candidates with the horsepower to win.

For example, if I were to tell you candidate A is a child abuser or a rapist, then you would be less likely to vote for candidate A. Except that being one of those things is an easy accusation to confirm or deny. Therefore, political marketers must find terms that sound sinister, yet are difficult to prove. I'll talk more about these in a later post.

Read the rest of Godin's post at this link.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/creating-storie.html