Spin

Politics and Marketing in a Divided Age

Clive Veroni

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781770893184
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Spin has been updated with a new introduction reflecting on the current era of Brexit and Trump.

Aided by masses of data, sophisticated computer modelling, and smart manipulation of social media, political strategists are reshaping the way voters think. And act. Clive Veroni analyzes the inner workings of campaign organizations to show how they build and motivate teams, and how they approach strategic and future planning. And those strategies being used to influence our choices at the ballot box will soon be used to influence our choices in the grocery store.

Spin focuses on the well-known characters from the worlds of politics and marketing to reveal how all of us will be affected by the surprising new ways in which companies and politicians will try to persuade us to vote for their brands.

Chapter 1

The Power of the Passionate Few

Where Ideas Go to Die

In midtown Toronto lies a small industrial park bordered to the east, west, and south by parkland and to the north by a post-war suburban development and a pricey shopping mall. You approach this industrial enclave along a road that gently curves and climbs, passing expansive manicured lawns and low-slung buildings in the modernist style. As the road crests, you can see to the right a long, low, red-brick office building. Beyond this is a large factory where all day long a lumbering ballet takes place as giant semi-trailers manoeuvre back and forth, some bringing in supplies, others hauling off finished product. Inside, workers toil day and night to manufacture chewable latex, inject it with flavour, and then wrap it in colourful packaging.

This is the Canadian headquarters of a multi-billion-dollar American corporation founded over a hundred years ago. It is a global leader in the manufacture and marketing of chewing gum. If you enter the office building and walk up the stairs to the second floor, you will pass by a row of large, glass-fronted offices with tall walnut doors and brass fittings, evoking a 1960s corporate office environment. This is where the senior management is ensconced. Keep going and you will enter a warren of small, windowless offices occupied by the lower echelons. Go farther still and you will come to an equally small, windowless boardroom barely big enough to hold the table and twelve threadbare chairs that crowd the space. It is here, in this room, where many an advertising idea has gone to die.

This is the room where Ipsos, the multinational market research company, routinely comes to present test results for advertising campaigns developed by the ad agencies that work on the gum account. And it is here where one advertising idea died because a small fraction of respondents found it irritating — despite the fact that the vast majority of consumers found the spot interesting and enjoyable and were keen to watch it again. In fact, those who liked the ad were “very enthusiastic” about it, according to Ipsos.

There is nothing unique about this room or about what happens here. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rooms like it spread all over North America. This airless place is symptomatic of a deep and unshakable fear that runs through the corridors of the modern corporation. It is the fear of pissing people off. Companies are unwilling to antagonize any group, no matter how small, with their ideas. Even if there is a much larger group of people who would enthusiastically embrace those same ideas.

The air in all these rooms is permeated by the same odour — the sharp smell of anxiety. If one were to invent collective nouns for the actors in the drama that plays out when the ad agency comes to present ideas, it would have to be a pride of creatives, a cringe of account executives, and a concern of clients. The clients are invariably concerned.

On this day, Ipsos is presenting results from the gum advertising. Glance up at the screen and what you see projected there is a bell curve. This curve displays the reactions, positive and negative, people have towards the ad. Most people give the spot an average rating, so in the middle is where the curve crests. Off to the sides are the most negative and most positive ratings. That is where it tapers off.

Riding that curve is the focus of most marketing efforts. The goal is to make the bulge as high and as wide as possible, with the aim of appealing to the highest common denominator. It is on this coveted mountaintop where mass marketing has traditionally pitched its tent. But this focus on the middle of the curve results in a narrowing of vision. It ignores what’s happening at the outer edges. And it’s there, on the fringes, where passion lies. And it’s passion that can make or break a brand.

The fact is, a small group of ardent believers at the tapering end of the bell curve can influence what the entire rest of the group thinks and does. This is the proverbial tail wagging the dog.

This phenomenon is common in the world of politics. Political pollsters pay particular attention to these small tribes of fervent supporters because they can have an outsized impact on the rest of the electorate. Marketers tend to look past them towards the bigger target, the great middle ground. In so doing, they can miss out on the opportunities these small groups can represent or be blind to the significant dangers they pose.

