UK Vote Badge
Conspiracy theories aside, I’ve been thinking about the election with my marketing hat on. Effectively an election campaign is a product based marketing campaign but with only one product to sell, and that product is the election candidate themselves. Indeed, this is a much easier marketing prospect than promoting a company or an actual product as for a start the competition for an election is usually much smaller, the campaign is highly geographically targetted, and for at least three of the candidates the brands they represent are household names, although given the news recently this may not necessarily be a good thing!
So why do election candidates persistently fail to get it right? Looking at what I’ve had through the door for both the local and the MEP elections, it’s a ramshackle collection of poor quality leaflets with blurry images and typos on poor quality paper, and that’s from the people who bothered to push something through my letterbox. To be fair one candidate did take the time to knock on my door, although he didn’t know the answer to a fairly straightforward question about social care standards that I asked him, but he did say he would make a point of fighting for an improvement if we voted for him, which sounded a bit like he was grabbing onto any idea that he could campaign for because he didn’t have any of his own. It’s a sad state of affairs when this person actually seemed like a better candidate than the others, because at least he said he was going to do something for me that might be related to an issue that I was interested in.
While local politics is a different bag to national politics, I’ve been thinking that surely it should require some effort on the part of the candidates to actually get themselves elected? It’s no wonder there’s such poor turnout at elections if this lacklustre promotional attempt is what election campaigning is all about in this country.
In short, make more of an effort next time because I can almost guarantee that if you actually did some marketing, you’d be a mile ahead of your nearest candidate who will be following the same old poor quality format. If you need a few pointers, here’s ten tips for a marketing campaign for people wishing to stand for office. If you win the job, let us know.
1. Read something about the issues that concern local residents. These issues will always include care standards, public health, education, public services, council tax, affordable housing, crime. Remember something of what you’ve read. Have at least one comment for each saying how you’re going to improve things.
2. Don’t scrimp on producing leaflets. It makes you look cheap and untrustworthy. Get someone to proof read them.
3. Don’t bother to knock on people’s doors if you don’t know the answers to basic questions, or you can’t at least respond with an answer to a related subject. Watch Question Time or Newsnight for a lesson in how to answer a question with an alternative answer should you need to do this. Make sure you get the voters email or postal address so you can send them some relevant further information if you don’t know the answer. Don’t forget to do so.
4. Smile more. From the looks of the photos of our local candidates, you’d cross the street at night to avoid some of them. If you look like a dodgy second hand car dealer, find a decent outfitter to suggest a different style, get a haircut, and get yourself in the gym and lose a few pounds. Keep smiling.
5. Don’t enlist local youths to campaign for you because they’re cheap, particularly if they know more than you do about politics because they’re studying it at college. Also, if you are the kind of person who is prone to using the local Young Conservatives to help you canvas small regional villages for several hours in the pouring rain on a Saturday and you promise them lunch, make sure you keep your promise.
6. Pick one topic that is a widespread popular issue and keep banging on about it to convince people that you are going to do something about the issue. Then actually do something about the issue to make sure you’ve got something positive to say at the next election about what you’ve done.
7. Hire a PR/marketing agency to make sure you are seen regularly across the media throughout your campaign. Don’t try to do this yourself to save money, because you will lose to anyone who does hire an agency. Make sure you use a local agency because they will know the local issues and you will also be seen to be supporting local business.
8. Make sure you use good quality stationery. Using cheaper writing paper than the person who is looking to you to represent them isn’t going to impress anyone.
9. If you’re going to address envelopes by hand to encourage people to open them, make sure you’ve got something good to say when people do look at what’s inside. The disappointment of not getting a letter from someone and instead finding a cheap election flyer inside the envelope will work against you.
10. Always remember that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
Sure, it might cost you some money to mount an effective campaign, but considering that the salary of an MEP is currently over £80K plus ‘expenses’ per year (and apparently expenses can be quite lucrative as we’ve seen), and you’d be elected for a five year term, it would be well worth spending a bit more than £2.50 to try to win the job, don’t you think?
Here’s some other interesting reading.
