I wrote this article for libertarian activists. A Facebook conversation with gun-rights activist Darren Wolfe led me to write it. In our exchange, we both concluded that too many libertarians do not understand two key points:
- Liberty needs to be sold.
- You need to know HOW to sell liberty if you want to draw more people into the libertarian movement.
Selling liberty is a huge concept that I can’t realistically cover in one article. There are so many facets to it. In this article, I will limit myself to presenting two facets only, and even they will necessarily be long- winded presentations. My plan by the time I finish is to give you both an essay outlining the enormity of the problem and a set of steps you can apply RIGHT AWAY to become a more effective libertarian activist.
I will show why conventional approaches typically pursued by libertarian activists to winning hearts and minds have not worked for libertarians, despite being repeatedly applied for nearly 50 years. Then I will outline a sales process drawn directly from the world of marketing that can be applied to political discourse with some thought and more importantly with some creativity to gain real headway within the extremely difficult environment of political activism.
Jim Lewis: The First Selling Libertarian
Most libertarians have never heard of the first libertarian advocate selling liberty. Even many current L.P. leaders and leading party members would be hard-pressed to name the Libertarian Party’s 1984 Vice- Presidential candidate. His name was Jim Lewis, and he ran that year with presidential candidate David Bergland.
The same is true for small “L” libertarians who long ago decided that the L.P. isn’t for them. Yes, I understand that all libertarians are not also Libertarian Party supporters. Far from it! But Jim Lewis’s argument applies to all libertarian activists, regardless of their political alliances.
I knew Jim because he came from Connecticut, where I also lived at the time (and to which I have recently returned). Jim was older than me (I was in my early 20s, he was in his early 50s), but he was still quite young and energetic.
Jim didn’t have a magnetic personality or anything like that, but he knew how to speak well and present his ideas. He passionately peddled the selling of liberty.
I cannot say that he made particularly deep or insightful arguments. Rather, he relied on his passion to carry the day. I would even go so far as to say that he wasn’t a very good salesman(!). But there is no doubt that he was absolutely convinced that liberty needs to be sold, and he was absolutely correct about that.
Jim’s campaign for V.P. focused on just this one, key point: that liberty must be sold. It was as if he really wasn’t running for Vice- President of the United States, but rather was running to try to convince libertarian activists to change their approach for spreading the ideas of liberty. This was even more of a radical notion then than it is now, and while he did win the nomination that year, I think it’s fair to say that the members of his own party didn’t strongly embrace what he advocated. To the contrary, I don’t think many of them even understood it. He ran for his party’s nomination for President in 1988, but finished third behind Ron Paul and Russell Means.
The essence of his platform was that liberty was neither properly understood by the general public nor presented by its supporters in a manner that the public could embrace, and that it was up to libertarians to make both a factual and an emotional appeal simultaneously. I wish I had a copy of some of his remarks made at some point or other, but I do not, so I cannot share them with you.
Jim also chose to be a tax evader, and sadly the IRS caught up with him a few years later because of his semi-public notoriety as a political candidate. They convicted and sentenced him to three years in prison, and when he emerged from that cold and dismal existence, he came out a shell of a man. He died a few years later in 1997. I have no doubt that prison shortened his life. It’s noteworthy that almost as many Connecticut-based L.P. supporters as his family members attended his funeral.
Nevertheless, I still remember him standing at the podium before all that happened in his conservative black suit and tie with a smile on his face declaring the need to sell liberty with the enthusiasm of Anthony Robbins. I hope he would approve of what I attempt to write today to expand upon his favorite topic.
Why negative campaigning doesn’t work for libertarians
For 40-50 years, libertarians both inside and outside the L.P. attempted to emulate the two major parties by using fear and criticism to gain attention. This works to a degree for major party candidates, as anyone who has ever followed an election knows. Mudslinging is a time-honored tradition in both major parties. However, they may not understand WHY it works so well for them and why it cannot similarly work for libertarians.
Republicans and Democrats can get away with campaigns based on fear, personal attacks, and all other forms of negativity because they have something that libertarians do not have: an established base that makes up a significant portion of the population and that will vote for them NO MATTER WHAT.
