How To Win An Election With Marketing
With an eye to the upcoming Federal election, guest columnist Alex Connell revisits the 2012 US Presidential election to examine five key marketing factors that swayed the outcome.
As local marketers begin to plan multi-million dollar election campaigns for their respective parties, what does it actually take to win an election with marketing?
By analysing the most successfully marketed election campaign of all time, Obama’s 2012 win over Mitt Romney, here are five things to consider during the upcoming Australian election campaigns:
- The Power of the Slogan
Obama’s slogan ‘Change’ was much stronger than Romney’s ‘Believe in America’. Change, when relating to politics, is a word that infers a positive outlook; things will be done, our problems will be solved, all our issues will go away. What does ‘Believe in America’ imply? That people don’t believe in America? Why don’t you believe in America? ‘Belief’ isn’t going to fix America, but ‘change’ will.
- Find your story and sing it
Every successful brand has its own intriguing story, it’s even better if that story can invoke some admiration or empathy. Obama was born to a middle class Kenyan father and English mother, was involved in gangs and drug use during his teens, reformed to attend and graduate from Harvard, then went on to become the first African American president in United States’ history.
have u ever worked in political advertising??
Alex, great words. I expect your next article to be about how you went from a Planner to a President.
Loved it! Very insightful 🙂
Agreed Isobell!!!
If only more planners were this insightful and articulate. Great read.
Ripper article Alex, Steel City is proud of you. X
One of the defining factors of the marketing tactics used by US political campaigns is that the US does not have compulsory voting. To put into context how prevalent not voting is in the US, for all of the coverage Donald Trump is getting, only 4.7% of eligible voters have voted for him across all of the primaries and caucuses through to 3 May 2016 (source: Vox).
This playing field brings to the forefront additional “Get Out The Vote” tactics that sound alien in the context of Australian elections and/or commercial brand management:
1) Since US election winners are determined under a first-past-the-post system, political campaigns often aim to move relative support in its direction by “going negative” with mass reach campaigns and earned media coverage that feature messages that were crafted to intentionally de-motivate more of the opposing candidate’s supporters than it de-motivates the preferred candidate’s supporters. In the view that vote tallies are a scoreboard, (Our side: +1,Their side: +0) and (Our side: -1, Their side: -2) serve the same purpose (source: long ago coursework).
2) US political campaign operations often identify and model which individual voters the campaign (candidate or issue) wants to encourage to show up to voting booths on election day. From doing this, US political campaigns then can activate these segments through not only email and SMS but also prioritise activation through solutions that are more costly to scale: regular mail, phone call, door knock, letter drop, lawn sign, even so far as shuttle buses on election day (source: personal low level experience in US GOTV operations from when the blue team was playing catch up to Voter Vault in the Bush era).
3) Conversely campaigns suppress paid voter outreach activity to known and likely detractors in the hopes this makes them marginally more likely to refrain from voting if unprompted to show up (source: logical extension of above). This is surprisingly similar logic to dialling down DSP spend on segments that aren’t performing.
4) Considering the national remit of the political parties and special interest groups that fund campaigns and recent advances in marketing automation, the 2016 elections will feature an unprecedented swiftness in how trailing candidates in formerly close races experience national organisations re-mobilising planned resources away from them and towards electorates that are more competitive. Now that I think about it, real time weather data projection providers could do very well this election (source: conjecture).
Tangentially related: Super PACs get absolutely fleeced by publishers. They routinely pay premiums over +100% on top of rate cards that candidates’ campaigns pay.
@meh (?) emoticon. Insane reading. At the risk of oversimplification, and assuming Trump and Clinton win their respective party nominations, would you say the campaign is going to be decided by the ‘Get out the vote because we can’t let this person be President’ component? And if so, would Clinton provide a less divisive figure than Trump in relative terms. All moot of course, but interested in your thoughts.