Of course, there have always been smaller fringe groups orbiting around the great mass market, minor collectives with their own particular interests and agendas. But what’s happened in the past decade, thanks to the amplifying effect of social media, is that these groups have become more vocal and more visible than ever before. Get enough of these little groups spinning around and they can throw the mass market off its axis. Sometimes the sheer intensity of one group’s passion can overwhelm even a much larger group. The power of the passionate few has long been a persuasive weapon in political fights to control the public agenda and influence voter behaviour.

Politicians have always understood that mass marketing and niche appeals do not constitute an either/or proposition. You need both to survive. That’s why politicians spend so much time standing around suburban living rooms, backyard barbecues, and church basements. They know that no audience is too small and that a small group, if it’s the right group, can have an enormous impact on your fortunes. Some marketers are still learning to embrace this dichotomy.

As marketers re-evaluate their notions of mass marketing in this new age of hyper-individualism, they’re having to shift away from a heliocentric world view where everything revolves around one giant, glowing prize, and instead turn their gaze outwards to the vast constellation of possibilities that lie beyond. That’s not to say that mass marketing is going to fade away completely. The sun will come up tomorrow. It’s just that there is a universe of other opportunities to be explored, smaller perhaps, but each generating significant heat and energy of its own.

The Below-Average Winner

Jake Nickell is a laid-back former art student and college dropout, now in his thirties, who looks a lot younger thanks to his slight build and mop of boyish blond hair. He speaks in a soft, laconic manner. He likes to wear jeans, T-shirts, and an air of hipster calm. But Jake understands passion.

In 2000, while still a student in Chicago, Jake and a friend decided to start a Web project that matched their artistic interests. As he said later, “I just wanted to make stuff with my friends. That stuff just happened to be art on my computer.” Jake knew a little about art but not much about computer programming. So he figured he’d teach himself. As he explained in a tedx talk in Boulder, Colorado, in 2011, he figured out how to write html just by clicking “View Source” on his web browser and patiently working out how to decipher the code.

This instinct for self-reliance and willingness to step fearlessly into the unknown came naturally, and early, to Jake. “I built a tree fort at the age of twelve just by grabbing a hammer and nailing a board in and standing on it and nailing the next board in,” he says, as if that’s how everyone goes about building things. He taught himself how to use Photoshop simply by clicking every button in the program until he knew what they all did. Mr. and Mrs. Nickell must have raised Jake in a household where the sky was the limit and the floor a giant safety net.

Jake’s web project was a simple but radical idea. He created a site called Threadless.com that allows anyone to go online and submit a design for a T-shirt and anyone else to go online and rate those designs. The most popular designs are printed up and made available for sale. This might not seem particularly radical today, but back in 2000 almost no one was using the Internet in this way. Threadless was one of the earliest examples of Web 2.0 — turning the Web experience into something participatory and collaborative, driven by user-centred design. Threadless was using crowdsourcing four years before the term “crowdsourcing” was even coined.

It took a few years for Threadless to become a real money-making business that Jake and his partners could dedicate themselves to full-time. And just a few years after that, in 2008, Inc. magazine ran a cover story declaring that Threadless was “The Most Innovative Small Company in America.” Today, Threadless supports millions of independent designers around the world by giving them a simple and ubiquitous canvas on which to display their work: the humble T-shirt. And its reach is expanding even further. The company created a line of T-shirts for Gap, to be sold online and at Gap stores around the world.

Threadless has an unheard-of track record for a retailer. Every single product they have sold has been a success. That’s because buyers have expressed their passion for the item before it’s even produced. It’s a retail fashion business that reportedly generates a staggering 30 percent profit margin. Most retailers don’t even come close to that. Generally, merchants are lucky to wring out a single-digit net profit margin. The result is that the company, started by a college dropout, is now the subject of business school case studies at Harvard and mit.