Liberals and Conservatives both have bases that amount to around one- quarter to one-third of the electorate nationwide each. The remaining 40% or so are self-described independent, but even among this group they typically vote with one camp or the other. Only around 10% of the overall electorate routinely decide based upon who they believe the best candidate is from election to election regardless of that candidate’s political association.
With an electorate so firmly ensconced in their affiliation with two broad philosophical camps, the nominated candidates can be assured of getting substantial support from those voters that typically vote with their own camp. As long as they carry out strong get-out-the-vote efforts and don’t say anything to significantly alienate their own supporters, those supporters can be counted on to vote for them in a general election … even if they don’t agree with the candidate philosophically on all points.
The Tea Parties attempted to flip this situation upside down by standing firm against certain candidates in their parties, with some success. However, we must also note that these instances are newsworthy exceptions, and the rule still holds. In fact, in the most recent off-term elections in 2014, establishment Mainstream Republicans surprised many political analysts when they outperformed Tea Party Republicans at the polls. Why? Because people who tend to vote Republican (or Democratic) continue to tend to vote Republican (or Democratic) even when their party’s candidate isn’t an ideal philosophical match.
Small “L” libertarians, similar to their L.P. counterparts who think that third parties can establish that kind of base using negative campaigning combined with vaguely positive cliches, have long (and wrongly) concluded that all they have to do is to become active members of those two major parties and get nominated by them, and they’ll be able to take over. However, while this might be theoretically possible, in practice it’s quite a dicey proposition. In races where the two major parties are on relative parity, it’s extremely difficult to win either party’s nomination as a radical. In those states and in those instances, it’s the moderate candidates who have held extensive lower offices who have the greatest chance of being nominated by their parties. The most they can usually hope for is to win in a primary in a district where the party never loses, thereby giving them the election. That’s what they work for.
But what really kills this approach is the idea that before they even gain nomination, they try to win by focusing on negatives the way that their party leaders do. They’re wrong because they make the same fundamental mistake that many small business owners make. They assume that everyone wants what they have to sell.
More importantly, they assume that if they just get negative enough to show the people in their party whom they want to win over just how wrong the party’s typical approach has been that they’ll somehow “see the light”, admit that they’ve been wrong, change their views, and begin to support libertarian candidates who will now lead them to victory in November.
There’s even a faction that believes that they don’t have to win anyone over. They just have to show up in greater numbers than the party faithful and force their way in.
Hollow laugh! This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Senator Rand Paul, for instance, understands that he can’t behave as a bull in a china shop. Oh sure, it’s possible to get some candidates nominated, and perhaps even win an election or two, but if you want any staying power, you have to play the political game THEIR way, which means sacrificing your own philosophical beliefs in many cases in order to gain mainstream support within your own party.
Even then, there is always distrust and doubt among the party faithful, and thus Rand finds himself in a constant, ongoing battle to get his own party to believe that he’s actually one of them. I do give him credit. He has managed to make significant in-roads, and he is considered to be one of many front-runners for his party’s nomination for President in 2016. However, at what cost? How much of his belief system has he had to sacrifice in order to get this far? He has probably sacrificed a lot more than even he himself realizes.
For the average small “L” libertarian activist, the prospects are even worse using negativity. Thus, when I see libertarian activists attempting to play the negativity card over and over again, while getting nowhere in the process, I cringe and shake my head at the insanity of it all. Specifically, I mean “insanity” as defined by people in Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step groups. Insanity to them is repeating the same failed behavior over and over again, each time hoping for and expecting a different result. (Think “abstinence” for example.)
All of the top libertarian bloggers that I know thus put out a stream of negatively-based posts designed to scare or disgust mainstream people into switching their allegiance to the libertarian movement by showing just how horrible big government truly is. The idea is that the mainstream approach is so abhorrent that if you make it clear just how abhorrent that side’s views are, you’ll win supporters by default. Even though the approach has failed and continues fail on a monumental scale, its adherents stay the course. I suspect that they’ve reached the point where they don’t even care any more about such a fine point. They have followers. They have readers. They have a peanut gallery willing to share and parrot whatever they say. What a great ego boost it must be for them!
