Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (12 page)

Goldfarb, plugged in as he was to the private sector, was a big fan of focus groups, those small gatherings of citizens who would agree to be interviewed, usually behind a one-way mirror, so that their reactions could be scrutinized in depth. Researchers would lure citizens into participating in these focus groups with small cash incentives and refreshments. Focus groups, relying heavily on people with time to spare, can rarely claim to be representative of the busy population, but they can suggest typical responses. The commercial world had come to appreciate this style of research because it was a way of gauging intangibles that straight polling could not measure: emotion, gut response and the like. It was through focus-group research in 1980 in Marin County, California, for instance, that Goldfarb collected some stunning news for the Ford Motor Company: most participants had never been in a Ford car and didn’t even know anyone who had owned one. “It was an absolute shock to the corporation,” Goldfarb told the
Chicago Tribune
. Ford responded with an ad campaign specifically for these strangers to the brand: “Have you driven a Ford lately?”

In the political realm, Goldfarb applied the same approach, convinced that understanding hopes and fears of citizens was more useful than gauging vague political support. Rather than ask whether Liberals were simply losing strength in the 1970s, he would probe the emotions behind the numbers. Were Canadians afraid of inflation because of the dent in their wallets or the threats to their jobs? In turn, Goldfarb could then counsel the Liberals on how to tailor their rhetoric to match these more deep-seated sentiments among the electorate. Goldfarb didn’t invent Trudeau’s “just society,” but he liked the way it worked as an indelible, over-arching “brand” for the party throughout the 1970s. His research told him that Canadians were looking for fairness in this decade, whether it was fairness in store pricing or fairness in hiring practices. Pierre Trudeau’s “just society” spoke to a value that travelled from the grocery aisles to the ballot box.

There’s an old saying in advertising that comes from Leo McGinneva, a US marketing expert, that revolves around knowing what you’re trying to sell. When customers go to a hardware store to buy a drill bit, he said, “They don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes.” What he was saying, in essence, is that consumers are buying the
idea
of a product. Successful marketing rests in understanding people’s motives and wants, beyond the mere transaction. This is what Goldfarb was supplying to the Liberals with his research, and why it was useful to the public and private sectors. People who were looking for freedom in their undergarments may also be looking for freedom in their political dialogue. People who wanted choice in the grocery aisles would want choice in their political options, too. This would be especially true of checked-out voters, who were often more informed about their consumer choices than their political ones.

Politics, as always, was several steps behind the consumer world in terms of market research in the 1970s—probably because the politicians were still operating under the idea of their craft as something separate from the less lofty world of commercialism. It was fine to let the ad guys sell the political brands at election time, and maybe even throw them some work in between campaigns, but the marketing experts remained just outside the inner circle of power.

“Emotional Commitment”

By the 1970s, Canada’s advertising community was getting deep into the idea of consumer research, and “positioning” was the hot new fashion. Products had to be “positioned” against their competitors in the marketplace. Shopping malls were proliferating across the country and Statistics Canada, in a 1973 report, found that stores in these convenient, multiple-merchandise centres, with their ample parking, generated 30 percent better sales per square foot than traditional stores. In Toronto, the giant Eaton’s Centre opened in 1977—a six-storey, two-block-long marvel of steel and glass that immediately became a shopping and tourist mecca. It even had a ceiling sculpture of Canada geese in flight, so shoppers could feel a tinge of patriotism as they browsed through the merchandise. Commercials on TV were getting slicker, with video replacing film and colour taking over from black and white, and the old sixty-second ad was being pared down to a speedier thirty seconds. At the same time, advertising-savvy political aides were trying to coach their bosses in the art of the “thirty-second clip,” which politicians would continue to see as a necessary but lamentable decline in public discourse.

For someone like professor-turned-politician Ed Broadbent, for instance, clip-friendly speaking became part of his on-the-job training. Broadbent came to politics from academia. He had been a professor at York University and his early speeches were dry, complex historical lectures—not exactly crowd pleasers for the blue-collar audiences in his Oshawa riding. But he would get the hang of things. In 1977, Broadbent told
Toronto Star
reporter John Honderich, “I had an instinctive inclination to speak in sentences that included colons and subordinate clauses and always qualify en route. Now I put the conclusion first.” After the Throne Speech that fall, Broadbent was disciplined enough to distill his reaction into seventeen quotable words for the media: “The failure of this throne speech lies in the absence of specific suggestions dealing with the economy.”

Television arrived in the House of Commons that same year, 1977, forcing all Canadian politicians, front bench and back bench alike, to reckon with issues of packaging and image. Patrick Gossage, then press secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, chronicled the development in his diary, which he published as a book,
Close to the Charisma
, in 1986. “Just to make sure we don’t get away with anything, television was launched in the House of Commons this week. Show business has now penetrated the sanctum of Canada’s most exclusive club. The regime is terrified,” Gossage wrote in a November entry. By January, terror had given way to grudging acceptance. “One image-polishing exercise is working well,” Gossage wrote. “We are finally doing something about the performance of ministers in the House, now that their every finger-up-the-nose is televised for the nation to laugh at.” Gossage and some TV-savvy folks even prepared a videotape to shock and mock the Liberal cabinet ministers into paying more attention to their image. “The result was hilarious and devastating. It was a compilation of fast cuts of bad-taste ties, horrible checked jackets ([Eugene] Whelan’s the worst) and childish behaviour by ministers as a colleague spoke.” Ottawa tailors suddenly started doing a brisk trade in new suits for ministers, and Trudeau himself took more time in the Commons to better “frame” his replies for the camera lens.

