Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (29 page)

Muttart’s analysis of the Canadian electorate, in fact, was so precise that Conservatives knew which 500,000 voters they needed—swing voters in swing ridings. So while the media and the pundits were transfixed by the big horse-race numbers of national polls, the Conservatives paid them little heed. They didn’t even bother with national polls after 2005, choosing instead to do nightly tracking polls among the small, “micro-targeted” constituencies they needed, as well as regular focus-group sessions that helped the party continually shape itself around what they were hearing from voters on the intangible plane of emotions and values.

More to the point, this micro-targeting also showed the Conservatives what votes they did not need to seek: supporters of Liberals, New Democrats and Greens who would cancel out the others’ votes if the Conservatives’ opposition remained scattered among a number of party alternatives. Conservatives, using micro-targeting, could also concentrate their pitches on people who were more likely to cast a vote on election day. The early Reform Party had taken this approach, too, to some extent, eschewing mass-market, pan-Canadian ambitions to focus on pockets of strength in the country (mainly in the West). Allan Gregg, watching this innovation in political polling, was struck by how far this took the new Conservative party away from the old “big-tent” approach of politics past.

“Every party that I’ve worked for wanted to be more popular. They always wanted more votes,” Gregg said. “And these guys are saying we don’t need more votes. We just need to make sure that the other guys are sharing a pool collectively… When I created the target-voter typology, the inherent assumption was that all voters aren’t created equal. But this is a whole new generation of thinking in that regard: ‘If my voters are twice as likely to turn out as yours, they’re worth two times as much.’”

The Five Habits of Successful Political Marketers

Now that the Conservatives had become more sophisticated about political marketing, it was time to overhaul the platform, too. The 2004 Conservative platform had been far too complicated, too abstract to the concerns of Tim Hortons Canadians. If the Conservatives were serious about reaching these voters, they needed to make their party more accessible to people. This platform-overhaul effort was textbook political marketing—changing the product to line it up with the market research. The Conservatives, according to Jennifer Lees-Marshment’s categories, were leaping from being a sales-oriented party to being a marketing-oriented party—from SOP to MOP.

The overhaul was carried out mainly by chief of staff Ian Brodie, relying heavily on Patrick Muttart’s advice about reaching swing voters. The biggest change was to the Conservatives’ tax policy. Their old promises had involved complicated changes to tax brackets and personal-income exemptions. But who among their target audience would care about this kind of nuanced change? Fixing the dreaded GST, though—that would get some notice. They wouldn’t make reckless promises to make it “disappear,” as Chrétien had, or try to mince words about its continued existence, as Paul Martin had. The Conservatives’ new, marketing-approved platform made a bold, easy-to-understand vow—if the Conservatives won power, they would reduce the GST by one percent immediately, then by another one percent by the end of their first mandate. It would cost them $12 billion to $14 billion a year in revenue, not to mention a wave of criticism from economists, but the payoff would be power. And that, in politics, is like a major windfall in profits.

That GST promise showed just how far politicians had now travelled to accommodate consumer-citizenship. The GST, all on its own, had become a story about the evolution of political marketing. Brian Mulroney had been able to risk a “helluva row” in the Canadian public to introduce the GST, though it probably helped hasten the collapse of the old Progressive Conservative brand. Jean Chrétien had been able to withstand the furor over his fuzzy promise to eliminate the GST. And though Liberals did internal polling on reducing the tax, they had decided that the treasury couldn’t take the hit, and the public seemed to go along with this decision, if grudgingly. But the Conservatives, tailoring their politics to the realities of marketing, recognized that this tax “product” had to be shaped around market demand.

The GST had moved through all those stages that Jennifer Lees-Marshment outlined, with her POPs, SOPs and MOPs. Under Mulroney, the GST was a take-it-or-leave-it product. Under Chrétien, it was something that needed to be sold or massaged to the electorate. Under Harper, it was a commodity that needed to be modified to answer consumer demand. The GST, like the politicians, had come into the marketing age.

