Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (30 page)

It actually helped the Conservatives, too, that the 2005–06 election campaign took place over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, even if they hadn’t initially planned for such a long campaign. Their consumer-citizen pitch was aimed at a huge section of the electorate that was busy with shopping, with little appetite for complicated platform statements or dissections of the subtle differences between the political rivals. The Conservatives, with their shopping-friendly, easy-to-understand five priorities, had given Canadians just enough to chat about over the holidays while they relaxed over their new gift purchases. Pollster Nik Nanos explained it to the
Toronto Star
: “Having a holiday in the middle of a campaign provides the unique chance for family and friends to gather and talk about what is happening politically. Corporate research shows that word-of-mouth opinions have a great impact on consumer behaviour. I don’t think one can underestimate the impact of friends, parents, siblings and neighbours on voting behaviour.”

An election that featured a shopping break entirely suited a party that had organized its appeal around shoppers and consumer-friendliness. On January 23, 2006, Canada handed a minority government to Stephen Harper and his Conservatives. The country, or at least a crucial part of it, had rejected a sales-oriented Liberal party, hobbled by its own obsession with advertising, in favour of a party that knew how to do marketing.

The challenge now for the Conservatives was to see whether they could apply the lessons of successful marketing campaigns to governance. Could they keep shopping for votes while they were running the country?

RETAIL RULES

T
here was a great scene in the old
Seinfeld
TV sitcom, in which Jerry Seinfeld gets into an argument with a rental car agent. He had arrived to find that the car he reserved wasn’t available, and he would have to make do with another model.

Seinfeld: “But the reservation keeps the car here. That’s why you have the reservation.”

Agent: “I know why we have reservations.”

Seinfeld: “I don’t think you do. If you did, I’d have a car. See, you know how to take the reservation. You just don’t know how to
hold
the reservation. And that’s really the most important part of the reservation: the
holding.
”

The same is true of campaign promises. Anyone can make promises, but it’s the keeping of them that counts. This is even more important for politicians with a marketing bent. Politics has always treated people harshly for breaking their promises. But when the voters see themselves as consumers of democracy, they place a high premium on customer satisfaction. “The maturing consumer wants a lot,” Martin Goldfarb wrote in his book about branding. “We expect guarantees for our products. We want answers from politicians. We want loyalty from our friends. We want the powerful to be humbled.”

Paul Martin had tried to throw a wrench into the Conservatives’ tightly scheduled plans for the election in 2005 when he announced a campaign that would last much longer than the minimum thirty-six days, stretching from November to January, over the Christmas holidays. While that shopping break had played well to their marketing strategy, it had also presented a logistical problem for the Conservative campaigners. They had to adjust their timetable accordingly and figure out a way to relaunch their campaign after the break. So on January 2, Harper announced that if he won the election his government would move “aggressively” on the five key priorities: the GST cut, $100 monthly cheques for parents, wait-time guarantees for health care, a crackdown on crime and, of course, “cleaning up” Ottawa. The very first piece of legislation in a Conservative government, Harper promised, would be an “accountability” act, to enforce tighter controls over how lobbyists and pollsters deal with government.

That to-do list, an act of campaign improvisation, would immediately become a formal agenda—a prewritten Throne Speech, more or less, when Harper assumed power on February 6, 2006. Conventional wisdom says it is easier to do political marketing when parties are out of power. But Harper and his Conservatives would set out to turn that wisdom on its head.

Words that Work

Exactly four months after the Conservatives came to power, Republican strategist Frank Luntz paid a visit to Ottawa, in part to celebrate this victory for the right in Canada, in part to offer a bit of advice for this welcome new Conservative government. Luntz had been more of a spectator than a participant in the Conservative victory in Canada. First of all, the Tories had their own marketing geniuses now, Patrick Muttart in particular. And Luntz had been otherwise occupied. In the fifteen years since Luntz had worked as a young pollster for the fledgling Reform Party, his fame and fortunes had soared. He had been named one of
Time
magazine’s fifty most promising leaders under forty and he had earned an Emmy for his voter-research spots on MSNBC/CNBC in the 2000 US election. Along the way, Luntz had worked with corporate giants such as Disney and General Electric, on top of his Republican market research. He was about to release a book,
Words That Work
, and on this visit to Ottawa, he would give his Canadian friends a sneak peek at some of the wisdom he intended to share.

Luntz’s main purpose for the visit was to speak to a Conservative organization known as Civitas, which billed itself as non-partisan: a “premier venue in Canada where people interested in conservative, classical liberal and libertarian ideas can not only exchange ideas, but meet others who share an interest in these rich intellectual traditions.” Meeting at the Brookstreet Hotel in Kanata, a good distance from Parliament Hill, Civitas’ audience was dotted with stars of the Canadian conservative movement—despite its non-partisan billing—including some of the new prime minister’s old bosses, mentors and current staff. Preston Manning was there; so was Tom Flanagan, as well as Harper’s new chief of staff, Ian Brodie—all people very interested in what they could do to keep the power they’d newly gained.

Journalist Elizabeth Thompson, then with the
Montreal Gazette
, parked herself outside the door of the Civitas meeting and recorded Luntz’s remarks to his Canadian friends. What she heard was basically a manual on mixing marketing with governance—a how-to guide on talking to citizens as consumers. And as such, it was also an eerie portent of what was to come from the Conservatives in their subsequent years in power, even if Luntz was not in Harper’s inner circle of advisers. Luntz’s speech, thanks to Thompson and her tape recorder, would be a useful way to understand the strategy of governance that Canadians were about to see: power marketing.

