James Frayne: Where the Tory campaigning operation is succeeding, and where it's lacking

James Frayne is a communications consultant. His new book – Meet the People – on what makes campaigns work and what this can teach businesses and other public-facing organisations is being published by Harriman House.

As we approach the last two years of this Parliament, increasing attention will be paid to the relative strengths of the parties’ campaign machines. There are no settled fundamental “facts” in politics – only public perceptions of them – and that means campaigns count.

But what really makes campaigns work? What distinguishes the great campaigns from the mediocre? And what can all this tell us about the current state of British politics?

I’ve been thinking hard about these questions over the last year while researching a book on public persuasion – on what organisations need to learn from campaigns as they come face to face with public opinion online. Part of this research involved looking at recent campaign case studies, as well as interviewing some of the best campaign consultants in the UK and the US.

Janan Ganesh is wrong - great campaigns and great staff do matter

James Frayne is a political and corporate communications consultant. He was previously a Director of Communications in Government and worked for a number of independent political campaigns in the UK. 

Writing in yesterday's Financial Times, their UK political columnist Janan Ganesh made the following argument:

"The first law of politics is that almost nothing matters. Voters barely notice, much less are they moved by, the events, speeches, tactics, campaigns or even strategies that are ultimately aimed at them. Elections are largely determined by a few fundamentals: the economy, the political cycle, the basic appeal of the party leaders. The role of human agency is not trivial, but it is rarely decisive either."

In short, campaigns don't matter.

Janan Ganesh is one of our very best columnists - always thought-provoking and insightful - but on this one he's wrong. There are no settled "fundamentals" in politics - no completely objective facts - and practically everything is decided by public perceptions. The role of campaigns is critical in forming voters' opinions and good campaigns can be the difference between victory and defeat. 

James Frayne: The power of emotion in political campaigns

James Frayne is a political and corporate communications consultant. He was previously a Director of Communications in Government and worked for a number of independent political campaigns in the UK. 

Given the extreme competence campaigns have developed on the operational side, where they have now have the ability to reach very specific groups of voters, the next logical step is for campaigns to develop greater expertise in the science of persuasion and influence. This will take campaigns into areas they have traditionally overlooked, such as neuroscience and psychology. Campaigns will investigate the process by which people make political decisions, and how they can intervene in that process to make them vote for a particular party. Just as campaigns have got used to having pollsters around, soon campaigns will start working with experts on how the mind works.

It is becoming increasingly clear that people make political decisions based primarily on emotion rather than reason. Even on issues like the economy - issues that should encourage a more objective, cost-benefit analysis about what is at stake financially for a given voter's family - within reason, people make decisions based on judgments around the perceived competence of parties, the extent to which they can be trusted, and whether or not a party's approach feels fair. People will always know when the economy is doing really badly and when parties have messed things up - think back to the ERM - but in less extraordinary times people are more likely to be moved by their emotional response to what they see and hear.

That people are moved by emotional arguments is not a new discovery. What is changing, however, is that we are starting to learn much more about how the human brain works, and therefore why messages that appeal to emotion work much better than those that appeal to reason. Messages that touch people on an emotional level cause a physical reaction in the brain that makes such messages more likely to be stored in our long term memory - and therefore more likely to affect our political outlook moving forward. Messages that are backed by powerful audiovisual stimuli are particularly likely to affect us.  

Scientists believe different types of messages affect voters in different ways. Non-surprising, partisan political messages that we agree with touch our "disposition system". This is the part of the brain that enables us simply to go about our everyday lives operating on autopilot. Such messages do not surprise us or make us think deeply. Rather, they act as reminders, putting certain messages in our head. Such messages tend to be positive and partisan and they are useful to campaigns in reminding party supporters to vote.

James Frayne: Target, target, target

James Frayne is a political and corporate communications consultant. He was previously a Director of Communications in Government and worked for a number of independent political campaigns in the UK. 

Political campaigns are about winning and parties must ruthlessly prioritise time and campaign resources for the best chance to secure power. The reality is that Tories will not make meaningful gains in the North East of England and Scotland in the next election, and Labour will struggle in the rural South. That could change in time, but not in two years. Barring a very serious shift in the national polling, victory or defeat depends on a relatively small number of identifiable seats, clustered particularly around the West and East Midlands, Yorkshire and the North West of England. These are the key battlegrounds.  

The parties have been developing sophisticated target seats campaigns to allocate resources accordingly. Taking their lead from some of the best US campaigns, parties have been making extensive use of polling, local intelligence from voters, and additional useful information like consumer data, to produce microtargeted campaigns to raise turnout amongst specific groups in target seats. As Lord Ashcroft has shown, these campaigns significantly increase candidates' prospects and there are signs that these campaigns will be even more effective in the coming election.