But does anything fundamentally change in the overall political landscape? No. Clearly no.
How to sell liberty
Now that I’ve laid out a rather simple (some might say simplistic) case showing that negative activism hasn’t worked, it’s time to answer the most important question: what DOES work? How can we successfully sell liberty?
To answer this question, we must answer the more fundamental question: how does selling work? Amazingly, most people in politics have never bothered to learn the selling process, even though there has been plenty written and presented on the subject by experts in the marketing field.
I will present here a bare-bones model of selling, to get the conversation started. These are generally recognized steps in a selling process that are routinely acknowledged and taught by leaders of the marketing industry.
There are 8 key steps in any sales process, as follows:
- Identify and name a pain point.
- Claim an emotionally-driven solution to resolve that pain point.
- Identify your target audience and your credentials to address that market.
- Create a “trigger” to get engagement with your message from your target market.
- Overcome objections.
- Present expert testimonials that defend your solution.
- Create some form of risk reversal.
- Identify your solution’s uniqueness to differentiate it from the rest of the sellers in the marketplace.
We could argue over the proper order, and your order might be better than mine. However, I’m confident to 3 decimal places that these 8 steps broadly cover all of the overall keys to successful selling.
So let’s go through each step for a moment, one by one.
1. Identify and name a pain point.
What is a pain point? It is an emotionally-driven point of negative sensitivity. Pain points are why we consider buying stuff.
“Wait a minute!” I hear you complain. “I thought you said libertarians shouldn’t focus on negatives!”
Sure, we have to touch pain points, but we can’t make them the sum total of the selling process as so many libertarian activists do. Ignoring the other 7 steps dooms your selling efforts to failure. All 8 points work together, or they don’t work at all.
I should take a moment to debunk an old myth that intellectuals in particular often fall for. Many people believe that people buy things out of logic and reason, but it’s not true. Libertarians in particular are susceptible to this fallacy because of the extensive left-brained logic of libertarian philosophy. Indeed, even the economic theories of Austrian Economics posit the idea of rational actors in a rational economic setting. But the truth is that even libertarians respond primarily to their own emotions in buying situations, then justify those emotions rationally when they decide to buy something. The same is also true for non-libertarians.
The classic example to illustrate this point is the father who goes into a new car showroom with his wife. He sees two cars there. One is a beautiful, red sports car with a convertible top or a sunroof. The other is an SUV. He LOVES the sports car. He desperately wants it. But he knows his wife will never accept it because they have children and they need that SUV. So, the rational buyer says to himself that he must logically accept that what he must do is to buy the car that he really doesn’t want to buy. He then pats himself on the back for his objective rationality.
The problem with this story is that his decision was actually not rationally-based at all. Rather, he bought the SUV out of love for his wife and children. He recognized the pain points associated with his wife getting on his case for buying a sports car instead of the SUV the family really needs, with his kids needing to be transported to soccer games, karate classes, field trips, etc, as well as with needing to transport groceries, stuff for the house, and so on.
In short, he actually responded to a long list of pain points, and THOSE are what led him to overcome his own initial desire to buy the red sports car, even though he LOVES that red sports car! His decision was emotionally-based, not rationally based. But because he’s a rational person, he then goes through all the features, reads Consumer Reports, and takes other steps to justify and assure himself that buying the SUV is the rational thing to do. Thus, he falsely concludes that his decision to buy the SUV was a rationally- derived decision.
In reality, though, he made the decision to buy based upon emotional needs before he even walked into the showroom.
We buy food to alleviate the pain point of hunger. We buy houses to alleviate the pain point of having nowhere to live. We buy smart phones to alleviate a number of pain points:
- Fear of being disconnected from our friends or business associates.
- Having a handy way to take snapshots at the drop of a hat, which overcomes the pain point of frustration associated with, “I wish I had a camera with me. This would make a great photo!”
- Being able to find a restaurant or the nearest gas station or a rest room no matter where we are by just reaching into our pockets and surfing the web. When you gotta go, you gotta go!
