Robert M. Worcester

Market Segmentation and Product Differentiation in Political Campaigns: A Technical Feature Perspective

The perceived importance of five technical service qualities (Gronroos 1984) or features (i.e. national and local policies, leaders, values and candidates), and voters’ ratings of the Labour and Conservative Parties’ competence on each of these parameters, were investigated during the 2001 British General Election using an a priori segmentation method and the classification tree statistical technique for data analysis. Voter ratings of the technical service features were found to be indicators of intention to vote. A product differentiation approach is most likely to influence voting intention, because the technical service features are more readily manipulated through marketing programmes than demographic and customer characteristics (Bucklin and Gupta 1992). Ratings of technical service features are stronger indicators of voting intention than voter demographics and characteristics. A product differentiation approach, based around technical service features, would be the most effective focus for strategy development in future political marketing campaigns.

Product Attribute-Based Voter Segmentation and Resource Advantage Theory

Political parties have long since targeted the marginal constituency and floating voters using demographic segmentation approaches and the use of market segmentation techniques in general election campaigns is now well-documented (see Johnson 1971; Ahmed and Jackson 1979; Yorke and Meehan 1986; Baines et al. 2003). The actual practice of segmentation as undertaken by political parties and its relation to theory is less well-considered. This paper represents a serious attempt to outline how political parties targeted a priori segments of the electorate including gender, age and lifecycle in the 2005 British General Election when they should have been adopting a product attributed-based approach. Selected MORI surveys from April 2005 were analysed, using logistic regression to indicate the most important factors in determining how Britons vote. Principal components analysis provides an indication of how the three main British political parties are perceived. The paper discusses, using resource-advantage theory (Hunt 1995; Hunt and Arnett 2004) how political parties might use their party and leader image, and policies to build their popularity in an election campaign.

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.