Mark Gill

The dark side of political marketing

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss exploratory research into the perceptions of British Muslims towards Islamist ideological messaging to contribute to the general debate on “radicalisation”.Design/methodology/approach – Four focus groups were undertaken with a mixture of Bangladeshi and Pakistani British Muslims who were shown a selection of Islamist propaganda media clips, garnered from the internet.Findings – The paper proposess that Islamist communications focus on eliciting change in emotional states, specifically inducing the paratelic‐excitement mode, by focusing around a meta‐narrative of Muslims as a unitary grouping self‐defined as victim to Western aggression. It concludes that British Muslim respondents were unsympathetic to the Islamist ideological messaging contained in the sample of propaganda clips.Originality/value – The paper provides an insight into how British Muslims might respond to Islamist communications, indicating that, while most are not susceptible to inducement ...

Examining the academic/commercial divide in marketing research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to comment on the differences in perceptions that exist between academic and professional marketing researchers, as creators of new marketing knowledge, and explore how academics and practitioners can work together better on areas of mutual interest or separately on areas where their interests do not coincide.Design/methodology/approach – The approach is via two focus groups, one with researchers in marketing from universities and one with commercial market researchers, and via online surveys of the same target groups, with 638 respondents in all.Findings – The study indicates that the two sample groups have relatively congruent views about the advantages and disadvantages of each others approach to research but both groups believe they could do more to make their research more comprehensible and accessible to each other.Research limitations/implications – The empirical study was conducted in the UK only, and the response rate from the university marketing research ...

Brexit Britain, two years on

Since Cameron’s resignation, his successor, Theresa May, has been working to steer a course towards “Brexit”, but it has not been smooth sailing. She has faced disagreement within the UK Parliament, and her own party, on what the future of Britain’s relationship with the EU should be. Many are entirely set against leaving, while others refuse to countenance any arrangement that would keep Britain subject to EU rules, preferring a clean (if painful) break with the past. In March 2018, EU and UK negotiators agreed a transition deal to last 21 months after the formal time of departure, beginning at 11pm (UK time) on 29 March 2019. As with all things Brexit-related, the deal has met with concerns and complaints from all sides. But has the rancour surrounding Brexit prompted any real, lasting shifts in public attitudes? In a special article to mark the two-year anniversary of the Brexit vote, pollsters Sir Robert Worcester, Roger Mortimore, Paul Baines and Mark Gill explain how people voted in the 2016 referendum and whether differential turnout affected the final outcome. Then, in the Q&A that follows, the authors reflect on the results of recent public opinion surveys and consider what has changed in the past 24 months. M ai n im ag e: H en fa es /i st oc kp ho to .c om IN DETAIL

BPC/MRS Enquiry into Election Polling 2015

This Forum article considers the unsatisfactory results of pre-election opinion polling in the 2015 British general election and the BPC/MRS enquiry report into polling by Sturgis et al., providing a response from Ipsos MORI and associated researchers at Kings College London and Cranfield Universities. Whilst Sturgis et al. (2016) consider how to perfect opinion poll forecasting, why the 2015 prediction was inaccurate when the same methodology returned satisfactory results in 2005 and 2010 at Ipsos MORI is considered here instead. We agree with Sturgis et al. that the inaccurate results were not due to late swing or the ‘shy Tory’ problem and with Taylor (2016) that the underlying problem is a response rate bias. However, Sturgis et al. critique pollsters in their report for systematically under-representing Conservative voters but the Ipsos MORI final poll had too many Conservatives, too many Labour voters and not enough non-voters. The Sturgis et al. conclusion is convincing that the politically disengaged were under-represented due to quotas and weighting mechanisms designed to correct for response bias. Nevertheless, for Ipsos MORI, this explanation does not account for why the polling methodology was inaccurate in 2015 when it had performed accurately in 2005 and 2010. For Ipsos MORI, a more likely explanation is that Labour voters in 2015 became more prone to exaggerate their voting likelihood. We offer various postulations on why this might have been so, concluding that to account for the inaccuracy requires a two-fold response, to improve: (i) sample representativeness and (ii) the projection of voting behaviour from the data. Unfortunately, the BPC/MRS report offers no blueprint for how to solve the problem of sampling the politically disengaged. Whilst Ipsos MORI have redesigned their quotas to take account of education levels, to represent those better with no formal educational qualifications and reduce overrepresentation of graduates, polling in the referendum on EU membership suggests that the problem of drawing a representative sample has been solved but difficulties in how best to allow for turnout persist.