Political "Customer" Experiences

I’ve been interested in politics since I was a little kid. My parents are pretty involved and we would have fundraisers at our house or they would take me to meet our various representatives at their offices once elected. When I graduated high school, I moved to Washington DC for the summer to work as an intern for my US Congressman and became even more in love with the political scene. It is fast pace, lively, and at times very intimidating but I enjoyed every second of it. Once I came to Texas that fall, I tried to stay up with the current events of campaigns but in your first year of college it can be difficult. A year later, I got an internship in downtown Austin for a political fundraising, marketing, and consulting firm. I have worked there for almost two years now and this has shown me what I really love about politics: the marketing, “getting in the consumer’s mind” part of it.

This political marketing reminded of the film, The Persuaders we watched for our last blog. There was a whole chapter in the film focused on how people’s minds/perceptions change based on just certain words and how politicians have now targeted in on this strategy. I thought the study Michael did was so interesting when he had participants sit in a room and listen to a political speech. Participants were told to turn a dial based on their likeness/dislikeness of certain parts in a speech. With this experiment, Michael was able to capture the key words that participants really liked and even particular words that they disliked. This is key for politicians!

We especially saw how important it was to use key words to grasp the minds of people in this last presidential election. Even those who were not Obama supporters knew he had a talent for giving incredible, insightful speeches, ones that truly captured minds of young and old. This can make all the difference to politicians and therefore have taken on Michael as a consultant. He found the way to target in on what words or phrases people really like and then those that politicians may think sounded good but really made no difference to people. A strategy that will most likely be used more and more in upcoming political campaigns.

I would love to do something more like this at my job. While we do offer consulting (I do not as an intern), we do not do anything as in dept as this. We work with many candidates ranging from US Representatives to State Senators to even a potential Governor candidate. This new strategy is something that is becoming more and more popular but still a lot of candidates have not caught on to and therefore can still be very effective. Voters (consumers) love a candidate when they hear what they want to hear and if you can get into what exactly it is that they want, the rest is fairly simple. President Obama did just this in his campaign. He knew what people wanted to hear and told them, thus beginning his super star image.

We also work with public policy groups, non-profit organizations, lobbyists and coporate PACS (political action committees). With these groups, we coordinate their annual conventions and plan all the operations from registration and hotel logistics, to speakers and meal options. Many of these groups are suprisingly very different and so therefore need different arrangements. For example, one of our clients has a small organization of about 100 people, with the youngest being in his late sixties. These people need hard copies of every agenda, respond better by telephone and want their dinner to be over by 8:00pm. However, another group we have holds conventions with over 1000 people and many of the attendees bring their spouses and families. For a group like this we must book a large hotel, communicate via email, and offer a variety of meal options always with an open bar. A lot of times with groups like this we also plan various excursions in that particular city as an afternoon or latenight activity. This is just another way of how politics can relate to customer insights and experiences in which you have to know exactly what they want and how to deliver it to them.