Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (14 page)

MARKET-TESTED

A
lmost as soon as Canadian political players fully embraced polling and advertising in the 1970s, earnest voices began to be raised in buyers’ regret. No question, people were having fun with all the new commercial tools for politicking, but what would they do to the higher calling of the profession? And so, for the next couple of decades, Canadian politicos seesawed between arguments over just how much our democratic system should be getting mixed up in the tools of the consumer marketplace. While that debate carried on, though, the country started to amass most of the raw ingredients of the all-out political marketing and consumer citizenship that would dominate the twenty-first century. Resistance would prove futile.

In the midst of the 1979 election campaign, a clearly grumpy Geoffrey Stevens lamented in his much-read
Globe and Mail
column how politics was turning into the “Selling of the Canadian Politician,” and in the process, untethering the voting public from the true, more civic-minded purpose of politics:

The 120-odd journalists who are travelling with Messrs. Trudeau, Clark and Broadbent today are less political reporters than they are stage props for the evening news. Dutifully, inanely, we follow Mr. Clark through the Syncrude project at Fort McMurray, Mr. Broadbent through a hospital in Regina, Mr. Trudeau through a boys’ and girls’ club in Saint John. Does Mr. Clark actually know anything more about the problems of small business than he did before he strode, rapidly, through a box company in Kitchener? Is Mr. Broadbent’s understanding of the complexities of food pricing deepened because he was able to pose in front of the produce counter at a co-op in St. Boniface? Is Mr. Trudeau more sensitive to the diversity of the Canadian soul because he lit a string of firecrackers on a street in Chinatown in Vancouver?

Stevens complained that campaigns had become a physical endurance test, rather than a challenge to inform and educate the citizenry. Somehow, he said, Canadian political journalists were helping to push the myth that if a politician could perform like an ad pitchman, he could also run a country: “What nonsense. What rubbish. All that’s being established is that the three leaders, properly briefed, are able to make painstakingly stage-managed public appearances without falling into the orchestra pit. We are learning nothing about which man would make the best prime minister or how he would conduct himself if entrusted with that high office.” Even the earnest New Democrats were embracing the slick new tools of the political trade, setting aside an unprecedented $1 million for advertising in the 1979 campaign with leader Ed Broadbent.

Terry O’Malley, ever upbeat, hauled out his Underwood typewriter and hammered out a defence of advertising’s place in politics for the pages of the
Globe and Mail
: “For me, advertising is one of the real bases of democracy. It is the voice of reporting on one of the most important fundamentals in our society: the goods and services supplied to the marketplace.” He also dropped an interesting bit of advertising-industry intelligence. Apparently, the most disliked form of ads were ones for household products such as soap and deodorant. However, O’Malley said, these were also the ads that proved to be most effective, simply because the soap and deodorant corporations had the money to saturate the airwaves.

There was a great bit of foreshadowing in O’Malley’s column for the politics to come three decades down the road in Canada, when a federal Conservative party learned that you could make Canadians watch ads they didn’t like and still persuade them to buy your product—as long as you had the resources to carry out a sustained PR effort. O’Malley, with the help of that handy soap metaphor again, was spelling out the formula for the unlikely success of attack ads. It was as simple as this: you may not like them, but they will get in your head anyway, thanks to rote, repeated exposure.

What the Canadian political media was witnessing going into the 1980s, in fact, was just the tip of the iceberg. Or, as Canadian band Bachman-Turner Overdrive sang in the 1970s, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Advertising and marketing were not just shaping politics and election campaigns, but their influence was being felt in government too, in between elections. The ad gurus were starting to be consulted on what policies would be more attractive to the citizens and what measures would be more consumer-friendly. Need a program to fight inflation or hammer out a new constitutional deal? Don’t call the political scientists. Call the ad guys.

There were also political developments unfolding on the world stage at the time, particularly in Britain and the United States, which would prove to be crucial lessons for future generations of Canadian politicos.

Have It Your Way

A lawyer and a staunch capitalist, Margaret Thatcher, daughter of a greengrocer, had assumed the helm of the British Conservative Party in 1975. Although she had been educated as a scientist, she began her political career in the 1950s as a young MP for the riding of Dartford, a community in England that had been hard hit by the rationing and regulation fervour of postwar Britain. Further political experience, notably as health minister in the early 1970s, had put Thatcher on a constant collision course with unions and state-run enterprise. Tough, hard as nails, Thatcher believed business-minded people were best-placed to handle affairs of state—and political campaigning. Thatcher would seize every opportunity to link politics to shopping, charging through supermarkets with a grocery cart during election campaigns and urging voters to see government finances as a household budget. As she ascended to the prime minister’s job in the late 1970s, pundits would call her “Margaret the Marketed” and her campaign “The Selling of Maggie.”

