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.

The Marketing of Confidence

Thierry Giasson

Thierry Giasson (Université Laval) has published about televised political debates in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, political journalism in the Canadian Journal of Communication, politicians’ image management in Questions de communication.

It is understood in academia that political marketing is akin to the marketing of services, where a strong relationship based on confidence, credibility and trust must be achieved between a producer (the political party) and its targeted consumers (the voter). It is such because a political offer is intangible, it deals with values and ideas, it is based on promises of delivery, and it imposes an act of faith from the potential consumer when evaluating the producer’s ability to fulfill those promises once elected.

Not unlike the marketing of insurance, financial, or legal services, the marketing of politics should be anchored in confidence building, an exercise achieved by creating real dialogue with voters and including them actively in the creation and development of an offer. This is why notions of trust, experience, competence, integrity, and transparency are so often mobilized in brands political parties try to embody during an election. These concepts are refered to because they help alleviate consumers' uncertainty associated with the selection process of intangible goods, such as political programs and promises.

A brand is the public image, the core value, the very definition of what makes a product distinct from its competitors. In marketing terms, it is also referred to as the “unique selling proposition” of a product. Consumers should be able to identify it quickly and without hesitation. The brand is promoted in advertising campaign and in slogans.

So how are federal parties doing in terms of brand positioning this time around? Are they actively promoting confidence and trust with voters in their communication?

The PCC’s slogan is ‘Here for Canada’. The core ideas underlying it are presence, patriotism and action. This seems to say  ‘We are taking charge, we’ll take care of you’.

The NDP’s slogan, putting party leader Jack Layton at the center of their offer, states ‘That’s Canadian leadership’. It is always presented in ads contrasting the NDP’s offer with Conservative and/or Liberal actions. This is saying ‘they failed as leaders, we’ll do better’.

The Liberal’s slogan ‘Your Liberals' addresses voters directly and seems to say ‘we listened, this is what you want’.

Will these brands reach their markets? Can they help parties broker political confidence in what many described as a sceptical and demobilized Canadian electorate?

Harper and the Hockey Sweater

Kenneth M. Cosgrove Associate Professor of Government and Graduate Program Director

Suffolk University, Boston, MA, USA. 

 

It should not be shocking to see the Prime Minister pictured wearing a Team Canada hockey jersey on the Star’s Landing page this morning. Doing this visually links Mr. Harper with Canada’s national game and, ideally, stirs the proper emotions in his audience target.  This is  similar to U.S. politics, in that he is visually presenting us with an image that will predispose us to view him in a certain way. 

The choice of hockey as a visual cue is hardly accidental. It packages Mr. Harper in a way that is very much in keeping with the argument made by American scholar Daniel Boorstin's work,  The Image.  It suggests the rise of packaged reality and pseudo-events as the big thing  -- as mass-based consumerist values came to dominate in the United States (and by extension,  over time,  elsewhere in the world)

It is also very much in keeping with the advice that Mr. Harper received much earlier in his career from his USA based political consultants. While I actually know some Canadians who do not like hockey, I have never met one who would actually root against the country in any sport. So using the Team Canada hockey imagery is an attempt to visually say to Canadians:  “I am one of you and I share your interests and values” rather than debating the minutae  of policy or ethics or personal management style. 

Rather than getting bogged down in detail, better to try to shape the public discourse through the use of emotionally laden images that require little from the viewer other than to take a couple of seconds of time to glance at them. 

 

Proper visual presentation is very important to building an effective brand because it can sum up the product, political or otherwise, most efficiently for the audience.  While an audience can be cued to feel a certain way, these feelings are as much the result of socialization and environmental cues as much as they are an individual campaign’s work. What appears to matter is how well   a campaign can  tap into the social narratives and values that are extant and hitch a ride along with those. 

Visual cues can produce powerful emotions and tap into deeper narratives as two hockey examples can show. Consider what the average NHL fan living in the GTA (or Boston for that matter) feels when he/she  sees a red capital C with a blue border enclosing a white letter "H"  in its center. Then  contrast that with what people in the Montreal area and the many fans of Les Glorieux living across Canada and in New England feel.

