The role of the press in helping voters to avoiding buyer’s remorse

Walter Wymer

Walter Wymer is professor of marketing at the University of Lethbridge. His academic work has helped develop the field of nonprofit marketing.

Political parties want to win elections and to put their ideas into practice.  Political candidates want to win elections and obtain a political office.  Candidates will try to convince voters that they are good and that their opponents are bad.  Candidates will work with their strategists to formulate messages that will appeal to specific demographic groups of interest.  They know that a certain proportion of voters always vote for a specific party and a certain proportion are not ideological, but rather cast their votes based on an impression of the individual candidates. 

 

Political races are won or lost based on a candidate’s ability to create a favorable image of themselves and an unfavorable image of opponents.  This explains why campaigns spend a great deal of time and resources on sending out negative messages about opponents.

 

Individuals who pay a lot of attention to politics understand the basic philosophies of each party.  They have a greater appreciation for the underlying views and desired policies of candidates and their parties.  These high information voters are not affected by platitudinous ads.  For political insiders, it can be difficult to understand that many voters lack this understanding.  Low involvement voters’ political attention is limited to campaign season. 

 

For example, in the U.S., political insiders are baffled that working class voters can vote for candidates who favor tax breaks for the rich, reducing social programs for the poor, and are vehemently anti-union.  These low information voters are not ideological.  They vote based on the attitudes toward the candidates.  They obtain their attitudes from what they read in the newspaper or see on television.  In short, low information voters can actually vote against their own economic interests and against their own values.  How could this be?  The answer is that many voters will only hear marketing messages from candidates whose objective is to win rather than accurately communicate their policy positions to voters.

 

While in consumer marketing, one may say “let the buyer beware” and if a consumer makes a bad choice, that’s their own bad luck.  However, since we are actually talking about the representativeness of our democracy, we cannot afford to have such a cavalier attitude. 

 

Since candidates’ goals are to win, they will develop a marketing campaign to achieve this end.  The media, then, is the institution that must help voters look beyond marketing messages.  The media needs to not just report what each campaign says, but to help voters understand the ideologies of the parties.  The media needs to help voters understand the past record of the candidates. The media needs to help voters understand what candidates are likely to do if they are elected.

 

I remember the Bush versus Gore U.S. presidential election in 2000.  The media faithfully covered the campaign as if it were a sporting match, which candidate was winning, which was losing.  Each candidate had a prior record.  Bush had been a Texas governor.  Gore had been a U.S. Senator.  Rather than help voters understand each candidate’s record, the media reported what each candidate was saying about the other candidate.  Bush positioned himself as a compassionate conservative, an environmentalist who would regulate CO2, and an isolationist who would avoid foreign entanglements.  What Bush actually did was quite different from the campaign’s messages.  During the 2000 campaign, the political reporter Molly Ivins wrote a book about George Bush.  I was unable to read it until after Bush had been president for two years.  Ivins had been a political reporter in Texas while George Bush was governor. She had observed him for a considerable amount of time and effectively captured his style and accurately predicted what type of president he would become. 

 

The point is that reporters who cover politics know the politicians, their style, and their priorities.  Rather than covering an election as if it were a horse race, educate voters on the leadership style of candidates, their political beliefs, and policies they will promote.  Buyer’s remorse among voters leads to apathy, an unrepresentative government, and a weaker democracy.

Getting the message right

Walter Wymer

 

In marketing your brand, you want to persuade consumers to prefer your brand over competitors’ brands.  In marketing your candidate, you want to persuade voters to prefer your candidate over the other candidates.

Besides promoting an appealing candidate (what makes a candidate appealing is another topic), carefully selecting the messaging of a party’s candidate is second most important factor in influencing voter choice.  Essentially, there are two objectives: first, providing voters with a reason why voting for your candidate would be good for the country; second, explaining to voters why your opponent would be bad for the country.

You would think that the party that values social justice and greater equality would have the advantage since it could appeal to the largest number of voters.  However, this is often not the case.  The political party looking out for the special interests of its core supporters will cloak its principles in a populist message.  In the U.S., the Republicans have been quite successful in doing this.  Republication strategists hire marketing research firms to use focus groups to discover messages that resonate with voters.  In the 2010 election cycle, Republican candidates’ message focused on job creation.  They portrayed their Democratic opponents as being for Big Government, while the Republicans were in support creating jobs, jobs, and more jobs.  The Republicans were united and consistent in delivering the message their strategists recommended and it worked very well for them in the election. 

After the U.S. election, the Republicans did not focus on creating jobs, as they promised.  They focused on (1) reducing or eliminating abortion rights for women, (2) destroying public unions, (3) and additional tax breaks for corporations.  The question is how the Democrats will respond to the Republican’s actual record during the next campaign.

With respect to the upcoming Canadian election, how will the opposition use the Harper administration’s record in its messaging to gain a majority?  In 2008, Drew Westin wrote The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.  Westin says that voters are emotional decision makers.   The opposition, if it wants to be effective in its messaging, can use the majority’s record to frame the government’s values.  What does the actual record reveal about what kind of people the current leaders are?

Voters believe that good people will make good decisions.  Therefore, candidates have to deliver messages that frame their own good values that will benefit voters and their opponents’ misguided values that will worsen the plight of voters.  While this sounds simple, finding the right message requires skill and careful implementation.

Walter Wymer is professor of marketing at the University of Lethbridge. His academic work has helped develop the field of nonprofit marketing.

Hot topics and voter values

Walter Wymer

Walter Wymer is professor of marketing at the University of Lethbridge. His academic work has helped develop the field of nonprofit marketing.

An effective marketing strategy is to find ways to differentiate yourself from competitors in ways that matter to voters.  Staking out your position on issues concerning voters in a manner that defines yourself favorably is a way to do this.  It is not sufficient, however, to merely highlight policy differences.  You must distinguish yourself in a way that appeals to voters' values.  For example, the nuclear power issue has become a concern once again.  Below is a brief statement.  Note that it talks about the issue as a policy, but it also frames the issue in a populous and values-laden manner too.  Furthermore, this approach also helps to frame one's opponent.

 

Position:

As public memory of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl faded, the nuclear power industry and its patrons believed the time was right to renew support for nuclear power.

Now, however, the disaster in Japan serves as a stark reminder that concentrating the most toxic substances on earth in fuel rods to create heat to boil water into steam to rotate turbines to generate electricity may not be a good idea. 

If one factors in the costs and risks of nuclear energy for the duration of the operational life of nuclear plants (including decommisioning) and the life of toxic radioactive waste, it is difficult to justify nuclear power from either an economic or a public safety perspective.  If one takes the long view and recognizes the inevitabe need for wind, solar, and geothermal sources of producing electricity; investing in nuclear instead of renewable energy makes little sense.

There needs to be a public debate on nuclear power.  Is there a future for new nuclear plants if the problems of old nuclear plants have yet to be addressed?

Political candidates can differentiate themselves in the nuclear debate.  Are they looking out for the interests of industry?  Or, are they looking out for the interests of citizens and for the interests of future generations?