Intelligent marketing hasn’t always been about dumbing down.
Profiling and creating a manageable number of representative consumer ‘personas’ (sometimes a bit stereotyped, admittedly) serve to render the complex task of audience selection simple by grouping people into recognisable cohorts who may share the same attributes, values and other cultural / commercial reference points. Phew! All based on a mix of solid research principles.
As every agency knows, this is frequently the starting point for gathering insights and knowledge into the behaviour and preferences of clients’ likely consumers. We like this approach.
Politics is marketing
So using those research methodologies, or something like them, David Cameron thinks he can win the coming election by focusing on…
“…materialistic and middle managers… living on new housing estates around the MI, M61 and M6 motorways…home to salesmen and white-collar workers who spend long hours on the road…”
That means the owners of shiny new houses, built on ‘infill’ areas (i.e. abandoned coal mines and which are known as new housing estates) are now the focus of the Tories’ election campaign.
You could say Pshaw! They’re just a micro element of the grand national strategy for recovery and economic health. A tiny part. You could say that but you’d be wrong. Victory in these ’swing constituencies’ will hand David Cameron, he believes, the comfortable majority that he needs to win the election.
So what is Motorway Man (not woman, it seems) like? Well, he’s like this: materialistic, multiple computer and Sat Nav and gadget-owning, satellite subscribing, golf-playing, aspirational, wants two cars, big detached house, dreams of a conservatory.
He works hard, doesn’t fiddle his exes, does the best for his (two-ish) kids and family, takes loads of sunshine holidays abroad and shuttles the whole family around at weekends — along the convenient and easily-accessible nearby motorways — to sports clubs, gyms and out-of-town shopping centres. Her indoors also works and helps boost the family’s spending power.
Yay. Margaret Thatcher’s, middle-England share and property-owning prosperity democracy dream come true. Except MM has previously voted Labour rather Conservative. But he is now ‘moving towards the Tories’. And to filling up the bits in the sky that aren’t already full up with CO2 emissions.
Just one more thing about him: he’s said not to be interested in ‘culture, the arts or current affairs’.
Road to nowhere
So all the clever research and profiling data to identify potential audiences whose greatest propensity to secure a victory for the Tories is that they represent an easy sell.
Sound like I’m being, snotty? London, snotty? Well maybe I am. But it seems as though our treasured, democratic right to vote for the parties whose principles and policies we believe will best serve the country, the national interest and therefore ourselves (that’s me and my family, too) is all very well. But ultimately it’s MM who will actually decide. Pity, because when it comes down to the little things, no one does it better than Martin Lewis.
So it has all been dumbed down. And I am being snotty. Who cares. I must get out more. But I’ll keep off the motorways from now on.
