Like most businesses, political players want to increase their slice of the available market – and like most businesses, they can only do so through proper, contextual understanding.
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What could politics learn from brands?
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Intelligence Applied
What could politics learn from brands?
Content Themes:
■■ Brain game
■■ Finding faster growth
■■ Connected world
■■ Research excellence
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What could politics learn from brands?
Like most businesses, political players
want to increase their slice of the
available market – and like most
businesses, they can only do so through
proper, contextual understanding
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What could politics learn from brands?
The primary concern of most political research isn’t
just to predict the result of elections. It’s to provide
insights that have the power to influence those
results. And doing so requires more than a simple
snapshot of the way people think they will vote
come election day.
Like any brand, political players operate in a dynamic,
fast-changing environment where it’s vital to look
beyond topline analysis to understand the true
strength of people’s loyalty to a party or cause –
and the true drivers of their likely behaviour at
the critical moment. As with consumer market
research, they need to understand people in their
full, individual context if they are to make sense of
the answers they give to researchers – and translate
them into winning insights.
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Looking beyond the latest headlines
Watch the evening news after a new poll has
been published and you are likely to hear a lot of
assumptive analysis. If polls change then pundits
tend to pick out the most obvious and most recent
headline as the cause: a speech or scandal, a new
announcement or news story. However, such ad-hoc,
join-the-dots analysis tends to miss the true dynamism
inherent within voter intentions. It’s not something
that a progressive market research agency would
apply to consumer markets and helping clients win
a greater share of spend – and it’s not something
that we settle for when it comes to understanding
voter intentions and helping parties to influence
them either.
TNS applies the same methodologies and techniques
that we use for gaining a predictive understanding of
consumer markets, in order to peel back the many-layered
drivers of voter’s choices and anticipate what
might happen if these factors change. By integrating
an individual-level analysis of different voter groups,
we can also identify the genuine drivers of voting
intention that have the greatest influence over the
broadest range of segments. When we plug in
techniques such as regression analysis, qualitative
interviews and explorations of trade-off scenarios
we can identify the platforms, arguments and
presentational changes that can shift voters from
one camp to another. We aim to identify not only
the differences between those intending to vote in
opposing ways, but also the similarities that cross
professed political lines and can hold the key to
generating broader appeal.
Smarter campaigning through contextual
analysis
Political players tend to have limited resources to
campaign for their party or point of view – and so
contextual analysis that segments people by their
actual level of political loyalty, their propensity
to shift, and the circumstances that are likely to
compel them to vote, is hugely important. Focusing
resources on previously unidentified voter groups
whose voting intentions could be swayed by a
common issue is the embodiment of value in
political research, and it’s an area where analysis of
shifting spend patterns in consumer markets has
much to teach us.
Such ad-hoc, join-the-dots
analysis tends to miss the
true dynamism inherent
within voter intentions
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Reinventing data collection
Applying the analysis techniques developed for
consumer markets is transforming the level of
effective insight that we can provide for those
looking to predict and influence political outcomes.
Ultimately though, any analysis is dependent on the
quality of the data available to it. And it is here that
the insights honed in consumer market research
are having the most significant influence on the
political space. Until recently, the wheel that drove
political data collection hadn’t been fundamentally
reinvented since the 1930s, when Gallup first
introduced mainstream polling in the US. Now
though, we are delivering significant improvements
through updating the way we collect data and
the way we apply contextual understanding to
weighting it.
The basic goal of political data collection should be
to reach the broadest possible sample of people
in the context where they are most comfortable
answering political questions. And today, that’s
not necessarily going to be over the phone – or on
the street with a clipboard. Mobile is increasingly
essential for meaningful political polling, since a
large proportion of the voter population can only
be reached this way – and methods that depend on
people being willing to speak to a researcher are
doomed to be unrepresentative. However, mobile
is far from the only new platform transforming
the scope of political data collection. Social media
listening provides valuable, real-time qualitative
insight that can be integrated within voter models
to reveal spontaneous reactions to candidates, ideas
and terminology as they develop, and guide a more
responsive communications strategy. Online surveys
are one of the fastest-growing areas of political
research and the significant variations between
online and phone-based polling results suggests that
some voters may be more comfortable sharing their
views with an on-screen form than with a human
voice on the end of the line.
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Getting better and
broader data is a huge
help, but its effectiveness
ultimately depends on
our ability to see the data
itself in context.
Putting stated voting intentions in context
Getting better and broader data is a huge help, but
its effectiveness ultimately depends on our ability to
see the data itself in context. If we are to translate
a narrow snapshot of stated voting intentions into
a detailed prediction of what people will actually
do weeks or months down the line, then we
require a full cultural understanding of the people
involved that will allow us to weight their answers
appropriately. We must understand and adjust
for the likely discrepancies between how people
say they will vote and what they will actually do;
between their stated reasons for loyalty to a political
cause or party, and their actual motivating drivers.
And we must bear in mind that the causes of the
discrepancies in people’s stated voting intentions can
be as individual as they are.
The relation of what voters say to their actual future
behaviour depends upon the context in which they
are speaking and the pressures they may feel at
that particular moment; it comes down to their
particular characteristics, the strength of their
convictions and the root causes of them, as well as
the general popularity of the views they hold. And
at the broadest level, it comes down to the culture
and history of democracy in their country. The trick
to weighting poll data successfully lies not just in
identifying where discrepancies exist, but also in
identifying the reasons for them – and adjusting
to the changing influence of these factors as time
passes.
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The evolution of political predictions
As our understanding of voter landscapes becomes
ever more detailed, it is increasingly clear that there
can never be a one-size-fits-all solution to the art
of predicting and influencing political outcomes.
Data collection techniques must be tailored to the
demography, infrastructure and attitudes of each
country; the analysis of that data must reflect the
evolving nature of its democracy as well as the
dynamic political landscape. Above all though,
the way that data is weighted must reflect a deep
cultural understanding of the people answering
political questions. Only by putting all aspects of the
business of political prediction in context can we
provide the precision insights required to change
outcomes.
Only by putting all aspects of the business of political prediction in context can
we provide the precision insights required to change outcomes.
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About Intelligence Applied
Intelligence Applied is the home of the latest thinking from TNS, where we discuss the issues impacting
our clients, explore what makes people tick and spotlight how these insights can create opportunities for
business growth.
About TNS
TNS advises clients on specific growth strategies around new market entry, innovation, brand switching and
customer and employee relationships, based on long-established expertise and market-leading solutions. With
a presence in over 80 countries, TNS has more conversations with the world’s consumers than anyone else and
understands individual human behaviours and attitudes across every cultural, economic and political region of
the world.
Please visit www.tnsglobal.com/intelligence for more information
TNS is part of Kantar, the data investment management division of WPP and one of the world’s largest insight,
information and consultancy groups.
Please visit www.tnsglobal.com for more information.
Get in touch
If you would like to talk to us about anything you have read in this report, please get in touch via
enquiries@tnsglobal.com or via Twitter @tns_global
About the author
Leendert de Voogd has been Global Head
of the Political and Social practice of TNS since
2007. With more than 17 years’ experience,
Leendert has held many senior roles including
Joint Managing Director of TNS opinion,
where he was responsible for the Eurobarometer surveys.
He has also successfully coordinated survey research for
the European Commission, the European Central Bank,
the European Parliament and the World Bank and provided
electoral consultancy to the European Parliament for the
last three European Elections. With a strong academic
background in Political sciences, Leendert regularly speaks at
conferences and has had a number of articles published in
titles such as “L’opinion européenne”.
Social policy needs more than behavioural economics >
What could politics learn from brands?
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