The visual itself provides no particular emotion but it sums up a set of deeper emotions that are part of a narrative constructed over a long period of time --  but into which new events can occasionally burst. A second NHL example can be summed up in the person of Leafs' player Phil Kessel and the negative response that he will receive in Boston for the rest of his professional career in said city. None of this is personal in terms of disliking the young man,  it is all based on visual images and perceptions. Mr. Kessel did not manage the visual imagery or build a narrative surrounding his departure from our fair city and is booed relentlessly upon his every return.  In contrast, when Thomas Kaberle was traded from the Leafs to the Bruins, public perceptions and images had been well managed and Mr. Kablerle received a nice tribute upon his return to the ACC with the Bruins. 

 

What the Harper team is attempted to do is manage its visuals in a way that positions Mr. Harper as a representative of average Canadians and as a part of a winning team for Canada moving forward.  In doing this, using the right visuals and the management of imagry is very important because both can say to an audience that its members should or should not be interested in this product and can shape the feelings that the consumer can have toward the product. The hockey example clarifies this because, while we in Boston are very interested in both the Montreal Canadiens and Mr. Kessel, we are not emotionally engaged in the same way as are the residents of the cities in which the team and the player toil. Mr. Harper is trying to sum up a complicated reality for an audience that he hopes to have vote for him in a short term. Visual cues and positioning like appearing in a Team Canada hockey sweater are key means of doing so quickly.  He is doing this because if he doesn’t, as the two hockey examples show, other entitles like the media and his political opponents will be happy to do so on his behalf. 

 

The silence of the lambs, er, candidates

The political parties have had me thinking of McLobster lately. I'll come back to that oddity in a moment.

I am intrigued by the Conservatives' announcement, less than a week into the campaign, that the leader’s tour will no longer be answering questions about local candidates. This comes after negative information (known as ‘oppo’ in the business) was disclosed by parties about candidates running to become a Member of Parliament. Sometimes this seems to have been timed with the movements of a leader's tour. When a leader arrives in an area of the country, the party's messaging is destabilized by having to deal with a localized controversy. It's a smart tactic, no?

Unfortunately this is another nail in the coffin for the ability of major parties to recruit and encourage independent thinkers. The parties already expect that their candidates will be salespeople repeating key messages, will use campaign materials such as lawn signs whose ‘look and feel’ is designed by the party centre, and that they will avail of party-controlled technologies such as telemarketing and Web site design. Aside from saying a quick hello on a doorstep there's increasingly little that the average candidate is allowed to do.

(Quick aside: I am currently monitoring the electioneering of local candidates across Canada. If anyone has noticed any unusual forms of campaigning in their area, from lawn signs to technology, please do take a moment to leave a comment)

To some, the lack of candidate independence is distressing. It is bad enough that MPs are muzzled in the House of Commons, and vote on party lines like sheep, but surely an election is the embodiment of free speech, a discussion of ideas and, ultimately, a barometer of the health of a democracy.

I think that candidates, electoral district associations, party members and local campaign workers had better get used to this reality. In a 24/7 media environment political opponents and bored journalists can quickly jump on the slightest hint of controversy. There are too many risks associated with candidates issuing news releases, participating in all-candidate debates, updating Facebook profiles and publicly musing on Twitter. With every disruption, with every controversy, the party centre gains a reason to encroach upon candidates' freedom of speech. Given that research shows that the party leader and the party label hold by far the most sway in vote decisions, and the local candidate is largely an afterthought for electors, muzzling candidates is in the best interests of the party to perform well in a democratic election. It's not how the system was designed, but the reality is that candidates are merely salespeople of the product, and not the product itself.

