CMPM2014

The next speaker at CMPM2014 is Gavin Lees, via Skype link (uh-oh). His interest is in the segmentation of political supporters in Australia, and the political targetting strategies which emerge from this; and this builds on Roy Morgan data on the demographics of some 42,000 Australian voters covering the periods before and after the 2010 election.

Amongst the variables examined by this study were gender: National voters were slightly biased towards men, Green voters slightly toward women; age: National biased toward older, Greens towards younger and against older voters; income: National biased towards low-income, Greens slightly biased towards higher income groups; socioeconomic groupings: National biased towards E, F, G (lower socioeconomic) and Greens towards A and B (higher socioeconomic) groups; and education: Greens strongly biased towards higher degrees, Nationals slightly biased against higher degrees. There were few clear differences between Labor and Liberal voters on these variables.

Next up at CMPM2014 is Edwina Throsby, whose focus is on swinging voters. These are important figures in Australian politics, and seen as determining party policies and deciding elections; the fact that Australia has compulsory voting also makes their position very special in an international context.

There are plenty of assumptions about who these swinging voters are, and how they might be targetted by political campaigning – and indeed most campaigns are squarely focussed on this group. But such targetting has become increasingly difficult in recent years: while campaigners continue to believe that they can be targetted as a bloc, they also acknowledge that to define and target this cohort is now very difficult.

Such swinging voters are sometimes seen as unprincipled, apolitical and disengaged, or at best as calculating or capricious; conversely, they are also acknowledged as the group which ends up deciding who will govern the country, and who are therefore important and critical. Political operatives in Australia still largely hold negative views, but also acknowledge the substantial diversity within this group.

The next speaker at CMPM2014 is Stephen Mills, a market research practitioner from UMR Research New Zealand. His interest is in the much-maligned device of the political focus group: a tool which continues to have a significant impact on political decision-making. This started during the Second World War, when Robert K. Merton researched how Americans could be encouraged to support the war effort.

But since then they've been increasingly strongly criticised for replacing political leadership, for leading to soft decisions rather than necessary reforms, for pandering to prejudice, taking over the role of political parties, driving leadership churn, and losing elections (this has been highlighted especially in the context of the ALP's self-destruction as it replaced Kevin Rudd with Julia Gillard).

The next plenary speaker at CMPM2014 is Jennifer Lees-Marshment, who reflects on the development of political marketing and management. This field focusses on how political actors and their staff use management tools and concepts to achieve their goals. This is not just about seeking votes, but also about driving certain issues and agendas, developing a political profile and image, and it is about governing as well as campaigning.

The scholarship of political marketing no longer just researches what voters want, but also explores how they might be involved in political processes, how long-term relationships can be built, and how internal marketing to the party faithful should be conducted. There are also questions about long-term, mutual, interactive communication relationships, and an expansion of these questions from campaigning to policy delivery and leadership in government.

Next up at CMPM2014 is Lorann Downer, whose focus is on brand strategies of the Australian Labor Party in the 2007 and 2010 elections. Political branding is a consciously chosen strategy to identify and differentiate parties and instil them with functional and emotional values, and this is expressed in part in the brand architecture

Brand architecture determines the hierarchy of brands from the same producer; it determines how brand elements are used; transfers equity between brands and offerings; and creates a "house of brands" or alternatively a "branded house". In Australia, the ALP has a federal structure and operates as a branded house, repeating certain logos and other elements.

The second speaker at CMPM2014 is Andrew Hughes, whose focus is on political branding strategies. Branding is a large area within marketing exchange, of course, and aims to influence the cognition, affection, and behaviour of consumers.

Key elements in this are brand preference, brand value, brand positioning, and brand architecture, and these all have their expressions in political branding: elections measure brand preferences, voters perceptions of which parties are on the left or the right reflect brand positioning, and the perceived relations between individual leaders, state and federal parties reflect the brand architecture of political parties.

The political market isn't all that different from other markets, then: how political consumers respond to brands, and how they engage with them, is not all that different – people might have turned off voting, but not politics and political questions as such. They want to engage with parties on an equal level, and this has also led to the success of new political brands (from Kevin07 to Palmer United) which seemed to promise a new style of engagement.