Notes on the marketing of Brexit...
A collection of old blog posts about the marketing of Brexit (and why Vote Leave won)
The apparent High Court decision in the Carole Cadwalladr vs Arron Banks libel case has, unsurprisingly, resulted in both sides claiming victory. The inception of this case lies with Ms Cadwalladr’s award-winning investigations into the dastardly underhand marketing of the campaigns to get Britain to leave the EU. I recall debating Ms Cadwalladr and finding that, once she’d realised she knew nothing about marketing her argument was reduced to ‘follow the money’ repeated again and again.
In the spirit of truth and understanding I thought, as a professional marketer, qualified conservative party agent and leave voter, I’d revist the things I wrote about the leave campaigns’ marketing. These are in pretty much chronological order…
“The Campaign report talks of divisions, suspicions and an inability to collaborate - coupled with the lack of focus that led to 24 people round the table deciding on the execution of strategy. 'Stronger In' had no message besides 'stronger in' itself - there was no effort to try and provide a context or rationale to that positioning, to explain in language people would understand just how we might be 'stronger in'. Instead 'stronger in' was defined in terms of us being 'weaker out' - in other words negatively. And people - or rather the people who mattered, the undecided voters - didn't believe that message or trust those proffering ever more shrill reasons why leaving the EU was bad.”
“Hind looks at web messaging, brand development and the lack of any apparent strategy. But this paragraph gets to the core of it - there was no message for the elderly couple sat in a Yorkshire sitting room worrying about their grandchildren. Instead Stronger In figures spent time painting these likely (but not certain) Leave voters as if they were pariahs - racist xenophobes, Little Englanders, selfish, ill-educated, lacking in understanding. A communications strategy designed to reassure the core thirty- and forty-something professional audience of Stronger In not a strategy to have a conversation with people in places like Cullingworth who hadn't made their minds up.”
“The reason why working-class voters tumbled out from council estates to vote Leave was more about word of mouth than mass media - conversations in hairdressers, in the pub, at work, at the garden gate, with family. Voting Leave was valorised - reinforced and confirmed by people's daily conversation. The failure of the Remain campaign was to rely on mainstream media to feed this conversation whereas Leave fed enough information to activists to provide a drip-drip of arguments, refutations, reinforcements and messages into those community conversations.”
“What we see from Oliver (Craig oliver one of the heads of the ‘Stringer In’ campaign) is complacency and a failure to realise that referendum campaigns are not like general elections. The latter are driven as much by personality - could you see Ed Miliband waving in front of Downing Street - as by policy. Referendums aren't, they're driven by policy and what people see as policy - by trying to turn the campaign into an attack on Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, Craig Oliver and his team completely misread how people respond when asked a policy question.”
An Evil Marketer comments on data analytics in political campaigning
“To appreciate why this is unlikely, we need to go back to how marketing analytics work, which is at the aggregate level. I appreciate, as a marketing professional, how we all want to believe advertising has become like the opening scenes in Minority Report but the reality is that aggregate data really doesn't provide the means to manipulate what we think. Rather, geodemographics, psychographics and marketing analytics enable us marketers to better target those people who are already predisposed to buy our product (or vote for our cause).”
“Yes targeting matters. Absolutely the generation of ‘fake news’ matters. But no, ‘Big Data’ didn’t win these elections. There is no sinister conspiracy, just a set of circumstances – good branding, viral social media, strong calls to action and awful opposing campaigns – that allowed the results we got. Targeting helps but, if we’d not seen the brand, message and memes – and the useless campaigns from Stronger In and Hillary Clinton, the results would have been different.”
“This latest conspiracy theory - hot on the heels of the "it was big data" nonsense - reminds us that many of those who voted to remain are still in denial as to what the campaign outcome was down to. These inconsolable remain voters simply can't countenance that their 'business as usual' message got both barrels from an electorate that frankly didn't think that 'business as usual' was doing them any good. The result has been firstly to shout about how it was all the stupid people who did it and it's not fair, then to blame the Daily Mail followed by lots of overhyped scare stories about 'hate crime'. We then got the conspiracies - it was shadowy American billionaires, it was manipulating 'big data' and now it's the Russians.”
“What's come out now is some of the detail of Vote Leave's targeted advertising. And, it seems that Vote Leave - led by a man who tells us Marvin's brain is tiny next to his - were the sort of client we loved. The supposedly sophisticated targeting based on cunning psychology and profiling turns out to be broad brush targeting - "older men", "women", "middle aged people" and so forth. Here's a journalist (the blog contains a series of tweets) completely failing to understand the entire point of marketing but, in doing so, revealing how simplistic Vote Leave's targeting was:…”
I’m sure wiser heads than mine will continue to analyse the campaign but, in the end, the difference was that ‘Stronger In’ - Remain as we now call them - failed to capitalise on their huge communications advantage. The remain campaigns casserole of ignorance, condescension and poor marketing execution resulted in a campaign based on attacking unsure voters, trashing individuals and failing to realise that referendum campaigns are about policy not personality (and that the public are a whole load wiser than grand SW1 media sorts think).
I fear though that, as Fred Skulthorpe reports, the bruised centrist left will continue to prefer join-the-dots conspiracy to a rational understanding of what happened (or is happening). It is easier for the left to blames Jews or Russians (better still both) for their politics failing than to construct a message that offers a bette rlife to ordinary people.
All official narrative these days has no argument for, because in fact there is nothing to recommend them, and when ‘the science’ is involved there has no supporting evidence, just deceit, lies, part truths, predictions of doom if we don’t do as we are told. Dissenters are vilified, ignored, silenced too stupid to understand, swivel-eyed conspiracy theorists, racists, granny killers, haters of the poor, destroyers of our children’s future.
I think it started with environmentalism in the 1980s and its monster child, climate change. It has been finessed during the CoVid Government sponsored crisis.
Worth remembering too that ‘Vote Leave’ campaign started in 1975 and the 2016 referendum was only what had been delayed for nearly 30 years. All three Parties had promised a referendum if elected, but then reneged when in Office (Not the right time. Other more important things to do.) for they knew the vote would be ‘leave’. I’m not sure how much either campaign affected the final vote. Maybe the vote to leave would have been bigger without the scaremongering.