In fact, the list of pain points that smart phones address is longer than your arm. It’s no surprise that Apple alone has sold nearly a half billion iPhones over the past 10 years given how many pain points the iPhone addresses, many of which people didn’t even realize they had until Apple pointed those pain points out to them while showing them the solution!
What are some of the pain points a libertarian might address? Actually, I’m sure libertarians can think of lots of them. Keep your own favorite ones in mind as you read on.
The big problem with libertarians is not that they don’t come up with pain points. Actually, they come up with plenty of them, too many in most cases. The meat of the problem is that libertarians don’t also incorporate the next steps in their presentations of those pain points. Let’s look at those steps now.
2. Claim an emotionally-driven solution to resolve that pain point.
Most libertarians smugly sit back and smile knowing that they do this all the time. Sadly, however, they’re wrong. In reality, most libertarians don’t supply solutions at all, and the only emotion they seem to know is passion. They merely allude to solutions as if everyone already knows them, when in fact the mainstream does NOT known them! In fact, it’s quite disconcerting to note just how often libertarian presenters offer no solutions at all!
For most libertarians, the solutions are to get government out of it, to mind our own business, and to allow the market to solve problems. While these certainly resonate with libertarians, they definitely do NOT resonate with non-libertarians.
Yet how many libertarian activists not only fail to appreciate this fine point, but also take no steps at all to repair the situation? Instead, they return to the first step over and over again to continue to present even more pain points! Their non-receptive audience (outside of the activist’s own choir) thus learns quickly to expect an endless series of pain points from libertarian activists without ever hoping to hear a real solution that resonates with them. So they shut the libertarian activist out.
Thus, libertarian activists gain the reputations of being pains-in-the-ass rather than effective, persuasive advocates. Sound familiar? It should, because that’s often the proudly-stated goal of many activists. That they succeed in being perceived as pains-in-the-ass and take pride in it only demonstrates how horribly disconnected they are from the people they claim that they want to persuade.
A real solution is only real if the target audience perceives it to be real. Thus, to claim that the market will solve the problem better only works if the audience agrees that that market can solve the problem! If the audience doesn’t agree, then you have a problem.
Libertarian activists typically solve this problem by putting out reams of logical arguments and solutions. So why doesn’t this approach work?
It fails for the same reason that pain points are the first step. Pain points are emotional in nature. Their solutions must ALSO be emotional in nature!
Logic does not alleviate pain. Why then do libertarian activists insist on using logic to counter pain? It’s so counter-intuitive that one might think that libertarians would wake up one day and say, “Hey! Maybe I should try doing something other than making more logical arguments!”
But no, it doesn’t happen. Instead, they demonstrate once again their insanity by repeating the same failed arguments over and over again, expecting a different result.
It’s not that the logical arguments are bad. Far from it! Heck, I personally agree with many of them. Rather, the problem is that they’re addressing the wrong solution. Their solution is invariably logical and inferred, when it needs to be emotional and clearly stated.
This is where libertarian activists usually stumble badly. “How can you address a purely logical fallacy using emotion?”, they ask. “Isn’t it better to defeat illogical arguments with good logic?”
The answer to both questions is yes in an Oxford-rules debate, but no when dealing with people in society. They forget (if they ever knew) that people (even themselves) buy emotionally, not logically.
Thus, they can’t possibly understand how President Barrack Obama’s vague and tepid solution of “change” during the 2008 Presidential campaign could possibly resonate so resoundingly among the electorate as it did. They don’t recognize the inherent emotional appeal in the “change” argument. All they can see is the irrationality of it and the broken promises that go along with it. They just don’t “get” the idea that it doesn’t matter whether the promises were broken. All that mattered was whether the solution … as weak as it was … successfully addressed the solution to peoples’ pain points in a way that resonated with them emotionally. Emotion forgives failures. It forgives bad logic. It forgives all. It only knows “now”.
This second step proves to be quite overwhelmingly challenging for most libertarians. So how do you overcome it?
Start by seeing successfully sold solutions as emotional rather than as logical. Push the emotional buttons when you present your solutions and not just your pain points.