Which brings me to the McLobster. If you look at political parties and their candidates as franchisers and franchisees, somewhat like UBC's R.K. Carty has, then you will appreciate how imperative it is for local representatives of a national operation to be singing the same tune. McDonald's Canada, for instance, controls its restaurant franchisees' product, pricing, place and promotional decisions. If one of its restaurants is notoriously dirty, has terrible service or offers special side deals, this weakens the overall brand and has negative repercussions for McDonald's Canada and for its other restaurants. It is up to the national company to ensure quality control which has been one of the keys to its success. A significant variation is the flexibility to respond to local markets, such as offering the McLobster on the East coast. In the same way the parties practice some limited regional variation in public policy to suit the tastes of the local electorate.

But whether it is a national political party or a national restaurant headquarters, success in the marketplace apparently depends on the local affiliates falling in line.

Alex Marland (Memorial University) has published about political marketing in the Journal of Public Affairs, political talk radio in Media, Culture and Society, and about Newfoundland nationalism in the International Journal of Canadian Studies. His research interests include political communications, electioneering, and politics in Canada and in Newfoundland.

Put polls in perspective

 André Turcotte, Ph.D

School of Journalism and Communication

Carleton University

 

There are a few milestones in an election campaign. The milestones are moments when voters begin to focus on what is at stake in the election and start the process towards deciding which party will receive their support. The first few days of the campaign is one such milestone. At that time, voters begin to realize they will be called upon to cast their ballot sooner than later and they seek to catch up on what has happened since the last time they paid attention to politics. It is an important process since we know from the 2008 Canadian Election Study that about one-third of voters (33%) will make up their mind about which party to support during the election campaign - some of them very early on - while close to 20% will wait until Election Day. 

 

In the process of getting up to speed on politics, voters will seek information from families and friends; will pay closer attention to the news and party advertisements or will be visited by local candidates who will distribute campaign literature. Others may turn to polls to get a sense of where the respective parties stand within the public opinion environment. Those voters who are turning to polls for some insights are likely confused at this point. 

 

Depending on which polls they accessed during the last week, voters have learned that the Tories have either an historic lead over the Liberals or the same Tories are barely ahead of their rivals and heading toward another minority government. Specifically, one poll recently suggested that the Harper Conservatives were 19 points ahead of the Liberals. Two other polls had the Tories with a double-digit lead (one at 16 points, another at 14 points).  In contrast, two polling organizations described the race between the Tories and the Liberals as very close – one established the Tory lead at 6 points and the other at 7. There are no methodological contortions that can explain such variations.

 

When George Gallup, Archibald Crossley and Elmo Roper began conducting polls in the 1930’s, one of the objectives was to democratize politics by giving a voice to voters. Gallup’s newspaper column was entitled “America Speaks” and purported to share with voters the kind of information about the public mood that was once the sole purview of political parties and their strategists.  While party polling was always more in-depth than media polling, voters were at least given a peek into the backrooms of politics. Today, the growing gap between media and party polling means that the voters is more likely to be mystified than enlightened by the latest polling data. 

 

In the political marketing literature, the current practice of polling in political campaign is referred to as “market intelligence,” Accordingly, the purpose is to use the tools of scientific polling to identify, segment and target the electoral marketplace. The data is then used to refine the communication strategy and more importantly, to support Voter ID and GOTV (Get-Out-The-Vote) efforts. National horse-race numbers that are so fascinating to media outlets have become largely inconsequential to party strategists. As documented in the soon-to-be-released Lees-Marshment’s Political Marketing in Canada, the Conservatives did not even conduct nation-wide polling during the 2008 campaign since they understood that their success hinged on targeting few voters in key ridings. 

 

In contrast, media coverage continue to focus on nation-wide variations in polling results that say very little about what is actually going on inside the respective campaigns. More troubling is the media practice to let wildly fluctuating poll results guide the nature of their coverage. In the next few days, a new set of polls will be released. Inevitably, the 19-point Tory lead is unlikely to hold and any closing of the gap will be reported as the Liberal campaign gaining momentum while in fact, a simple (but far less newsworthy) regression towards the mean may be at play. Similarly, the two polling organizations with closer vote intentions may report a widening gap and in the process, suggesting that the Harper campaign is gaining steam. While one of those two scenarios may likely be true, both cannot be accurate. The discerning voter should choose to ignore all of this and rely on facts rather than fiction in deciding who should run the country.