On health care, meanwhile, the Conservatives also applied some marketing wisdom to their platform. Canadians felt like consumers when it came to using health-care services and one of citizens’ main complaints was to do with the waiting times they faced for medical attention. So the Conservatives threw out their more technical campaign promises from 2004, revolving around better ways to finance health care, and kept it simple again—with a “Patient Wait Times Guarantee.” Consumers, as we’ve seen, love product guarantees.

On child care, the Conservatives would deliver another consumer-friendly promise, with a heavy dose of nostalgia in it, as a bonus—a baby bonus, if you like. Rather than make grand promises to create a national child-care program, the Conservatives would instead give Canadian parents one hundred dollars a month for every child. It was indeed like the old baby bonus program, which had evolved over the years into a far more complicated affair, targeted to families most in need. The Conservatives promised to make it all simple again, and called it the “Choice in Child Care Allowance.” There was that old word from the 1950s explosion of consumerism again: choice. Consumer-citizens love choice—in the grocery aisles and in their government services.

The other two big promises revolved around “accountability” and law and order. The Conservatives were promising to clean up government, the justice system and the streets—an echo of Dalton Camp’s “Let’s Clean House” slogans of another era, but also a reflection of the more modern collapse of confidence in the legal and democratic systems. Those problems were actually complex and cultural, but political marketing usually demands simplicity. So these promises were summed up sparsely in the priority list as “clean up government” and “crack down on crime.”

Like Blair’s New Labour campaign, the Conservatives had distilled their platform down to five points or “priorities,” as they were called. But although Muttart spent a lot of time studying Blair’s brand of political marketing in the lead-up to the 2005 campaign, there was another, far more pedestrian reason for the Conservatives’ five-promise platform: it would get them from Monday to Friday on the first week of the election campaign. Commercial sector marketers actually prefer the number seven when they’re making lists, according to Muttart: “Seven Habits of Highly Successful People,” and so on. But the Conservatives, in 2005, were looking for a way to make one announcement a day through the regular business week.

The reaction to the five priorities was swift and mostly enthusiastic, even if the seasoned pundits saw through the marketing strategy, especially on the GST cut. Don Martin wrote in his column for the CanWest media chain, “The GST cut is a shameless stunt to win votes, they’ll argue. Well... DUH. This IS an election campaign, after all, where politics becomes the art of buying mass appeal. And promising to cut the GST just as Christmas consumerism peaks is an idea that registers with every cash receipt. Vote Conservative and in five years you’ll save two bucks on every one-hundred-dollar purchase. Simple.”

James Wallace wrote in the
Sarnia Observer
that while official Ottawa might be bickering over who was to blame for the GST and how to fix it, the cut would be noticed by “Joe and Jane Canuck who will trudge to the mall this holiday weekend, with the short end of their paycheck in hand (income taxes and assorted deductions having consumed a sinful portion) and be forced to shell out another seven percent in tax on every dollar they spend on Christmas presents, shovels for the coming snow and nearly everything else they buy.”

The Conservatives also designed an advertising campaign to match their marketing strategy, aimed as it was at Tim Hortons voters, or to use Wallace’s words, “Joe and Jane Canuck.” Back in the spring of 2005, the Conservatives had prepared a series of “brand ads” that were intended to take the harsh edge off Harper’s image—and to show him as a leader of a team, much as Chrétien had done in the early 1990s when his leadership had been perceived as a potential liability. In the Conservative ads of 2005, Harper was filmed in a campaign office holding policy conversations with young, attractive members of his caucus: former Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay and Alberta MP Rona Ambrose. The TV ads ran in selected Ontario ridings in late August and September that year.

Muttart took a hard marketing look at the ads and found them too “Zoe” for the audience the Conservatives were trying to reach in the election campaign. Ironically, perhaps, the very people designing the ad strategy for the Conservatives, not to mention all those young aides around the Hill, were more like Fiona and Marcus than Rick and Brenda. So it was back to the drawing board. The ads filmed for the election were considerably less artsy, or as Tom Flanagan described them in his book
Harper’s Team
, “artfully middle-brow.” They were designed to resemble a five o’clock newscast—a medium, as Muttart knew, quite familiar to the disengaged Canadian voters.

