How to market Noynoy Aquino for President in 2010

MarketingRx for October 2-09

Marketing "Noynoy for President"? - part 1

By Dr Ned Roberto & Ardy Roberto

Q:  We work for an NGO advocating for change and for Noynoy in the coming 2010 election.  We read your column some 2 or 3 months ago saying that voters have a low involvement regard for the coming election and this is why the top 5 or 6 presidentiables have very close voting percentages.  To be frank, we disagreed and still do with your analysis and didn’t like at all what you predicted.  We were like the group who asked you the question in that column.  But we are different in that we believe many of the concepts about changing public behavior we found in your social marketing book. 

You wrote that column before the Noynoy phenomenon.  But now without the kind of Villar’s extra heavy ad campaign and without the other candidates’ shameless advertorial plugs, we’ve all seen how out of nowhere Noynoy grabbed the lead in the presidential race with an unbelievable 49% votes.  Surely, you can no longer say voters still have a low involvement regard for the coming election.  So what does your social marketing have to say now about our voters, our presidentiables that include Noynoy, and who will win in the coming election?

A:  You wrote an excellent brief note.  Thank you for your endorsement of the senior MR-er’s social marketing book.  Next, we’d like to go directly and respond to your questions. 

First, do voters no longer have a low involvement regard for the coming election? 

There are at least two important things to consider here.  The first of these is Noynoy’s 49% share of votes.  We probably can say that for those 49%, the low involvement attitude has been left probably in favor of the high at least for the present.  But as you probably still remember from your statistics, the flip side of that 49%  is the 51% who were not touched by Noynoy or by what happened to his Mom, Cory Aquino.  So the most we can say about the 49% statistic is that the playing field is now probably even between the low versus the high involvement voters.

This conclusion holds IF the 49% ratio represents a trend data.  But it is not a trend data.  It’s a single data point as of the date of that scientific and credible survey that did the reading.  To validly conclude about its voter behavior implication with regard to the likelihood of Noynoy’s winning the coming election, we need to see at least two more successive data points.  If that 49% is more or less maintained in the next two surveys, then it becomes reasonable to conclude that there’s a trend in favor of half the voter population sticking to Noynoy.  If, on the other hand, the next two surveys show an increase for each of these 2 surveys, then the trend is for the 49% to even increase further.  That will make Noynoy a stronger presidential candidate on the verge of becoming a dominant leading candidate.  Finally, if in the next 2 surveys, the 49% declines, then that 49% was no trend.  It was an “outlier” statistics representing a “surprise” or what author Nassim Taleb refers to as a “Black Swan” phenomenon that would, just as quickly as it appeared would just disappear or level off about the norm.

In all these 3 likelihoods, what’s of strategic significance is to understand the social force or forces underlying that 49%.  What made 49% of voters to suddenly want Noynoy for their president this coming election?  Without such an explanation, anyone’s intrepretation and recommendation are just as good as any other.         

That’s one social marketing answer to your question on who will win the coming election.  If we transform the question to relate specifically to Noynoy, we therefore ask: 

“Will Noynoy win the election?”  

Or translating the question to refer to your advocacy stand and resoluteness, the question becomes: “What will it take for Noynoy to win the election?”

The ideal would be for Noynoy to hold on to the 49% and if there should be a decline in this voting ratio, to arrest the decline to the lowest level of 30% or 34%.   Recall that Fidel Ramos won at a 24% share of votes.  That’s our benchline in this portion of the analysis.  Now, come May 2010, the final share of votes for any candidate will be determined first by the voters’ final voting decision and behavior.  But the other half in a candidate’s final share of votes is his or his party’s political machinery.  That other big factor is what we do not and cannot have from the survey. 

The political machinery includes, especially for the incumbent party, its capability and experience with a “hello-Garci” maneuver or many others of this type of vote hijacking.  Presumably, a 10% lead (i.e., 34% versus 24%) would represent too numerous a number of voters to hide under a “dagdag-bawas” (vote adding-vote deducting) manipulation.  So Noynoy can gain a decisive win with a low 34% or a high 49% SOV that he now commands.

Just how can your NGO and allies make this happen? Since we are out of space, we'll answer that question next Friday! 

Thanks for your questions. Keep sending them to drnedmarketingrx@gmail.com or marketingrx@pldtdsl.net or text us at 0918-3386412. God bless! 