One of the ways libertarian activists sorely fail is in their abilities to imagine how the better libertarian society would specifically handle a given pain point. For instance, if you’re a libertarian activist, you believe that the market does a great job in solving pain points. Can you be more specific? A LOT more specific?
Describe to me in great detail, with concrete examples, how a marketplace solves the problem of the gap between the rich and the poor, for example. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m pointing out that you probably haven’t done it and don’t really know where to begin.
Sit down and write an essay on how society would look and operate if there was no social safety net, how it would actually be better for people at the lower end of the pyramid. Can you do it? Convincingly? I doubt it. More importantly, the audience you want to persuade doubts it too. That’s why you don’t get anywhere with them.
The popular mantra among libertarian activists these days is: don’t get caught up in the minutiae of intellectual arguments. What they mean by this is: don’t mess with the details. What they fail to recognize is that the details are how you make emotional connections with your audience. They correctly recognize the negative drawback of addressing details using logical arguments, but they do not recognize the paramount importance of connecting with their audience emotionally based upon the details. They hope to skip that step, arguing that if they don’t caught up in intellectual arguments, they won’t get bogged down. But they’re wrong because they’re the ones who so often fail to connect with their target audience.
Your story must be emotionally driven, not logically driven. This is where most libertarian activists avoid entering their personal zones of discomfort. They don’t know how to do it. They don’t know how to write or talk emotionally, except for passionately. They don’t know how to connect with their audiences emotionally.
I can give you a few, simple steps to do it, but I can’t guarantee it’ll be easy. Simple is rarely easy. In general, what we’re talking about here is creating stories. Creating stories isn’t easy to do, but here’s the basic process in a nutshell.
- Imagine the event or situation you want to happen.
- Give it as many real, concrete, specific details as possible. “Flesh it out” as the old cliché goes. Give it life. Create characters. Generate interaction. Present a conflict, a climax, and a resolution. The more details, the more likelihood your listeners will listen to it.
- Create a story line, including a beginning, a middle, and an end.
- Now tell what you imagined in step 1 as a complete story.
- Wash, rinse, and repeat.
None of us liked the stories that candidate Obama told, but we cannot deny that his storytelling was extremely effective in rallying his supporters and gaining more supporters. Most libertarians make dreadful storytellers because of their heavy emphasis on argumentation and logic, so we really need to work on this skill a lot. We must learn the art of effective storytelling.
Most important of all, your solution must be POSITIVE! If your solution is nothing more than, “Let’s stop hitting the pain point,” then you haven’t actually offered a solution, at least not a sales-based solution that will persuade new people to join you.
Sure, if you keep hitting your finger when hammering a nail, the immediate solution might seem to be to stop hitting your finger. That’s the argument most libertarians would make, but the emotional solution must also provide a way to make sure that you don’t accidentally hit your finger again so that people imagine they will feel relief going forward.
- Maybe your solution is to wear a metal glove on the other hand. So even if the hammer hits your finger, you don’t feel the pain.
- Maybe your solution is to let someone else do the hammering while THEY hold the nail. That way, the hammer never hits your finger.
- Maybe your solution is to hammer using short strokes rather than long strokes, to give you more control and avoid hitting your finger.
- Maybe your solution is to use a nail gun, so that you don’t have to swing a hammer at all in order to drive a nail.
As you can see, in each of these cases the solution strongly suggests a positive emotional context. You will definitely feel better, more in-control, more successful, if you use one of these solutions rather than simply trying to follow the admonishment, “well, stop hitting your finger”! Yet how many libertarians use that kind of sarcastic “stop hitting your finger” reply to propose their solution? Nearly all of them, of course!
In fact, if you were to try to sell one of these solutions, imagine how much easier it would be! For instance, you could sell a nail gun by saying things like:
- Now you will never hit your thumb again while hitting a nail. What a relief!
- Be the envy of your fellow carpenters!
- Nail faster, more easily, and risk free than ever before!
- Throw that awful hammer away for good!
Notice that every single one of those claims presses an emotional button. “What a relief” is an emotional reaction. Envy is an emotion. Risk free is emotional. Throwing the hammer way for good … now THAT’S emotional!
Oh, what a relief it is!
