SYNOPSIS
What book are we doing?
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, by Salman Rushdie
Why are we doing it?
To learn lessons in planning from an unexpected source; and to acknowledge a great writer and advocate for books and the people who write them
How can we use it?
To see how easy it is to incorrectly describe your audience.
To illustrate the negative consequences of describing your audience poorly.
To remember the interplay between audience and story.
Salman Rushdie’s career began in Advertising. He spent most of the 1970s working as a copywriter in London. He then became a full-time novelist and spent the ‘80s writing books rather than ads. In the final year of that decade, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie; he spent the ‘90s in hiding. In 2000, he moved to New York City and began to live his life out in the open, which he’s done for the past two decades and into a third.
On August 12, 2022, thirty-three-and-a-half years after Khomeini’s decree, a person Rushdie refers to as “The A” infiltrated the stage at Chautauqua Institution and stabbed Rushdie fifteen times. Against all expectations, Rushdie survived and lived to tell the story. Knife is that story.
While I admire and believe we can learn a lot from Rushdie’s courage as a person, talent as a writer, and advocacy as a champion of books, Knife also holds lessons that we can apply more directly in the day-to-day practice of planning.
Rushdie’s assailant would not have made a good planner. By his own admission, he read only two pages of Rushdie’s writing. He did not know Rushdie or Rushdie’s work at all. It’s difficult to understand how a stranger could hate someone enough not only to try to kill them, but to kill them in such an up-close-and-personal intimate way as with a knife. It’s even more difficult to understand how they could arrive at such a conclusion seemingly without making much effort to truly know their target.
In an imagined conversation as he’s trying to understand the source of The A’s hate, Rushdie says, “I know that it is possible to construct an image of a man – a second self – that bears very little resemblance to the first self. But this second self gains credibility because it is repeated over and over again until it begins to feel real – more real than the first self. I believe it is this second self that you have gotten to know, against whom your sense of an enemy is aimed.”
The stakes Rushdie’s faced were much higher than those we face in marketing and brand work. There is, however, a parallel. If we think in terms of writing a brief, The A’s desire for intimate connection (“I need to kill this guy with a knife”), based on little exploration or understanding of Rushdie feels a lot like brands that want to make a “deep emotional connection” with “Gen-Z.”
Rushdie reminds us that, if you want to get intimate with a person or audience, it’s wise to invest the time and effort to know and understand them deeply first. I suspect his former boss, David Ogilvy, would be proud.
Khomeini knew his audience well. As a result, in issuing the fatwa, he presented a compelling story that resonated with them and endured. Three decades after his own death, his story inspired The A to try to stab a man to death. Others among Khomeini’s audience celebrated Rushdie’s misfortune, wishing for him to lose the other eye, and mockingly calling him Dajjal, the one-eyed false Messiah.
Rather than feel defeated, Rushdie reverts to the power of his own art and encourages others to do the same – fight story with better story: “Above all, we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have proved attractive to many. So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do – stories in which people want to live.”
Knife illustrates, not only of the power of story, but the importance of understanding your audience and how the two are intertwined.
When describing the idea of a first and second self, Rushdie references Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Shadow, in which a man’s shadow leaves the man for a life of its own. The shadow is a flat, false reflection of a man. It has no depth. But the shadow presents itself as real, dresses up as real, and convinces people to believe it’s real. Over time, much of the world confuses the shadow for a man and the man for merely a shadow.
It’s not easy to understand people deeply. To uncover a true insight. To know your audience. But it’s a prerequisite for telling stories in which people want to live. Otherwise, we’re just making stories for shadows.