 

 

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.

Delivering the political product: Has Harper delivered?

Jennifer Lees-Marshment

Jennifer Lees-Marshment is a world-wide expert in political marketing who was visiting professor at McGill University in 2009, and who has conducted research and published on Canadian political market

So Harper has called the election, and we need to think what will political consumers judge him on? For the party in government, and the leader in power, a key aspect is going to be delivery. As with business marketing, political products need to deliver. 

Opposition leaders don't have to worry about delivery as much; they can make vaguer and grander promises, but Prime Ministers need to have fulfilled their previous pledges and shown that they have broadly delivered what they promised to the people at the last election.

This isn't so easy, as my research with practitioners around the world including advisors to the White House and Downing Street tells us that the public are very reluctant to give credit to politicians for what they get right yet more than willing to criticise them for what they get wrong.

An Australian campaign manager once told me about a sketch from Monty python The Life of Brian where they ask ‘what have the Romans ever done for us?’ (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso) and members of the audience unwittingly produce a long list of successes…the acquaduct, sanitation, the roads, irrigation, medicine, education, law and order…in 21st century politics, pollsters have told me how they sometimes ask focus groups what they think about a government’s record and participants are very willing to complain about what they think a government has failed to deliver, and so they go through a list of what a government has achieved and ‘you can see slightly rueful voters who had been rubbishing the Government  start to change their minds a bit as the list of what they had forgotten is conveyed.’

I know from interviewing Harper advisors that in earlier elections the Conservatives tried to get around this dilemma by setting out clear priorities, to try to make it clear to voters what they were offering and what the outcomes would be.

Other governments including the UK Labour government under Blair have also tried to communicate progress in delivery by conveying to voters what has occurred locally to them – such as the money for local schools and hospitals, and having a section in their website where the public can type in their address and find out what the government did down their road. They try to communicate delivery on an individual level.

The head of the UK’s first delivery unit said that governments have got to be great not just good enough to get attention for success. And even then voters still don’t give credit…it’s not like in business where they remember good service or go back to the company who delivered a long lasting and effective product. In his last Party conference speech in 2006 Tony Blair noted how he spoke to a woman who was a part-time worker, complaining about the amount of her tax credit, and he said ‘hold on a minute: before 1997, there were no tax credits not for working families not for any families; child benefit was frozen; maternity pay half what it is; maternity leave likewise and paternity leave didn't exist at all. And no minimum wage, no full time rights for part time workers, in fact nothing.’ ‘So what?’, she said ‘that's why we elected you. Now go and sort out my tax credit.’ Voters are not easy to satisfy.

Also, no government succeeds 100% in delivering – managing government, like all businesses and organisations, is not an easy task, and despite the power of a Prime Minister they cannot just order something to happen and assume it will. Government does not work like that. Delivery – especially in a minority government – involves compromise, building relationships, and working with the front line deliverers such as education and health care staff. There will always be some failures in delivery, but those who have worked in delivery units in the UK and Australia have told me that when this happens politicians would be wise to admit mistakes but then work to fix them and avoid blaming civil servants all the time.

The odds are therefore stacked against Harper in terms of delivery.

So do you think Harper has delivered? Does the public generally think the Harper government has delivered? Have they communicated their success effectively? Where they have failed, have they handled it effectively?
And what further political delivery is Harper now offering voters now shopping for a new government – and is it what people want, but also what Canada needs?

At what stage of the product life cycle are Canada’s political parties?

Alex Marland (Memorial University) has published about political marketing in the Journal of Public Affairs, political talk radio in Media, Culture and Society, and about Newfoundland nationalism in the International Journal of Canadian Studies.