3. Identify your target audience and your credentials to address that market.
American libertarian activists usually make the same kind of mistake that many small business owners make. They do a terrible job of identifying their target audience. They make a list of false assumptions, including:
- Everyone but liberal wackos are in my target audience.
- My target audience includes every concerned, reasonable American.
- I have only one target audience.
- My target audience thinks like I do.
- Liberty is good for everyone. Therefore, everyone (except liberal wackos and high-powered politicians) is in my target audience.
- The majority of people distrust government. Therefore, the majority of people are ripe for logical libertarian arguments.
- And many more.
In truth, we have numerous target audiences, and each one requires different treatment. But first, let’s take a moment to discuss what a target audience is.
The concept of a target audience comes from a target used in target shooting. The classic target is round and has a series of concentric rings surrounding a bulls-eye in the middle. Most people think of a target audience as being all the people who metaphorically fit on that target, but that’s incorrect. Your target audience is the people who reside in the bulls-eye.
“What?” I hear you protest. “No, that’s wrong! I want to reach as many people as possible.”
This is the classic mistake that even professional marketers make. They assume that if they aim and hit the bulls-eye every time, they’ll never reach the people on the periphery. But that’s a false assumption. Here’s why.
First, the people in the bulls-eye are influencers. Reach them and meet their needs successfully, and THEY will reach and sell the people on the periphery for you.
Second, the people in the bulls-eye have different needs and interests from the people on the periphery. Aim to hit the people all over the target, and you’ll be much less likely to win over the people who live in the bulls- eye.
“But won’t that mean that I’ll be dealing only with interest groups, that I’ll never reach THE PEOPLE?”
No, it doesn’t. The question assumes that there is only one target audience. In fact, there are many target audiences, thousands of them, perhaps even millions of them. Each one has its own unique needs, interests, and most important of all, PAIN POINTS REQUIRING SOLUTIONS THEY CAN BELIEVE AND BUY!
So the goal becomes to hit each target audience in the bulls-eye, one target at a time.
To do this, you have to know your target audience in every particular case. Do most libertarians bother to find out who their target audience is in any given situation? Heck no! They just do their normal arguing, agitating, criticizing, attacking, extolling, and sometimes trolling. This is yet another reason why libertarians don’t get anywhere.
What happens if you present a solution to a pain point that doesn’t resonate with your target audience? What do you do then? The first thing to do is to look at your target audience and ask yourself, “Was my solution congruent with their needs and interests as THEY perceive them?” In nearly all cases, I find with libertarian arguers that the answer to that question is a great big, NO!
There is no such thing as a single, monolithic American electorate. There is no such thing as needing just one, unifying logical theory in order to win people over. That isn’t how people think or behave or respond. They respond to solutions to pain points where the solutions meet their immediate needs from THEIR perspectives, not from YOUR perspective.
I should also mention credentials. Your credentials come from two sources: your authority (which derives from your authorship), and your credibility (which comes from whether they can identify with you).
4. Create a “trigger” to get engagement with your message from your target market.
A trigger is a mechanism for getting the people to whom you’re talking to take some form of desired action after recognizing how the solution will work effectively for them. Triggers answer the question, “How does that work?” In other words, a trigger is what sets the solution into motion so that your target audience (your “buyer”) can imagine the solution actually working for them.
The storytelling angle I outlined above begins the trigger-building process. Follow your story with a “next step” about how to get there or how to make your story happen. That’s your trigger.
There are three important keys to building an effective trigger:
- Don’t make your trigger too watered down or too vague. It must be specific and tangible in the minds of your target audience.
- Use a roller coaster effect by presenting your pain point, solution, identification of your target audience’s needs, and trigger over and over again with different variants. Thus, your audience hears the whole cycle repeatedly, presented slightly differently each time, burning into their subconscious minds the power and effectiveness of your solution.
- Don’t make the libertarian activist’s most common mistake by focusing all the time on giving them more pain points, right? You gotta follow each pain point with a solution, an identification with your target audience, and a proposed trigger mechanism.
- Don’t trigger too often.
“Hey, wait a minute!” I hear you protest. “You just said to use the roller coast effect. Now you say don’t do it too often. Well, which is it? How often is too often?”