The Liberal ad guys, meanwhile, were all too aware of how TV was changing the message, if not the entire political medium. In a May 1978 speech at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto, the party’s man in charge of advertising, Jerry Grafstein, laid out all the ways in which TV was transforming the political business—making it far more concentrated on emotion, character and leadership. He said that the mass media and the mass public were looking for the same thing: “emotional commitment.”

“I believe there is a common factor—I call it the EC factor—the Emotional Commitment factor, in the mass mind,” Grafstein said. “Politicians are constantly searching for that factor—the emotional commitment by the largest mass of our citizenry. So the political battle is not a battle so much for ideas as it is for minds. It is a psychological battle for the conscious as well as the conscience. It is the creation or promotion of symbols, or a group of symbols distributed to attract the widest number of individuals in the society that the politician serves. Those symbols can be policies and programs or best, pictures to reflect ideas.”

There were two prescient observations in Grafstein’s speech. He said that eventually, political messages and societal values would be transmitted through non-political media, such as TV sitcoms. What if, for instance, he said, Canadians got their ideas about cultural tolerance from shows such as
King of Kensington
? Additionally, Grafstein predicted, television would prove to be the most persuasive and powerful medium for those citizens who have checked out of political debates.

“The less educated, the more uncommitted, the undecided, the less partisan, the non-party people rely more on TV than any other mode of public persuasion. Those whose ‘software systems’ or ‘codes’ are not fixed or simply don’t care are persuaded the most,” Grafstein said. “It appears that television, if it has any persuasive power, persuades those most who care the least about the particular issue.”

As Canadians were becoming more enamoured of those flickering images on TV, they were also becoming more fickle consumers. Martin Goldfarb saw the 1970s and 1980s as a time of disloyalty and abandonment of the big brands. “People abandoned known product lines and sought out generic brands because of cost, quality and competitiveness,” he wrote in his 2010 book
Affinity
. Consumers, thanks to the omnipresence of advertising, had become “more savvy, more tough-minded,” he believed. And as always, he saw the link to Canadian political culture. This was a time, he said, when old loyalties to parties began to unravel and more Canadians became “floating” voters, switching their allegiance back and forth in successive elections. That unravelling of loyalty became apparent as early as the 1974 federal election, when post-vote analysis turned up a significant amount of party-switching since the previous election. About 70 percent of Canadians voted the same way in 1974 as they had in 1972. Another 20 percent had switched their vote between parties. (The other 10 percent were either newly eligible voters or people who had chosen not to vote in 1972.)

This analysis turned up another interesting fact about voting behaviour in the 1970s—loyal partisans were motivated by issues, the survey showed, while “transient” voters were influenced by factors such as leadership, personality and image. So the people who were attached to political parties were looking at elections as engaged, informed citizens. The floating voters, however, were more like consumers, open to the kind of pitches they were getting in the shopping world.

In the consumer sector, this new floating loyalty was damaging the big names that dominated the Canadian market in the immediate postwar years: the ones that had provided Goldfarb and other marketing consultants with lucrative cheques. At Ford, for instance, Goldfarb’s market tests were showing that the brazen newcomers into the auto market, Honda and Toyota, were reaping greater customer satisfaction over the long term. Ford customers were generally happy over two years, but Honda and Toyota owners were satisfied with their cars as long as five years after purchasing them. The solution? Two-year leases for Ford cars. Goldfarb’s idea was to get Ford patrons to keep renewing their customer happiness with their new vehicles, and thus, their attachment to the brand. If you couldn’t count on long-term loyalty, why not constant-renewal loyalty? Car leasing, as a concept, began to catch on in a large way in the following years, as a direct response to North American consumers’ desire for new things and their accompanying, fraying loyalty to old established brands. We would soon see that same kind of brand loyalty breaking down in Canadian politics, too.

The Rock-Star Pollster

Allan Gregg, born and raised in Edmonton, was a struggling graduate student at Carleton University when he discovered that his wife was expecting their first child. In need of some extra cash, he went looking for work on Parliament Hill and landed at the offices of the opposition Progressive Conservative party, just as Robert Stanfield was preparing to step down.

Gregg, in appearance alone, could hardly be described as “conservative.” Just twenty-three years old, Gregg looked more like a rock star than a denizen of Parliament. His long hair trailed down to the middle of his back. He wore an earring. He didn’t know how to knot a tie. But Bill Neville, the head of Conservative caucus research, decided to give Gregg a job interview, in the cafeteria of Confederation Building on Parliament Hill.

Gregg didn’t talk like a Conservative, either. Bluntly, he told Neville he didn’t really care about the fate of the Progressive Conservative party, or of any party, as a matter of fact. He was an academic—he wanted to teach. Gregg had been doing his Ph.D. thesis on voting behaviour, with heavy emphasis on statistics. Polling education was making its debut in academia and he wasn’t alone in his enthusiasm for the topic at Carleton University in the late 1970s. Also at the university in those years were some young students who would similiarly go on to become nationally known pollsters: Frank Graves and Darrell Bricker, for instance.

Gregg was hired for the summer and he arrived at a fortuitous time. The Conservatives, like the Liberals before them, had been looking to the United States for its polling needs for the past decade, but this arrangement was wearing thin. At the time, Canada’s PC party was using Robert Teeter of Market Opinion Research, who had also been doing all the polling for US presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Teeter had been one of the pioneers in the use of focus-group polling in politics. His polls were expensive, though, and the Conservatives needed to save some money. And like the Liberals, Conservatives weren’t exactly eager to publicize or extend their reliance on American pollsters. Martin Goldfarb had become the Liberals’ homegrown pollster. Who would do the same for the Conservatives?