Think it out again!

The last of the Political Party Conferences finished this week. No, don’t move on to another site, this isn’t a party political diatribe. I watched the ‘performances’ of the major speakers from all the parties, listened to their thoughts, ideas and plans… Which for me is unusual… Like most people these days I find politicians an unattractive and uninspiring lot. But the dilemma facing the country at the moment is so serious that even I was keen to hear what plans the Parties had to solve the monumental problems threatening us.
 
Having listened, and sorted out the ‘talk from stutter’ so to speak, I put on my old marketing director’s hat and fell to wondering, if I was responsible for marketing the plans of my party, whatever party that happened to be, how on earth I would tackle the task of convincing the country to vote for what can only be a very uncomfortable programme? The old adage came to mind, you know the one about getting turkeys to vote for Christmas? Suddenly that didn’t seem such an impossible task. With hope rising I remembered that on every packet of cigarettes there is a warning that tells the buyer the contents of that package will kill them in time. Yet still the tobacco companies sell them in vast quantities. Everyone knows that too much booze will damage your brain and your innards, but still vast quantities are sold and of course illicit drugs still damage large numbers of people despite the obvious danger of using them, even to the dullest intellect. So, surely to sell a harsh political message shouldn’t be that difficult? But it is. Because the people selling the policies do not enjoy the trust of those they are selling to!
 
To market something tangible, the use of commonsense, intelligence, experience and skill usually result in a well balanced approach to a given market. People will give a new product a try and if they like it will re-purchase and eventually become loyal to that particular brand, a well trodden path travelled by all branded goods. Often a celeb will be used to endorse the product adding credibility, glamour or conferring a fashion to a product’s name. Not so with politics, there’s history to contend with, deep seated beliefs, age old images and rhetoric that has all been heard before and found wanting. And a celeb’s name attached to a political party here is often likely to do more harm than good.
 
Marketing a political message has only one obvious and tangible hook upon which the message can be hung, a person, it must be someone with a degree of credibility; who understands how to create wealth as well as how to distribute it, someone people can trust…  Someone who actually does things, not just talk about doing them…. Who are these people and where are they to be found? By the nature of Parliament those elected will be a mixed bag. Some will have had experience in industry, most will not. Some have had experience of managing large sums of money and are as result careful and prudent with it. More often than not though, the people controlling huge amounts of taxpayers’ money have never created or run anything or been held accountable for the proper us of those vast sums of money.
 
One message above all others did become clear and it was the same message running through every conference, the country is facing a dreadful situation and is virtually skint. The wheels of the gravy train have fallen off, free rides are over, just printing more money is passé, from now on it must be earned. Of course each party claimed it was the other’s fault, nothing to do with them, they would all have done things differently if only……What’s worse, it seems, there is no solution to the problem for a generation or more. The best that can be done in the short and even medium term is for everyone to work harder, pay more taxes, and claim less from the national purse. Then perhaps the debt passing to the next generation, and probably the one after that, will at least begin to come under control. As I folded and put away my old hat I reflected that I had seen austerity before…real austerity, in the years during and just after the war; we overcame the problems facing us then and I have no doubt we shall do so again, but I must say I will be fascinated to see and hear how the current package of misery will be marketed to us during the run up to the General Election. The conferences were I think the softening-up process.