Labour – selling itself as the ugly party
Do you have to be Plain Jane or Dorky Dave to vote Labour? It would seem so.
If Labour is aiming to position its brand in the more glamorous part of the political spectrum, what with Michelle’s Gucci-print boots, jaunts in Asti and tal-pepe hangers-on, Joseph Muscat’s new home page has put a bit of a rocket under all that.
Where did they find all these ‘oh, but they have such a nice personality’ people (see below)?
Did they hold auditions, or what?
Well, we know where they found the one in the top left-hand corner. They rang round to Forum Zghazagh Laburisti and called her in (ghax ghandna bzonn token bjonda).
Anzi ghamlu token ragel suret in-nies u token mara mhux hazin – but otherwise, Labour seems to be promoting Malta as the land where good genes go to die.
And please don’t anybody come back at me with the retort that this is a fair reflection of the Maltese population and that all I have to do is take a walk through some seaside place on a Saturday night.
Aside from the fact that this is not entirely fair because you don’t get a good cross-section of Maltese people out by the sea on a Saturday night, that’s not the point.
Even if the whole of Malta is plain or downright ugly, you don’t use plain people to sell your product.
People are by their very nature aspirational. They want to buy into the kind of thing to which they aspire.
Do I know anyone who is gagging to be associated with the beta crowd, even if they are beta themselves?
No, I do not.
Everybody wants to run with the alphas, even if they are beta. That is the thinking which underpins practically all advertising.
When was the last time you saw a human troll used to sell a car? Or a really plain guy used in anything other than an ironic way to sell something vaguely Wayne’s-Worldish?
Choosing beautiful people for party campaigns fails only if those beautiful people are obviously not Maltese (we can instinctively recognise a Maltese person), because we know for sure that those people won’t be voting Labour or PN because they’re not ‘real’ and they don’t live in Malta, and so that alienates us.
If the beautiful people are Maltese, it works. It certainly works better than asking us to hook up – so to speak – with people who look like they have to beg to get a date, or of whom our grandmothers (well, mine, anyway) might have said, “Well, I’m sure s/he has a very nice character.”
You know, the sort who Americans call ‘homely’.
I just don’t understand this belief which both political parties seem to have that homeliness sells. It really doesn’t.
A German magazine which undertook to use ‘real women’ as models for its fashion pages only saw sales fall even further. It soon realised that its readers don’t want to be shown what they will look like in those clothes, but what they want to look like.
The real women were spiked, and the 0.00001% of the female population brought back on board.
The trouble is finding enough good-looking Maltese people who are not stars of stage, screen, page or catwalk already, and who are willing to feature in a political campaign. That’s the really tough bit. Good-looking people tend to get enough attention already.
The last thing they want is to be poster-boy or poster-girl for a party campaign.
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CSI’s mugshot database?
As a ‘FOREIGNER’ who doesn’t understand the language, except for the odd words or phrase one hears whilst out and about, I have a skewed view of political life.
One thing that occurs to me is the number of people like me, those who are citizens through marriage.
I guess there are a couple of thousand or so, all non-Maltese-speakers.
We have a vote.
When we get in the voting booth, how shall we vote?
As instructed by our partner?
What if that partner is PL?
I do not believe that PL is bound to win the next election because there are people like me who will vote PN tactically to keep PL out of power.
Just a thought.
And what has the PN done to you? why not give the PL a chance, you never saw them in power…
And why should the PL be given a chance? What have they done to deserve it? Being I. The wilderness for close to 25 years?
Most women have dyed hair; take your pick between red, jet black and blonde. The rest have never heard of make up. Then all men have either a really close haircut and in some cases have had their hair shaved.
Mind you, though, there are one or two pretty ladies and at least one decent-looking man.
And as for instinctively recognizing Maltese people, one has only go to London or Taormina, to start getting vibes of inherently Maltese people walking in the street.
Often it’s easy when people start conversing in a loud voice with that typical tkaxkira of syllables at the end of each word. But even if they don’t and act decently, I still recognize them; I can’t understand it.
It’s the big noses. There’s no escaping the semitic gene.
Go easy there, Baxxter.
But it’s true, isn’t it?
It’s all about the scale. Those pictures are too small to be individual, and too large to merge into the background.
Some political campaigns have used the “plain Joe/Jane” marketing ploy very effectively, but it was always either:
1) very small photos used to make up a larger picture (ref. “Président”, even though it’s a film) or a crowd; or
2) a few close-up vignettes of Average Citizen offering his/her support.
Whereas the people in that picture look like they’re Labour candidates at first glance.
What’s with the Fisher-Price colours?
It’s fashioned on the new windows 8
If someone is REALLY bored, you can try Facebook face recognition (if it’s still working) …cut and paste blah blah (I’ll get me coat).
As a spectacularly good looking alpha person myself (cough), I concur.
I wouldn’t be seen dead in a political campaign because there will always be repercussions to come and bite you badly in the ass.
That’s what the 80s have taught me.
Good-looking? They need Franco Debono. He’s so handsome. He told us so himself.
I think every country has it’s beautiful and not so beautiful people.I find the British as not a particularly good looking race..most of them look as if they are going to sneeze in a second. I recently was at Bristol airport with hundreds of british in the departure area and I was sitting having a coffee and out of all those hundreds going by, I hardly saw a dozen beautiful girls ,apart from the hideous clothes all were wearing( even the dozen beautiful ones were dressed badly),most were overweight and yes many were short too.I do not mean that I do not like them ,the politeness I notice when I visit Britain, their que keeping ( the only people who do it ..I know as I work in a hotel) and their fairplay .Many men from the continent are facinated with our young girls.Most british and other northen girls are flat chested but ours have the most sexy and beautiful breasts ( from a very young age) The only draw back we have is in height but a short women if she is not overweight is still attractive.
One can sit outside in a caffe here and admire our girls and there will be many but I ask you how you can do that in Britain.
The competision I see is fro the eastern european girls as there the vast majority are beautiful.
What a lot of stereotypes. “A short woman if she is not overweight is still attractive”. Come off it.
There are lots of features in a woman which make her attractive.
What a chauvinistic and archaic remark.
Is this how you see women? The laws of attraction are much more compIex. What an immature comment. “Big breasts” indeed. “Eastern European competition”. Come on. Start looking at a woman as a person not as a pair of long, lean legs. Comments like yours, frankly, disgust me.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/jul/29/marketingandpr.advertising1
“It was a ground-breaking advertising campaign using “real women”, complete with curves and normal length legs and within a month sales of the Dove range of firming creams had doubled.”
“But other research in the past has shown that women will usually say they would like to see bigger models in advertising, but when shown ads with larger models they are more likely to want to buy the product advertised by the “perfect” woman.”
For Malta’s minute population, the ad might just work as everyone will look at some of those faces nd exclaim….iiiiii dak nafu!
But were we not talking mostly about looks in this article?