“You have a gentleman who could well be the smartest leader, intellectually,” Luntz told the crowd. “Now that’s half the battle.” But being smart, he warned, was not as important as having an ear for average Canadians, who had better things to do than translate political jargon.

Luntz said Harper would have to talk about taxes, for instance, in terms of people’s everyday existence—that world in which Canadians were consumers, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. “If he wants to talk about reducing taxes he’s got to relate it on a day-to-day basis, on a personal basis to every Canadian. When you wake up in the morning and take your first cup of coffee, you pay a sales tax. You go out to your garage, you pay an automobile tax. When you drive to work, you pay a gas tax. At work, you pay an income tax. You turn on the lights, you pay an electricity tax. You flush the toilet, you pay a water tax. You stayed the night at this hotel, you paid a hotel-occupancy tax. You fly home to wherever you’re from, you pay an airport tax. You get home at night, you pay a property tax. You turn on your TV, you pay a cable tax. You call the family, you pay a telephone tax. People in the United States have taxes. You’re taxed from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you go to sleep at night. You’re taxed from your cradle to your grave.”

Luntz reminded the Conservatives that in today’s post-partisan times, people don’t vote as much for policy as they do for emotions and intangible personality traits—trust, consistency, stability. “We would rather vote for someone who we completely trust than someone who agrees with us on the ten issues that we care about the most,” Luntz said. “We now vote for people in terms of who they are as people rather than just their intellectual capability and so [being] a straight shooter is so important… The key here is consistency. The key here is stability.”

Luntz urged the Conservatives to find some national symbol and firmly tie Conservatives to that imagery. “What is the symbol of Canada that matters more than anything? Is there one? Other than the Canadian flag, is there one?” he wanted to know.

“Health care?” came a voice from the audience. Silence. Someone in the room suggested a beaver, an idea that was greeted with some laughter.

But Luntz had a better idea: hockey. “If there were some way to make hockey [part of what] you all do… do it. Because it’s not political. It’s not partisan.” Not only that, he said, but hockey would give the Conservatives some real marketing tools to reach the citizenry: “That’s what the public [needs]—some kind of symbol and pictures. And visuals matter more than anything else.”

This wasn’t new to Tim Hortons and the beer companies—very Canadian corporations, in the public’s eye, who had framed many of their ads around hockey rinks and players. If these patriotic corporations had learned the benefits of pairing their products to hockey, why shouldn’t it work for a political party, with the same kind of “customers” in mind?

Conservatives should go looking for people who weren’t part of the voting public up to this point, Luntz said. In the States, this was called “exurbia,” he explained, and such voters were a type of blank slate. “We have these areas that are outside the suburbs where people are moving further and further from the city, where they’re prepared to commute for an hour or more because they just don’t like what suburbia’s become,” he said. “No one knows that they’re there. They’re brand-new communities. They’ve been built within the last five years. They’re not targeted. They don’t get all that crappy direct mail because it’s brand new so they’re not on anybody’s list. Find those areas. Those are the areas of opportunity for you because they’re not traditional.” Luntz advised the Conservatives, above all, to keep things simple and consistent. “You need a lexicon that is… crisp and clear and repeated and common.” He need not have worried about the Conservatives’ ability to pull this off.

New and Improved

It was immediately apparent that the newly minted Harper government was indeed very attached to slogans. In press releases, it repeatedly referred to itself as “Canada’s New Government,” selling itself like detergent, new and improved. Bureaucrats were ordered to insert the phrase into government communications at all opportunities. One scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada, Andrew Okulitch, balked at the directive in the fall of 2006 and was sacked (though subsequently reinstated). In his email to his bosses, which was made public, Okulitch protested the infiltration of marketing buzzwords into the official, institutional business of government. “Why do newly elected officials think everything begins with them taking office? They are merely stewards for as long as the public allows. They are there to foster good policies even if (horrors) they were set up by another party,” Okulitch wrote. “While this ridiculous and embarrassing policy is in effect, I shall use Geological Survey of Canada… as opposed to idiotic buzzwords coined by political hacks.”

Everyone appeared to realize that this was a government doing marketing. Journalists sought out experts from the commercial sphere to explain or comment on the “new government” labelling exercise. “From a purely marketing perspective, keeping the same identification once it’s established and has some value is good,” Adam Finn, a University of Alberta marketing professor, told the
National Post
. “You only get rid of it when it’s so old and tired people have moved on.” Stan Sutter, an associate publisher at
Marketing
magazine, said in the same story, “Every government wants to keep that kind of new-car, fresh smell as long as you can.”

At least one cabinet minister, in a rare show of candour, admitted he was finding the label tiresome after fifteen months in office. Newfoundland’s minister in cabinet, Loyola Hearn, admitted to reporters that he was puzzled by the way the phrase had lingered. “I asked that question actually some time ago: Why do we still call ourselves the new government? If it happens to be written in the script… I skip it, and if I’m doing my own stuff, I don’t use it,” Hearn said. Still, regardless of how obvious its tactics, or the backlash from critics, the Conservatives stuck faithfully to the “new government” label. It was a rule of thumb within the Harper communications shop: if the journalists were complaining about hearing the same words too much, that meant that the phrase was just starting to seep into the public consciousness. And so the “Canada’s New Government” slogan was still appearing in press releases a couple of years into Harper’s first term in office. Message to Canadians: we’re fresh and clean, and we may even smell a bit like soap, or a new car.