Threadless creates a forum, a meeting place, for designers and buyers to connect. But arguably the same thing takes place every day on the streets of most major cities. Artisans who make jewellery, clothing, accessories, and all sorts of other things set up tables on street corners and at markets and fairs where consumers can see and buy their wares. But at the heart of the Threadless concept lies a critical difference: consumers are allowed to score the designs before they’re manufactured. This simple mechanism changes everything. When visitors to the site vote on a design, they’re delivering a powerful reinforcement to the designer for work that might otherwise never even be seen. And the voters, in turn, are engaged in a way that most ordinary shoppers never are. It’s the American Idol effect. The more you vote, the more invested you are in the outcome. Research shows that 95 percent of purchasers on Threadless have also voted on designs. Almost no one simply buys; they also engage.

The scoring system is simple. Each design is rated on a five-point scale. In theory, anything that gets an above-average score (2.6 or higher) should be a winning design. And that’s precisely how it would work if the folks at Threadless were trained as mass marketers who viewed the world as a giant bell curve. They’d be aiming for the highest common denominator. They’d be focusing all their energy and attention on that bulge in the middle of the curve. But that’s not how Jake Nickell and his partners think. They are unencumbered by market research presentations. Their thinking is not funnelled through years of business school training. And they are not interested in aiming for the middle of the road. These guys are used to operating outside the mainstream. So they also pay attention to what is happening at the fringes. And by doing that, Threadless discovered something remarkable: sometimes a below-average score can result in a successful design.

This simple fact runs counter to everything traditional mass marketers believe. The “concern of clients” sitting in the gum company’s dimly lit boardroom could never be persuaded that a lower-than-average score could result in higher sales. But that’s precisely what Threadless has found to be the case. Some designs with a score well below average (say 2.0) can still sell very well.

Instead of fixating on the middle of the bell curve, the Threadless team also looks at how many zeroes and fives a design gets. The reason, as they explained in a 2007 interview with the New York Times, is “designs that inspire passionate disagreement often get printed because they tend to sell.”

Read that sentence again and you’ll find the secret to turning below-average performers into winners: passionate disagreement. Polarizing ideas tend to get people more engaged. In these situations, it’s not the size of support that’s critical but the intensity of that support. A brand seeking to increase its market share by 10 or 15 percent doesn’t need to appeal to everyone. It needs to connect in a powerful way with a relatively small group of people. Threadless has succeeded by turning the bell curve upside down.

By expanding its view beyond the broad middle ground, the company has uncovered a powerful idea — that it’s better to have a few people who are passionate about your idea than a whole lot of people with only middling enthusiasm for it. And along the way, they’ve built a whole new level of Web interactivity, a place for people who love design to come together, and an entirely new platform for e-commerce. And they did it simply by nailing one board in, standing on it, and then nailing the next board in.

Pro-Choice versus Multiple Choice

For years political strategists have been refining the art of engaging a small number of passionate supporters in order to help them win. What Threadless discovered by being observant, political parties have known for some time — ideas that inspire passionate disagreement can lead to success. This runs counter to the impulse of mass marketers, who strive to make the greatest number of people like you, or at least not hate you.

Politicians, however, live in a world of perpetual conflict, where passions can run deep. The most skilled among them learn how to harness that passion in order to keep sailing forward; the less skilled simply get swamped. Everywhere around us are examples of how relatively small tribes of passionate political activists can have a huge impact, an impact out of all proportion to their actual numbers: the Tea Party, pro-lifers, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and so on. The Republican Party is widely considered the party of the pro-life movement, and Republican leaders have been obliged to toe the party line on this issue. Stepping out of bounds can lead to a swift rebuke, as Herman Cain quickly discovered during the Republican presidential nomination contest in 2011. The former ceo of Godfather’s Pizza, Cain elbowed his way (briefly) to the front of the crowded Republican race with a simple slogan: “9-9-9.” This mantra summed up his plan for a regressive tax policy that would impose a 9 percent income tax, sales tax, an...

Table of contents

• iPraise for Clive Veroni and Spin:
• Dedication
• ixIntroduction to the New Edition
• 1Introduction
• 15I
• 19Chapter 1
• 45Chapter 2
• 80Chapter 3
• 123II
• 127Chapter 4
• 160Chapter 5
• 191Chapter 6
• 221III
• 225Chapter 7
• 252Chapter 8
• 287Conclusion
• 299Notes
• 309Acknowledgements
• 311Index
• About the Author
• About the Publisher