Giving people what they don’t want

To me it’s obvious that when choosing a new leader, the Labour Party should be canvassing opinion among those who don’t vote Labour and not among those who already do. To get into government it needs new buyers, people who haven’t been buying Labour recently or who have never done so at all. But I don’t think the Labour Party understands that political marketing is just like other forms of marketing. It’s about find new markets and customers for your product. It’s about finding out what people want and giving it to them. It’s not about keeping your existing customers happy. That’s called customer relationship management, and is something else altogether.

I was away for a few days, and when I got back I read an article by Alfred Mifsud in The Malta Independent of last Friday. It was about this very subject. Read this, for example.

The PN branded their last election campaign as gonziPN not because Prime Minister Gonzi wants to build a cult in his honour. They did so because research among the electorate showed that while the party was suffering fatigue and dissatisfaction with its long stay in government, voters’ attitude was much mellower regarding Gonzi personally.

If Labour failed to paste up huge pictures of Alfred Sant on their billboards it was not because they wanted to show disrespect to their leader. It was because their research showed that voters were much warmer to the party than they were to Alfred Sant personally who consistently, in all reliable research, scored less than Gonzi on the issues of credibility and appropriateness for the top job.

Mifsud suggests that the Labour Party should use marketing research methods when choosing its new leader.

I dare suggest that unless Labour adheres to this principle when it makes the choice of the new leader, it could prejudice as of now its chances of winning the next election. The PN did not make that mistake when they chose Gonzi to take over from Fenech Adami. The party machinery, a common phrase these days, which is not easily definable but basically refers to those who really pull the strings behind major decisions, threw its weight behind Gonzi because they got market feedback that while Dalli could have been more popular with core PN supporters, Gonzi was more acceptable to the narrow middle segment of floating voters.

Alfred Mifsud doesn’t back Joseph Muscat. He backs George Abela. Now here’s the thing. Mifsud was Muscat’s boss twice over: at Super One when he was in charge and Muscat was the equivalent of Charlon Gouder, pursuing Fenech Adami and heckling him, and then again when he employed him at his investment advisory firm. So when Mifsud speaks about Muscat, we can assume that he knows exactly what he is saying.

The Labour Party machinery is clearly backing the candidature of Joseph Muscat. Have they made any research showing that Joseph Muscat can offer better prospects for winning the next election than the other candidates? My impression is that while Joseph has great potential to reach the top post at some point in his career, he still needs to enrich his CV with executive experience and further doses of maturity before he would be able to successfully take Lawrence Gonzi head on sometime in the next five years. So I thought the Labour Party machinery must know something I don’t know, that my impression is wrong, and that they truly see Joseph Muscat as their best hope to win government next time round, an elusive objective if they ever had one.

Mifsud decides to carry out some market research of his own. Because this is a field with which he is more than familiar, he commissioned a telephone survey of 400 respondents, chosen not at random but by age and location to give a representative sample of the electorate. A survey like this has a wide margin of error but it remains a good indication of how things stand.

I had picked up the same indications already by using my antennae, but because no one in the Labour Party is going to believe anyone’s antennae, still less mine, a survey is useful evidence.

Those who claimed to vote Labour or who refused to say how they voted in the last election (Mifsud took them to be Labour voters feeling routed and vulnerable, with which I tend to agree) all went for Joseph Muscat. Mifsud sees this as evidence that the party machinery has been successful in communicating the message that he is the chosen one. I think there are other reasons too, foremost among them being their inability to see what those who are on the outside and looking in can see very clearly indeed: that the man is worryingly shallow and self-satisfied, and that his smile is more of a disconcerting nervous twitch that doesn’t reach his eyes. These respondents said that they will vote Labour no matter which person is chosen as leader. So they are not new customers and Labour gains nothing by giving them their preferred candidate.

Respondents who consider themselves floating voters opted for George Abela. So did those who voted Nationalist. Because these two categories are the very ones that represent the new customers that Labour leads to get elected (there are another two categories, the new voters of 2013 and those who usually vote Labour but this time failed to vote), they are the ones to whom Labour should be listening. But we are the very ones who are being told to mind our own business and stay out of what the Labour Party considers to be a purely private and internal matter. If they tell us to butt out now, then of course we will have no choice but to butt them out in 2013. I hope they realise this.

Alfred Mifsud concludes that the Labour Party is actually telling its potential new customers:

…that they do not care about their tastes, feelings or expectations and want to continue with the trial and error methodology, based on hope rather than logic. Small wonder that if this persists, Labour could be forcing floating voters as of now to vote it yet again into opposition right until 2018.

Yes, I see the situation the same way, but it is even more worrying than that. If the Labour Party doesn’t even know how to choose a suitable leader, how can it be relied upon to develop policy and run the country?