Factory and Pipe
In a previous essay, I wrote about the mission: “To change minds, channel votes and win elections, we need to offer an alternative. A new direction, a Nayi Disha. We need a clear purpose, a messaging pipe to reach out to people, political entrepreneurs to rise, a platform to unite these entrepreneurs and the voters, leading to a path to power and eventually prosperity…The first step to making this alternative vision of a new India a reality is to get the message across to large numbers – a pipe to the masses. In an increasingly repressive environment where the mundane could be seen as seditious, we need a mechanism to create safe spaces for people to communicate and coordinate. A content factory needs to constantly separate fact from the fiction we are fed, and to spread truth in a melange of falsehood forwards.”
A content factory and a pipe. These are the two building blocks for changing minds. To get people to act, we need to get them to pay attention. The content factory needs to lay out the new ideas and package them in an attractive manner so they can cut through the clutter and impact people. This is what marketing is about. In their book, “Made to Stick”, brothers Chip and Dan Heath offer the SUCCES framework: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions and Stories. As they write in the book’s Epilogue: “For an idea to stick, for it to be useful and lasting, it’s got to make the audience: pay attention, understand and remember it, agree/believe, care, and be able to act on it.” The content factory needs to take the ideas of freedom, prosperity, and the need for a freedom movement and make them stick.
To make the ideas stick, we need to get them to people – this is where the “pipe” comes in. How do we take the stories created by the content factory and get them to tens of millions – day after day, so they not only alter their own thinking, but also become agents of change and amplify these ideas to those around them? We do not have the advantage of mass mono-media or a great leader who the nation listens to. How do we build this pipe to take the output of the content factory to the eventual audience? How to get people to pay attention?
