Policy branding: stringing nuggets

I’m posting this on our Vessel Health Behaviour Change blog because the psychological biases people show in choosing a government are some of the same biases behind their blindness to extremely poor population health care.

When political analysts come together to talk about how voters should decide on which party to vote for, they emphasise that voters should do it rationally. Indeed they take the position that all voters have, in equal measure, the capacity to be rational. They will then give examples of such rational analysis. They will say something like: in order for voters to make the best choice, they should compare party A’s handling of the economy to party B’s, or voters should look at how many million-dollar contracts party A would have given to their friends and families compared to what party B gave. They will also talk about the uselessness of both propaganda, and voting ‘by race’, for ‘rational people’.

In the lead-up to elections, when people’s everyday lives, and those of friends and families are overwhelmed by constant streams of messaging, it’s easy to see how little cognitive space they’ll have for being ‘objective’ and rational about voting choices. Very often they don’t care about objectivity anyway, so all the noise around them is either rejected, or absorbed, if that’s their kind of noise. Indeed no human being is programmed to make decisions like ‘Mr. Spock’ from Star Trek. I note just above, that our friends and families are also bombarded with political messaging. When that happens, like the social animals we are, we follow the herd and default easily to groupthink.

We are all emotional beings who make many decisions emotionally and automatically, including political decisions. Automatically, we might like people because we share their name and have the same haircut, or dislike them, because we think they’re too perfect and we’re not. Our automatic ‘brain’ really does ‘choose’ like this without consulting the reflective ‘brain’. The more we like a candidate, the more likely we are to vote for him. We couldn’t be bothered about whether his policies are good or bad.

But when elections are over and the post-mortems begin, we see many people questioning results in disbelief; some wondering how a party with negative stigmas could have done so well, and others wondering how a party that had weathered stormy times lost ground. Some wondering also, how, yet again, the guy who has been advocating social justice for so many years - something that we need much of - did not even make a mark or how the woman advocate for animal rights was not even on the map. We then see that the analysts’ wish for rational decision making had never materialised and they resorted to their bad habit of submitting winners and losers to a range of cost-benefit analyses in order to uncover where the irrational decisions happened. At these times, it will help us to study how persuasion in political branding drive voting choices.

Journalists also have this bad habit of castigating voters for not being ‘objective’ in their analysis of party choices. But who are they deceiving with this posture? They, like us all, have human brains; and to have one of these means that you will make tons of intuitive choices. Choices without ‘reason.’

So what we have is a culture of political commentators who apply rational choice models of decision making to explain outcomes. This forum is sometimes sound, but incomplete. We should include experts in political branding. They study political persuasion; they don’t guess about people’s behaviour. They explain why through some lenses the good could look bad, and lies can ‘be’ true. They apply design principles, science, and ingenuity to decision contexts, to persuade voters.

Here’s a bit of advice for political parties: focus on policy branding. Policy branding is central to the political brand identity. A policy brand done well will never go stale, because it almost always marks a certain period with its own dynamics in social life. So it can be considered like a historical artefact. If along the way of governing, each policy brand is considered as a little nugget, and, if polished nugget by polished nugget the party strings together a long chain of beautifully branded, policy nuggets, there is no doubt that this well held together chain will reflect all the points of success over time, and also show a high degree of foresight about brand holism. We can see how valuable policy branding is to parties by how often they get angry and accuse each other of stealing policies. When this happens, I ask myself how much greater would a party’s brand equity be, had they branded the ‘stolen’ policies prior to the ‘theft’, and had they kept them as a chain of beautiful, highly polished nuggets? If you look good, there a few examples of a good start to policy branding here in Trinidad and Tobago, but otherwise parties are wasting their opportunities.

I think constructing political brand value this way might be cheaper, show more integrity, and have more opportunity for upgrades, compared to the mad scramble just before elections, to find a pick-up-side of attack artistes. If you’re interested in this subject matter you can write me at s.ouditt@caribbeanbehaviour.com

As with all our posts, the photos show the covers of texts in our library that we use for research.