MarketingRx for October 9-09

Marketing "Noynoy for President"? - conclusion

By Dr Ned Roberto & Ardy Roberto

Here's a repeat of the question posed last week by an NGO advocating for change and "marketing" Noynoy for President in 2010. They ask:

Q:  We read your column some 2 or 3 months ago saying that voters have a low involvement regard for the coming election and this is why the top 5 or 6 presidentiables have very close voting percentages.  To be frank, we disagreed and still do with your analysis and didn’t like at all what you predicted....

(But) you wrote that column before the Noynoy phenomenon.  But now without the kind of Villar’s extra heavy ad campaign and without the other candidates’ shameless advertorial plugs, we’ve all seen how out of nowhere Noynoy grabbed the lead in the presidential race with an unbelievable 49% votes.  Surely, you can no longer say voters still have a low involvement regard for the coming election.  So what does your social marketing have to say now about our voters, our presidentiables that include Noynoy, and who will win in the coming election?

Here's the continuation and conclusion to our answer from last Friday. (For those who missed it, visit our blog at marketingrx.org)

Word of Mouth and stickiness

First, find out the social force or forces underlying Noynoy's 49% share of votes (SOV).  That reason or reasons make up the raw materials for crafting Noynoy’s campaign message.  Then, that message has to be spread and, more importantly, kept at top-of-mind  consciousness among the voter population.  How to effectively accomplish this is found today in the growing word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing literature.

WoM marketing shows that the spread of a message can be multiplied by its “conversation value.”   That’s the quality of a message that makes it to its audience “buzzable” or, if you will, “Boy-Abunda-ble.”  Its initial recipients will like to talk to others about the message. 

If talking about your message takes only one or two rounds, its spread and top-of-mind character will be short-lived.  It needs another pass-on quality.  That’s the quality of “stickiness” according to Malcolm Gladwell in his best seller book, The Tipping Point.  Message stickiness, comes from the appropriate and timely use of message source and message context. 

When a message source is a celebrity or a respected figure of authority, the message source gives the message an enhanced stickiness.  It is stickiness that gets the message to be passed on more than 2 or more rounds. 

The powerful message context, according to Gladwell, is controversy.  But using controversy is a double-edged sword because it has positive as well as negative consequences.

Controversy

Conversation value and stickiness find its ultimate and ingenious application in Mel Gibson’s pre-selling of the movie, “The Passion of the Christ.”  Gibson did the following.  First, he spread the news that the Jewish communities were “mad at me because they said the movie made them look bad; it’s anti-semitic, they said.”  He then got emails to circulate in the Christian communities defending the movie.  Next, he somehow was able to get Entertainment Weekly to name the movie “the most controversial film of all times.”  This was followed by a movie review from the foremost movie critic Robert Ebert saying: “The full 10 minutes of flogging makes this the most violent film I have ever seen. … No level-minded parent should ever allow children to see this movie.”  That practically assured an eager children’s crowd for the movie.  Through all of these, the movie-going public talked about the movie and the media continued to do so as well.

So how did Gibson sustain the conversation value and stickiness of his WoM campaign for his movie?  He created a serial WoM “campaign” of sorts whose changing but unrelenting conversation value and stickiness held movie fans in suspended anticipation until the movie’s release and they all lined up to see it.  That’s the kind of WoM campaign that Noynoy requires for keeping his 49% SOV or for making sure its decline would stop at 34%.  His campaign message must have conversation value and stickness.  Then that message must be reformulated repeatedly and played in a serial schedule until election time.

We close by saying something about the social marketing model we applied above for shaping and directing voter behavior.  Among other things, the model versatility.  It can work for any other presidentiables.  An appropriate WoM campaign can be developed for the #2, #3 or even the #4 candidate aimed at matching and then excelling Noynoy’s SOV.  It’s a matter of having the necessary voter response and behavior data.  

Thanks for your questions. Keep sending them to drnedmarketingrx@gmail.com or marketingrx@pldtdsl.net or text us at 0918-3386412. God bless! Our writer's fees for this and last week goes to Operation Blessing's medical mission for Typhoon Ondoy victims. Please support relief efforts for the victims of Typhoon Ondoy. God bless!  God bless!