A Changing Campaign Landscape
With today’s voters consuming more content than ever before, it’s a politician’s job to keep up to snag votes. Keeping up is quite the task! They must know their audience by learning how they collectively feel on important topics, as well as what they desire for the future.While a candidate must outrun their opponents to win the race; the real race is a struggle to get into the minds of voters without crossing the line.
In the 2016 United States presidential election, voter turnout was one of the lowest in history, with only half of eligible voters turning up at the polls. Two years later, hopeful presidential candidates would have new issues to resolve in order to bring those voters back to the polls in their favor. The 2018 election set a new precedent with unique campaign signs that sparked conversation. Those campaign signs and slogans were a reflection of the collective voter consciousness. These revealed the potential for reframing the campaign’s target around the ‘brand’ rather than the ‘campaign siign’.
The Big Data Race
A core feature of marketing is a kind of intellectual property-hacking to harvest data for design. In this case, the task is to lure voters to click campaign ads, or to remind them with yard sign, magnets, and postcards of the candidate they respectively believe is best suited for office. These data harvests tell a marketing team everything they need to know about a population of voters, and present scores which are predictive of voter preferences and tendencies.
In many the same ways a dog looks like its owner, so too does a person’s social media feed reflect their apathies. That’s because of trends. For certain politicians, those apathies may be the controversial key to a winning campaign. Rather than designing a simple yard sign, the focus becomes starting a revolution through positive intent or division, and creating campaign visuals and marketing materials that reflect those apathies in engaging ways. Hence, engaging wears that bemoan a nation.
Thinking Outside the Square
When devising marketing visuals for political campaigns, a good strategy is not to view campaign visuals as a piece of the puzzle, but rather a natural offshoot of the campaign. First, Marketers harvest data through everyday platforms. Next, these mathematical arrangements become abstract. They’re turned creative then accessible, then visual organizations of data collected from the voters’ mind—scapes are reassigned back to them.
As the Politicians take the stands, they leave a legacy that rises a community of people wearing and waving their colors and their brands. That politician becomes the subject of dinner parties, while canvassers turn towns into galleries. For voters to choose a politician to protect their liberties, the voters must each be, in their own ways, proud to present their brand. Campaign Marketers for Politicians already have the task of locating the grey state voters they need to convince on their campaign trail, now they only ensure voters show up favorably, armed and branded to combat the opposers.