In the “accountability” ad, for instance, Harper sits on a low-budget stage set with an actress playing a TV interviewer, who is modestly dressed in a rumpled brown blazer, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. “How is it that hundreds of millions of dollars goes missing and no one goes to jail?” the interviewer asks. Harper then launches into his pitch to clean up government, before wheeling around to field a question from an ordinary-Canadian voter on the background screen. The spots all ended with a grainy shot of a portable marquee, the kind often used by small-town merchants, with the words spelled out: “Stand Up for Canada.”

The initial reaction from the ad community was not positive. In the
National Post
, the Conservative advertising was described as “contrived” and Harper’s performance as “wooden.” Ad experts preferred the Liberals’ high-production spots, which featured crowd scenes of diverse people and positive newspaper headlines, just like the testimonials that Dalton Camp used to feature in his advertising decades earlier.

But the Conservatives weren’t aiming for the experts. The ads were designed for non-political Canadians, who knew that all advertising, to some extent, is contrivance. As Tom Flanagan would put it in his book, “Although many observers said they were hokey, they were well conceived for the job they had to do—to communicate the essence of our policy to middle-aged or older, family-oriented, middle-income people without high levels of formal education. These were our swing voters, the people who would bring us victory if we could bring them on side.”

Yaroslav Baran, then working in the “war room” for the Conservatives, said Muttart’s fictional characters made it easier to keep communications aides’ eyes on the target audience. He told his fellow war-room staffers that they weren’t designing their message for press gallery reporters. Every piece of communication, Baran advised, whether it was a press release or an ad, should be imagined as letters to Dougie, or Rick and Brenda. It was good practice for marketing communications in government, too, which is all about speaking over the heads of traditional media and straight to consumer-citizens.

Warren Kinsella, a Liberal blogger and author of books on hardball politics, was sitting in the spectators’ stands in this election—figuratively and literally. No great fan of Prime Minister Paul Martin and his loyalists, Kinsella was not playing any active role for his party. Early in the campaign, he was sitting in an arena in Leaside, where Harper had grown up, coincidentally, when suddenly he was struck by the idea of the campaign as a class struggle at the coffee shop. Kinsella tapped out a little blog post with his BlackBerry, saying that the election was about Tim Hortons voters versus Starbucks voters. Soon after his post went online, he received two messages: one from Muttart, another from Conservative policy chief Ken Boessenkool. The blog post, they said, was dead on. Conservatives were looking for their voters at the doughnut chain.

That was quite the turnaround from 1957, when Camp’s Madison Avenue wizardry, complete with customer testimonials and image-heavy ads, defeated the Liberals. A half-century later, that kind of sophistication was out of fashion. Not even advertising could help the Liberals, now that the world had shifted to the sharper arts of marketing. As with the sponsorship program, they had overplayed their hand on the bid to prove that Harper was scary. Sometimes, repetition works in advertising. At other times, as in the 2005–06 campaign, constant repetition merely makes consumers suspicious of the source. This was certainly the case when reports emerged of a new wave of Liberal attack ads. Implying that a Conservative government would militarize Canada, the ads were accompanied by a menacing drumbeat. “Stephen Harper actually announced he wants to increase military presence in our cities. Canadian cities. Soldiers with guns. In our cities. In Canada. We did not make this up,” the ad warned. Reaction to the ad, even in the early hours, could be summed up as, “Seriously?”

Facing an immediate backlash, the Liberals pulled the ad before it could get into circulation. Their fates were already on a downward trajectory anyway, defeat almost certainly sealed when news broke in late December that the RCMP was investigating possible leaks from Finance Minister Ralph Goodale’s office, related to a decision on how to tax income trusts (Goodale’s office was later cleared of all suspicion). That blockbuster of a news story gave fuel to the Conservatives’ constant campaign refrain about the “corrupt” Liberals. The off-the-cuff remarks about “beer and popcorn” by Martin’s communications director Scott Reid made the Liberals seem even more distant from the Tim Hortons constituency that Conservatives were courting. You make jokes about beer at your peril among Canadian brand-patriots.