It’s a valid complaint, but the point also demonstrates the importance of exercising good judgment. Too often versus not often enough is a judgment call you must make in each case. Use your target audience’s reactions and responses to gauge how much is not enough and how much is too much. That’s the best guideline I can give you.
5. Overcome objections.
Most libertarians are exceptionally enthusiastic about doing this step. Their problem is that they still make the following mistakes when they do it:
- Perceptions rule. Specifically, your target audience’s perceptions rule. If you fail to overcome their objections by focusing on THEIR perceptions, not YOUR perceptions, you will lose every time.
- Their past experiences with libertarian activists create fear in their minds. You must address that fear, every time, in some way. You must assure them that they have nothing to fear in a way that is meaningful to THEM. Proof can be one very good way to do this, but it must be proof that resonates with THEM.
- The unknown creates fear. Despite every effort you make to be as specific as possible with your solutions and triggers, you very likely won’t address all their fears. The unknown part is the part you didn’t address because of lack of time, lack of space, lack of whatever. You must address their fear of the unknown, and you must do it specifically to the details of the idea you’re selling.
- Remember that the needs for security and safety are among the top emotional drivers most people have. Don’t just hammer them as pain points. Show them how nail drivers make better solutions!
Don’t skip over this important part about overcoming objections. Make sure that the method you use for overcoming their objections meets each of the above requirements.
6. Present expert testimonials that defend your solution.
Enough time has evolved that there are now libertarians in all walks of life who have attempted either theoretically or practically to apply libertarian solutions in their lives and writings. Point to them. Use them as experts to defend your position.
A good testimonial is the flip side of an objection. For every objection they raise, come up with a testimonial to support your reply to their objection.
7. Create some form of risk reversal.
In the marketing world, this refers to something like a guarantee or a warranty. Obviously, in politics, there are no guarantees. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t make them anyway in an effective way.
Remember, you’re trying to address your target audience emotionally. Emotional communication has no past or future. It only has now. How do you make them feel now? What are they feeling now? These are the critical questions. Devise a promise, a guarantee, a warranty of some kind. Remember the lesson from candidate Obama. It doesn’t have to be true or accurate. It only has to be emotionally appealing to be well-received.
Will critics criticize your proposed risk reversal? Of course they will. Hey, I’ve got news for you. They’re going to criticize EVERYTHING you say or do, no matter how good it is.
Ignore the critics. Just make your guarantees. Make them as real and as good as you can make them, of course. They need credibility in order to be well received by your audience. But if you’ve done your job with the first five steps in this process, it won’t be hard for them to buy into your guarantee, no matter how flimsy it may seem.
8. Identify your solution’s uniqueness to differentiate it from the rest of the sellers in the marketplace.
This is the last step, and it’s actually the easiest step for most libertarians. Clearly, libertarian thought is highly unique compared to the rest of the political “marketplace”. If you’ve done your job with the other 7 steps, this one will be addressed easily, naturally, and automatically. No extra effort required.
That’s it for now.
This article has gone on an awfully long time. Clearly, this subject requires far more discussion than a single article can handle. I hope, though, that I managed to give you some ideas you can put to use right away to sell liberty in your efforts as a libertarian activist. Share your comments and questions below.
I hope that Jim Lewis is pleased with it, too!
Poster Comment:Repeating for Emphasis: All of the top libertarian bloggers that I know thus put out a stream of negatively-based posts designed to scare or disgust mainstream people into switching their allegiance to the libertarian movement by showing just how horrible big government truly is. The idea is that the mainstream approach is so abhorrent that if you make it clear just how abhorrent that side’s views are, you’ll win supporters by default. Even though the approach has failed and continues fail on a monumental scale, its adherents stay the course.LF’s fanatical libertarians put out the same stream of negatively-based posts designed to scare or disgust as they stalk and hound other posters. They have never learned that does not work. That is why I continue to regard their sort of fanatical proselytizing as a worshiping cultish religion of annoying flamers who give the appearance so much as street-preachers screaming on the sidewalk where people walk on by and never stop to listen. |
