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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/394777
58 BCBusiness November 2014 These are not frivolous questions. Nor are the ones asking what kind of animal Robertson or LaPointe is, which movie star or what brand of coffee. Voters might think they care deeply about issues, that they will make informed and reasoned choices after carefully studying what every candidate says about the key topics—homelessness, the economy, bike lanes, transparency and accountability, development—but psychologists, marketers, political cam- paigners and product managers know that isn't the way the powerful reptilian part of the human brain works. Espe- cially not these days. Everyone is filled with torrents of information, too much to be sorted through or pro- cessed rationally. We live in Mal- colm Gladwell's world of Blink. In that world, children who are briefly shown pictures of can- didates in elections far away can correctly choose t he w i n ner— su g- gesting that those pictures form the basis for many adult elec tora l dec i- sions too. We will choose our leaders because they remind us of a movie star we like or they subliminally transmit reliability or they feel like a golden retriever kind of person (and we have a fondness for golden retrievers). Along with blinking our way to instant judgments, we've also become shoppers, not just of cars, but of people—especially politicians. In her recent book on the transformation of Canadian political culture, Shopping for Votes, Ottawa reporter Susan Delacourt unearthed a trend underlying present- day elections. Fifty years ago, 10 to 20 per cent of people used to switch par- ties between elections. Today, it's 30 to 40 per cent. We've lost our unswerving loyalty to brands, as Sears Canada and BlackBerry have already sadly noted. The brands that continue to dominate— those that have become more powerful and wealthy than many nation states— are the ones that manage to form an evocative relationship with consum- ers. It's a relationship filled with blink impressions that make us feel happy, understood, beautiful, living in our ideal world. An Apple world of delight and connection. "People think a brand is a logo. But it's not. A brand gets under your skin, it gets you emotionally and you don't even know it," says Steve Bengtson, a local consultant who works with Toronto-based BrandSpark Interna- tional. In the academic world, various scholars define it as "the management of meaning," "the process of creating identification of a thing to an idea" and "an attempt to create value." Robert Levy, the president of Brand- Spark, expands on that. When you have a brand, you have a personality that people, particularly the people in your target audience, understand and con- nect with instantly. That's of maximum importance in politics, where the jum- ble of issues and policy talk can over- whelm even educated voters, leaving all of them searching for a quick subliminal cue about where to go—and a sense that someone is speaking directly to them, not to some generic crowd. The candi- date "has to figure out who's his target audience," says Levy. "You don't have to appeal to everyone. But you need that 30 to 40 per cent who really dig you." The most successful political brands are those who can convey what they are in an elevator-pitch moment to their slice of the audience. Outgoing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's "I'm going to stop the gravy train" was all that a swath of fed- up voters needed to know. It's what a significant proportion of them still care about mostly. At its most basic, that ability to project a definable, easily understood personality is the mechanism that encourages consumers to identify a dif- ference (and possibly pay more for it) between two products that appear to be superficially the same. That's the situation Vancouver voters face Nov. 15, where the shift to politics by branding will play out. Whether by design or accident, the NPA has chosen, in Kirk LaPointe, somebody who looks not that markedly different at first glance from the Gregor Robertson cereal box on the shelf: Two white men, both fit, good-looking, dressed like CEOs, aim- ing to project managerial competence. The most successful political brands are those who can convey what they are in an elevator-pitch moment to their slice of the audience. outgoing Toronto mayor rob Ford's "I'm going to stop the gravy train" was all that a swath of fed-up voters needed to know