|
By Duncan Matheson
As published in the June 24 edition of The Moncton Times & Transcript
Being a political junkie and a student of communications strategy I followed the recent election campaign and the subsequent vote with more than just passing interest. It was a great case study in effective communications on one side, and failed communications on the other.
While the pundits who picked over the Tory carcass have pretty much unanimously agreed that the PC's near demise was due to their failure to recognize early in the game the relevance of insurance as the hot button issue, there's much more to it than that. They are right, but this one mistake need not have been as devastating as it turned out. It was the Tory strategist's failure to effectively adjust and recover that hurt them most.
What compounded the problem for the Tories, was that the Liberals' communications strategists seized on this initial Tory stumble, saw it as an opportunity to take control of the agenda, and in doing so left the Tories on the defensive and playing catch-up through the rest of the campaign.
The Tories rejigged their strategy on insurance no less than three times in the midst of the campaign. First with what was generally rejected as an inadequate solution, then with one that no one understood because they failed to explain it, and finally, in the dying days, they started flying a 20 per cent reduction. All of this though, was done in what had to have been an environment of panic, borne from the apparent reality that this issue was killing them. Shawn Graham's comment "200 days of change have changed into 200 changes a day" underlined the ridicule the Liberals and NDP then employed, which made the Tories changing insurance stand worse.
I remember speaking with a Tory cabinet minister at The Fredericton Market during the campaign, and remarkably, he couldn't admit that the changing Tory insurance stand was any kind of flip-flop. There is no shame in changing your mind, and while the Tories eventually started saying as much, the PC's wasted far too many days while people were making up their minds, with this strange posture of changing their platform because they needed to, but at the same time trying to pretend it wasn't a change at all. It was as if they were ashamed of doing it, rather than seeing it as a positive. Again, bad communications.
Full credit to the Liberals and their key strategist Derek Riedle for jumping on insurance in the first place, but they didn't do this because they are better at reading tea leaves than the Tories were. They did it because they had solid research that told them insurance was the hot issue. The luck, on their part, is that the Tories either didn't do this research, or if they did, didn't listen to it. And it wasn't just the insurance issue. It was solid research that told the Liberals an overwhelming majority of New Brunswickers wanted NB Power to remain in public hands. And since the government had gone on record saying they aren't opposed to the selling of Colson Cove and maybe also privatizing Point Lepreau, the Liberals knew they had another issue on which to hang their hat, and in the process, possibly also hang the Tories. And of course there was health care, which always seems to be a key election issue.
So with insurance, health care, and NB Power, the Liberals had the three pillars of their campaign. Their platform covered all the other major issues too, but in the aforementioned three, they knew where to focus.
Next came execution - how to effectively get the messages out there. Candidates, especially Shawn Graham, kept focused on the three key issues as much as he could through the debates and his media interviews. This complimented the Liberal's sharply focused advertising campaign. So the key strategy both in the advertising, and public speaking, was to stay focused not only on what they wanted to talk about, but also what they knew the voters wanted to hear about. This was also how the Liberals kept control of the campaign agenda.
Conversely, after that initial stumble on insurance, the Tories failed to recover not only because their campaign strategy was flawed, but also because their advertising wasn't as good. Their ads weren't as focused. Take the insurance issue as an example. The Liberal message was clear cut and uncomplicated - "I will make lower insurance rates the law, and if the big insurance companies won't cooperate I'll bring in a public system" Shawn Graham pounded this message every chance he got, and the advertising was straight to the point. Granted as the campaign progressed, the Liberals distanced themselves from the 25% reduction Graham pledged earlier, but still the promise was straightforward. The Tory one was anything but. Premier Lord's half page ad was weak, with a pledge of a no frills policy that, despite pressure from the Liberals and the media, he never did explain.
While the Liberal campaign was superior, it wasn't flawless. In the CBC debate, the format was such that toward the end, each leader was given some time to talk about an issue of their choice. Since all the major ones had already been hashed over by this point, the Liberal strategy was to bring up Premier Lord's failure to get tough with Quebec concerning labour policies where New Brunswick contractors can't work in Quebec, but Quebec contractors can win jobs in New Brunswick. The Liberal strategy was to bring this up as an integrity issue, saying that Premier Lord's national ambitions stopped him from getting tough with Quebec on behalf of New Brunswick contractors.
But in the media analysis panel right after the debate, a CBC journalist said it was a curious choice of an issue for Graham, and that it may mean he had given up on the mainstream vote and was now targeting specific segments, in this case contractors. It's hard to say whether Graham's strategy in that instance went over other people's heads too, but it's possible, and if it did, it would have been an example of a communications strategy backfiring. It certainly did with that one reporter.
While there is no question the Liberal communications folks out performed and outsmarted their Tory counterparts in this campaign, and in doing so carried the day in almost defeating a government that entered the campaign with a huge lead, it would be overly simplistic to say communications strategies made all the difference. But there is no doubt they made a huge difference. They always do.
Finally, in the interests of full disclosure, let me state that I am not, nor have I ever been a member of a political party. In this recent campaign I did agree to requests that I manage the communications of T.J. Burke's campaign in Fredericton North, but I did so on the condition I didn't have to join the party to do it.
Duncan Matheson is President of Bissett Matheson Communications Ltd., a strategic communications firm based in Fredericton and Moncton.
|