 

 

One of the many things that marketers look at when they assess a product or service is its stage in the product life cycle. Now, politics is not really a product, and a politician is a human being. Think of politics more as a service, where politicians are franchisees of a larger organization. In the past I have likened election candidates to realtors (i.e., real estate agents) who work under a major brand label that helps promote their services. However lately I have been thinking about what a Canadian party strategist recently told me: that politicians are more like dentists, because they provide a necessary service that causes some people distress.

There are four elements to the product life cycle: introduction, growth, maturity and decline. This traces a product from its development and launch through to gradual market acceptance. Then competition gets more challenging and demand for the product starts levelling off. Eventually the product fills a niche in the market, has to be re-launched, or expires altogether.

Using the product life cycle lens, what might we say about Canada’s federal political parties in 2011? Some context is provided below to help you arrive at your own observations.

CONSERVATIVE PARTY
The history of this party is full of incidences of passing through the product life cycle. It has changed its name multiple times, including being known as the Liberal-Conservatives, Unionist, the ‘National Liberal and Conservative Party’, Progressive Conservative, and, since 2004, Conservative. There have also been offshoots, most recently Reform and then the Canadian Alliance. In elections this party has experienced the highest of highs (Macdonald’s majorities, Diefenbaker in 1958, Mulroney in 1984) and the lowest of lows (winning just two seats in 1993). This is because it fractures apart and succeeds only when the Liberal party falters. Its market potential is limited when its emphasis is on right-of-centre voters and its potential grows when it seeks to reach median voters in the middle of the political spectrum.

The ‘new’ Conservative party was announced in late 2003 and was launched when Stephen Harper became its first leader in 2004. It has been going through a growth phase ever since and has been the market leader since 2006. The question about its life cycle is whether this political product has matured or not. If the Conservatives can achieve a majority government then the party will have continued to grow, notwithstanding various bumps in the road along the way. But it is difficult to imagine a governing party being satisfied with forming yet another minority government. If the Conservatives secure a third consecutive minority then an argument could be made that the party has levelled off and that a new approach, not just hypersegmentation, will be needed to avoid entering a period of product decline.

Key question: What is the market peak for the Conservatives?

LIBERAL PARTY
As any student of Canadian politics knows the Liberal party has enjoyed a prolonged life cycle. It barely existed at Confederation and its introduction and growth phase began with Wilfred Laurier. Throughout the 20th century the party was in a sustained maturity phase whereby it regularly won majority governments and has fared no worse than forming the official opposition, to the point that the Liberal party obtained the moniker ‘Natural Governing Party’. Though it experienced its own major hiccups, usually due to serious scandals, its brand is sufficiently strong that it has never really been in decline or had to be re-launched. Certainly there have been strategic changes in leadership and marketing methods (the 1960s and 1990s come to mind) but the Liberal party has enjoyed considerable success securing votes from the political centre. This ‘big tent’ party has yet to be humbled with the type of significant election loss that causes a complete product renewal, the sort that occurs when a party is mired in the depths of opposition and faces further losses without major and potentially risky change, the kind that party members vex about.

The Liberal party has gone through a number of product adjustments since 2003 and its results in recent elections, both percentage of the vote and seat count, suggest that this is a party that has matured and is in the decline phase. Once a party of stability, it has now had three leaders in five years, and the current one did not even receive members’ endorsement in a leadership convention. Marketers have tinkered with the Liberal brand mark (logo) and notwithstanding the 2008 green shift policy it isn’t abundantly clear what unique service is being offered or even what the compelling reasons are for choosing the Liberal product. The public input that the party received at its ‘thinkers’ conference’ in March 2010 is indicative that new leader Michael Ignatieff recognizes that the party cannot rely on its weakened brand and that it badly needs some redevelopment. Being a market challenger means needing to convince people that you offer a better product than the one that consumers are currently using. The Liberals need to provide compelling incentives to reassure electors that switching political products is worth the risk.

Key question: What does the Liberal party need to do to grow?

