The recent elections in France and Greece have been

watched with great interest by both politicos and investors.

These choices resonate loudly across the oceans.

"Political

Loyalty" may sound like an oxymoron, or

the punchline to a joke, depending on your cynicism level and the

news headlines today, but it is real and it could have a major

impact on the next electoral cycle. Two huge factors will shape

the next several elections in the U.S. and beyond:

1. The application of technology is

   accelerating. After precious little innovation from the 15th

   century to the 20th, successive escalations - TV, robo-calling,

   etc. are leading to attempts to micro-target messages. Engaging

   the Millennial population among not just voters, but also party

   supporters and campaign staff will demand a comprehensive

   approach incorporating mobile and social capabilities. Otherwise,

   voter turnout rates are doomed to continue their long

   decline.

2. The game is more and more about the

   "middle:" the

   candidates' polarizing rhetoric and policy

   mixes across spheres of social/economic/foreign

   policy have led to a dramatic increase in independent voters

   (known to political science geeks as NPP or DTS voters). Even

   here in California, with a lot of opinions flying around,

   self-identified independent voters are now over 21% of the

   electorate…

With all that

said, let's take a look at the landscape, what

retailers can teach politicians, and how to address the two big

challenges mentioned above

THE

LANDSCAPE

The mechanics of the

political process may seem very foreign to many who have spent

their career in the commercial world. I, too, pursued a career in

business, but grew up in a political environment, so I see the

parallels. A political campaign is, at some level, a

conversion marketing program: you

try and deal with people along the full spectrum from

"don't like" to

"don't know" to

"like," "support,"

"advocate,, "organize" and

"fundraise"…and of course the goal

is to move them from the former categories to the

latter.

Edelma and other professionals in the

public affairs business call the "don't

know" and "like" categories the

moveable

middle, and this is a major focus of

almost all campaigns. That moveable middle is identified through

a combination of public reporting (e.g. contributions databases),

various value-added versions of the voter file (a primary example

being that by PDI) and demographic profiling. Political

consultants also develop their own "secret

sauces" over a period of years to deal with

the inadequacies of the datasets

that they can access, and on occasion have some proprietary

data.

Many issues arise here: just one example

is that party registrations are over-evaluated as indicators of

voter intent. There are a lot more moveable voters out there than

those solely indicated by "No Party

Preference" data, as the Reagan Democrat phenomenon

taught us years ago. Furthermore, there is little deep

understanding of the social networking phenomenon's

very real overlay on all those traditional media sources, and the

leverage that it can give to a campaign in understanding or

converting opinions. Simply put: a Facebook page for your

candidate with 10,000 likes doesn't tell you enough

about true voter intent.

Also, many would-be

politicians underestimate how much time they end up spending on

fundraising; it turns out to be a huge amount. Right, wrong or

indifferent, this matters for a number of reasons:

1. No money means no permanent staff

   and no access to the information tools required to

   win.

2. Time fundraising is not identical to

   time campaigning - in fact, it tends to take away time from the

   actions required to directly win votes

3. It is

   a world with notoriously arcane regulations; it is crucial to

   know where you are - and be able to promptly report - relative to

   the various contribution limits. This was famously lampooned by

   href="http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/405889/january-12-2012/indecision-2012---colbert-super-pac---coordination-resolution-with-jon-stewart

   ">Stephen Colbert and his SuperPAC.

WHAT MACY'S KNOWS

THAT YOUR SENATOR DOESN'T

Consumer brands of all kinds, from retailers to sports

teams, have a very good understanding of both

customers' prior behaviors and their current actions in

the real and online worlds. They also know a great deal about

propensities of individual customers, which product goes with

what item already in your basket and what it would take to

trigger incremental behaviors - right now. They know this because

they can look at both data at rest

(favorite shop staff, transaction history, etc.) and

data in motion (what is on your

online basket, items you have previously browsed) at a very fine

grain, evaluated in real time to

make instant decisions. They even know who you are online, on

their site or on Facebook, or when you are on-premise at a store,

so they can service your every need. href="https://vimeo.com/41443161 ">Here is a good

example of part of that equation.

The contrast with the political arena is palpable: the

data sources they have are

fundamental and offer high value already

(particularly those with some post-processing applied), but

they are not clean, normalized and correlated

appropriately, so you can't easily see

that "Maria Lopez" really is "Maria

L. Sanchez," who was recently married. Furthermore, the

demographic data is very

20th-century and over-reliant on housing value -

itself based on ZIP+4 and other similarly crude

measures.

On the other hand, commercial

customers can pull data such as realtor MLS filings, href="http://trulia.com">trulia.com, href="http://zillow.com">zillow.com and href="http://housingmaps.com">housingmaps.com to get

values for that specific address. They understand what you

tweeted about your last experience with their brand, if you are a

veteran… they may even know which newspaper you subscribe

to and they probably have your credit file. How much influence do

these items have on voting patterns, too? As it turns out, a

lot!

The tempo of these organizations has also

changed materially; not long ago it was defined by the rhythm of

daily mainframe batches, brochures mailed to your home, and

quarterly sales. The metabolic rate of the modern

retailer is driven by real-time updates of

inventory, offers pushed to your mobile device

before you leave the aisle and an intelligent conversation about

your known preferences with a member of store staff you may never

have met before. The political arena is still grappling with the

problems of the poll cycle

(define-design-target-run-collect-analyze… and publicize if

it helps your cause) and largely manual methods; in short, there

is much transferable knowledge here,

from which politicians of all stripes can benefit.

Check back on Monday for thoughts on negative

campaigning!

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