Press Release

Election to be won on the marketing battleground

This May’s election will be won through the use of marketing techniques, says The Chartered Institute of Marketing, a leading professional body. The three main parties are using more marketing techniques than ever before – and whether this is seen as a good or bad thing depends not on the colour of someone’s vote, but on their view of the marketing tactics being used.

Voters are now more heavily targeted than ever before by parties keen to secure their vote, and the techniques used get more and more sophisticated. During this election campaign, voters may be called at home with a recorded message by Michael Howard, while Labour are busily examining the contents of shopping baskets to deduce who is likely to vote for who and calling voters on the telephone preference service in the name of research.

The three main parties have gone for classic market positioning to differentiate themselves from one another in this campaign, says Hugh West, CIM’s International Vice Chairman. “Labour appear to be running a negative campaign, highlighting the perceived dangers of Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin in charge of the UK economy, while the Conservatives are running an emotive campaign – highlighting broad issues such as the health service by focusing on individual, emotional subjects they hope will connect with voters, such as hospital super bugs, immigration and ‘yob culture’. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats are running a segmented campaign – concentrating on issues that are not so high on the other two parties’ agendas, such as university tuition fees.”

But each party could benefit from some marketing tips in order to refine their approaches.

“The marketing message for Labour is clear,” says West. “Focusing on individuals gets you into trouble, as seen with the ‘pigs might fly’ adverts earlier this year – much better to talk about positive issues to gain voters’ interest, instead of criticising the alternative.”

West explains that the Conservatives are “using a classic marketing technique – emotional connection with the product – to appeal to voters, now that dry dialogue about education and the economy seem to leave people cold.” Whilst this strategy gets lots of column inches and stirs up people’s attention, “the dangers are that the campaign risks being trivialised by individual cases that are either unimportant, inaccurate or which don’t take full account of the facts”.

The Liberal Democrats appear to be conducting the most logical marketing campaign. By stating explicitly they are going to focus on issues that they believe matter to people – instead of emotive issues, or attacking the other parties – the Liberal Democrats at least gain credit for not playing any wrong cards. But they’re playing precious few right ones in that the issues just aren’t high profile enough, “the marketing problem is that these are not subjects that are likely to make headlines and grab the attention of the media in the glut of stories leading up to the election,” adds West. “In this sense, their problem is exactly the opposite of the other two parties – who get all the headlines, but at the expense of being trivial or negative.   

From a marketing perspective, the Liberal Democrats need to ‘sex up’ their communications, the Conservatives need to be less emotionally explosive and Labour need to stop attacking the Tories, and instead focus clearly on why the country should vote them in for a third term.

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