BLOC QUÉBÉCOIS
In political marketing the Bloc Québécois is one of the only instances that Canada ever gets mentioned internationally. This is because the Bloc is an excellent case of a niche product. It was introduced as a party that would only seek support in Quebec, it has not wavered in its core product of defending Quebec values (though those are subject to change including when support for separatism is in flux), and it has maintained a solid leadership presence with current leader Gilles Duceppe having also been the party’s first MP. This is a party that passed through the introduction and growth phases very quickly in the early 1990s and ever since has been nestled in the maturity phase with a reasonably consistent level of support. Its decline has often been prophesized but its ability to continue as a protest party has been remarkable... and is also an indication that none of the parties seeking to form the federal government have been able to offer a more competitive product in the Quebec electoral marketplace.

There is little reason to think that the Bloc Québécois won’t continue to maintain its niche product status in the near future. There is simply no indication that the federal parties will be able to displace it and convince Bloc supporters to give up on a product that, to some, has delivered value and is familiar. Its brand as the representative of Quebec values is very difficult to challenge particularly for non-Francophone party leaders. The other parties may not be able to encroach upon the Bloc’s niche market until its current leader retires and/or until they have their own leader who can communicate renewal within Quebec. The guessing game of when this party will disappear continues.

Key question: What will cause the Bloc Québécois to decline?

NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY
The roots of the New Democratic Party are in a niche product of democratic socialism. Going back to the 1933 Regina Manifesto and the creation of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), and the rebranding of that party into the NDP in 1961 through a formal alliance with organized labour, this party has apparently been satisfied with being Parliament’s so-called ‘moral conscience’. Unlike the Conservative party, it has been unwilling to grow its market share by adjusting its core product and appealing to the median voter. Thus it has occupied an unmoving status as a market follower: it has never even formed the official opposition in Ottawa.

Under leader Jack Layton the NDP has modernized and a case could be made that it has subtly experienced a mild re-launch. In the 2008 campaign the party adopted a number of mainstream approaches, including promoting their leader as a candidate for PM, and it occasionally touches on soft populist principles, such as ending taxes on home heating fuel, that have appeal beyond the political left. Talk of renaming the party is common and high level officials have mused about a merger with the Liberal party. There are at least two election outcomes that would move the NDP away from its current position as a pan-Canadian niche party. One is if it succeeds in convincing enough so-called “Layton Liberals” (i.e., median voters) to vote NDP that it challenges to form the official opposition (in such a case the party would be well advised to pull 'red Tories' away from the Conservatives and the Bloc). The other outcome is that it fares so poorly that the party membership, after much soul-searching, recognizes that it is time to engage in a major re-launch, something akin to Tony Blair’s ‘new Labour’ in the UK. This is a party that went through one product life cycle as the CCF and, notwithstanding recent seat gains, there are long-term signs that its current incarnation is in decline or else that it has settled into its commonly perceived niche role as a party that is unable to challenge the market leader.

Key question: What circumstances would be needed for the NDP to consider a product re-launch?

GREEN PARTY
The Green Party is what political science often dismisses as a ‘fringe’ party. That was certainly true a decade ago but under the new party financing regime that since 2004 has rewarded parties for obtaining votes, not necessarily seats, the Greens have professionalized considerably. They still have never elected an MP and even if they do they will not be able to break into the mainstream until they can shake their positioning as a party that for many electors appears to offer little more than a micro-niche product of environmentalism and a “none of the above” brand. As with the NDP, and unlike the Bloc Québécois, they are seriously disadvantaged by the electoral system which is a harsh reality of the electoral marketplace that they must adapt to.

A very rosy view of the Green Party is that it is in a growth phase. The presence of leader Elizabeth May in the 2008 election debates and the continued possibility that she may finally win a seat are examples that the party is growing. If it goes on to be reasonably successful (i.e., wins at least the 12 seats needed for party status in the House of Commons) then we would look back at 2011 and say that the Greens were in the introduction phase of the product life cycle. But a more realistic view is that the party needs to do more than just compete for votes primarily for financial reasons. If it doesn’t get a breakthrough soon we could consider it a mature product that has nestled into a role as a fringe outsider, albeit a well-financed one.