The Thatcher-led merger of politics and marketing began with a fateful decision to bring advertising experts right into the inner circle of political decision-making in the Conservative Party of Great Britain. Gordon Reece, a former television producer, had been working with Thatcher since 1970, coaching her on how to be more TV-friendly. Reece, almost immediately after his 1978 appointment as director of publicity for the new Conservative leader, sought out a high-flying British advertising firm, Saatchi & Saatchi, to do a total image makeover for the party. As Margaret Scammell wrote in her 1995 book
Designer Politics: How Elections Are Won
, the advertising firm was given a free hand to do for the party what it had done for its corporate clients:

The Saatchi team went to work on their new account much as they would any other; its first task was to research consumers’ emotional reaction to the ‘product’ and then to reduce the client’s objectives and most logical appeals to their simplest elements… Saatchi’s stress on the general emotional appeal, rather than the particular policy aspects, led them to engage more heavily in qualitative, motivational research rather than quantitative surveys. Saatchi imported qualitative marketing research direct from the commercial world: unlike quantitative research, it does not attempt to produce statistically measurable results. It relies on focus-group discussion and in-depth interviews with voters in target groups. In the commercial field it is used widely at the stage of product development to gain an early indication of consumer reactions. In advertising, it is used frequently to test copy before it is released.

By the standards of the twenty-first century this may seem like tame stuff, but it’s impossible to overstate the significance of this development in political culture—probably the true moment when politics and politicians became products for consumer-citizens. This wasn’t just salesmanship. Nor was it advertising. It meant, in fact, deliberately shaping the product to meet and anticipate voters’ demands. That is what the professionals call marketing. And thanks to Scammell and others watching the Thatcher and Reagan method of politics, a whole new field of political science was born in this era, known as “political marketing.”

Political people and politics-watchers often treat the words “advertising” and “marketing” as synonyms. And indeed, it’s true that advertising is a facet of marketing; the distinction is often described as a fuzzy one. But in terms of understanding how politics have been influenced by the consumer world, and what defines political marketing, it’s more useful to see them as stand-alone terms, chronologically. Advertising is what you do after you have a product to sell; marketing is what you do to come up with the product in the first place. If someone knits a sweater and puts it on a table at a bazaar, that’s pure selling. If someone knits a sweater and then puts it on a mannequin, with a sign boasting of the sweater’s warmth and comfort, that’s advertising. If the knitter researches which sweaters have sold at the bazaar in previous years, then knits some to meet that demand, or even takes orders for custom-designed creations, that’s marketing.

The Canadian ad business didn’t exactly stampede to this notion of marketing when it first emerged. At a business conference in Montreal in April 1974 featuring advertising executives, corporate leaders and academics, the talk of “new marketing” fell on some skeptical ears. In the
Toronto Star
, reporter Robert Walker went so far as to say the idea sounded “kind of dumb” at first hearing. Business school professors were mainly the people behind the marketing push, Walker wrote, “by which they mean not merely advertising the product but also deciding in the first place what product to make, how and where to make it, how to get it to you and how much to charge.” Some ad executives, Walker reported, detected something vaguely amiss with this approach, fearing it was an unhealthy manipulation of the market, maybe even undemocratic. One study of 156 Canadian corporations at the time showed that marketing managers were viewed dimly for “attempting to exercise control over their customers.” But it was obviously a force that couldn’t be resisted, for business or politicians. Who wouldn’t want to get more control of their customers—or their citizens?

International political-marketing expert Jennifer Lees-Marshment, who cut her teeth on this issue by studying Thatcher’s approach to politics, has used the advertising-marketing distinction to come up with three types of political parties: the product-oriented party, the sales-oriented party and the marketing-oriented party. Or, if you prefer some rhyming acronyms, POPs, SOPs and MOPs. Product-oriented parties simply present themselves to voters and hope for the reward at the ballot box. That usually happens when they have a strong, singular position to present; in Canada, the Bloc Québécois or the early Green Party would be good examples. Sales-oriented parties, on the other hand, put a lot of effort into persuading voters to support them: putting popular policies in the front window, less popular or more complex ideas in the fine print. Most parties in Canada, at one time or another, are sales oriented. You want to sell politicians like soap? Be a SOP. Marketing-oriented parties, though, try to figure out in advance what the voters want, and actually shape their policies, not just their public face, around voter demand. To do marketing in politics, you need to be willing to see your party as a malleable “product” that can be shaped and altered by consumer demand and market research. This means that you don’t go to the pollsters and advertisers after you’ve decided on your policies and platform—you bring them in before, to help design what you’re offering to the electorate. It’s not the kind of politics that everyone likes. To this day, people in all parties can be as squeamish as those 1970s ad executives about shaping the political “product” to fit voter demand.

But marketing has been a powerfully profitable enterprise for the political parties that have put aside their reservations to do it. It has yielded those profits because it is answering to a market demand in the citizenry, according to Lees-Marshment. “We don’t like to think of people, of politicians being a product, and we certainly don’t like to think that they’re designing what they say they believe in and they stand for,” Lees-Marshment said in an interview. “The reason politicians treat voters as consumers is because voters act like consumers. Voters don’t just vote according to how their parents voted or according to their party ideology… We change whom we vote for from one election to the next. We need persuading to support somebody. We also need the politician to offer us a product that we will like, just as we do in business—because we’re consumers in every other aspect of our life. We also now act as consumers in politics.”