Key question: Is the Green party’s growth necessarily tied to the existence of party subsidies?

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?

Boutique vs. WalMart Campaigning

 André Turcotte, Ph.D

School of Journalism and Communication

Carleton University

 

Once again, we find ourselves at the brink of an election campaign. While this is becoming a common recurrence, it is hard to imagine how the opposition parties can once again prop up the Harper government without losing the little credibility they have left. For their part, the Conservatives began their campaign several weeks ago with an aggressive ad buy and constant attacks on Michael Ignatieff. All we now need is for the Prime Minister to walk up to Rideau Hall and pay a visit to the Governor General.

 

Every election is hyped as "the most important in a generation." While the upcoming election is unlikely to stand out substantively, it may offer interesting insights into the new approaches to winning elections in Canada. For decades, Liberals and Progressive Conservatives have formed governments by adopting a mass marketing approach to winning elections. They kept an eye on their core supporters but generally appealed to what academics refer to as the "median voter." The Harper Conservatives changed that in 2006.

 

As documented elsewhere (see Tom Flanagan's book Harper's Team (2007) and the upcoming Political Marketing in Canada (2012) by Lees-Marshment et al.) the strategy followed by the Harper Conservatives can be described as hyper-segmentation. They first set out to understand the composition of the political marketplace and identify the values and policy positions of certain segments of the electorate that will maximize their electoral market share. This strategy was developed after the Conservatives' disappointing showing in the 2004 election. After failing to defeat the scandal-plagued Martin Liberals, the key strategists around Stephen Harper decided to look for new ways to increase their chances of forming a government. As Ian Brodie, who was a senior member of the Conservative Team and later became Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Harper, suggested; one of the main lessons of 2004 was the necessity to develop a market intelligence structure to ensure that the campaign could be "more responsive" and "more nimble."

 

Their new approach was inspired by the electoral success of John Howard in Australia. Of particular interest were the ways Howard managed to end thirteen years of Labour rule in 1996. The Harper strategists studied the segmentation used by the Australian Liberal-National Coalition and its focus on what Party Leader Howard had called "the battlers" or families struggling to raise their kids on a small income. The idea behind this strategy is to use market intelligence to identify key segments of electorate and to develop a highly-targeted Voter ID initiative to ensure that voters fitting the strategic profile go out to vote. It combines the strengths of polling and tele-marketing to create a high-tech version canvassing. In 2008, the Harper Campaign successfully focused on less than half a million voters out of about 23 million eligible voters. It will focus on substantially fewer voters in the upcoming election campaign.

In 2011, the Conservative Campaign will likely zero-in on a few thousand voters in the 12 ridings they need to form a majority government. In business terms, this is like a "boutique" approach to national campaigning. The goal is to identify specific "customers"; identify their needs and preferences, offer them what they want and aggressively go after them with direct marketing and a targeted advertising campaign. This stands in contrast with what appears to be the Liberal strategy. Michael Ignatieff is promoting his Liberal "Big Tent." This looks more like a "Wal-Mart" approach to campaigning – offers lots of things to as many customers as possible, smile a lot and hope they buy your product on Election Day. In theory, this would yield a larger customer base for the Liberals but in this era of low voting turnout and disengaged voters, it is less likely to succeed.

 

The Conservative approach to campaigning has some repercussions. We already see some evidence in the recent television ads. While Canadians are emerging from a recession and may be waiting to see how the federal government will tackle the budget deficit, the Conservatives are running ads about illegal immigrants and Ignatieff being soft on crime. Illegal immigration and crime are by no measure "top-of-mind issues" but presumably, internal Conservative polling has identified this topic as particularly salient among their target voters. We can expect more of these types of special-interest ads as the campaign unfolds. This will leave large segments of the electorate feeling that their issue priorities are neglected; leading to more disengagement and low political participation. But if the end justifies the means, this strategy may result in a Harper majority.