Colm Carey on why election surveys and facts can end up poles apart
With a general election on the way – or looming as they say – be prepared for an avalanche of voter polls. Despite politicians claiming the only poll that matters is the one that takes place on the day of the election, both the parties and the media generally are obsessed with facts and figures coming from some of the country’s best known market research agencies.
A general election is a tricky time for the pollsters. On the one hand, they get a chance to highlight their brands and expertise. On the other, there is always the risk that one of more of them might get things spectacularly wrong. Historically, Irish polls have for the most part tended to be highly accurate but there have been some noteworthy blips in the UK.
The 2015 election saw Ed Miliband sent into political exile and his Labour party descend in to chaos while David Cameron sailed into 10 Downing Street on a spring tide of support. The polls leading up to the election got things dramatically wrong. An inquiry into the polls found that the use of unrepresentative samples was partly to blame for the failures.
Support act: Labour leader and Tánaiste Joan Burton is hoping voters will accept her side of the argument on polling day. But the likelihood is Labour will pay a high price for making Fine Gael look good, just as the PDs and the Greens lost out in previous Fianna Fáil-led coalitions.
The pre-election polls that provided precise age data for respondents all had skews within age bands. For example, they had too many people in their 60s and not enough in their 70s and 80s. The report also found that the polling samples were skewed towards the politically aware. People who agree to take part in a poll are more politically interested than others.
You can have the right number of under 25’s in your sample but they are likely to be more politically engaged than the average under 25 voter. In order to get the balance right, agencies might consider a political interest question in their profiling. While this would not excite the polling companies it is good in that it shows the inaccuracies were not due to methodology or bias in questionnaire design as sometimes claimed by the parties which do badly in a poll.
The report has thrown up some interesting and useful feedback for the polling companies to take account of in coming elections. Meantime, we shall look with interest to see how the only poll that counts matches the data from our home-based pollsters in the coming weeks.
NEGATIVE DISRUPTION
Talking of getting things wrong, who remembers the AIDA model of advertising? It was based on the idea that advertising works by creating awareness followed by interest, desire and acquisition. A simple enough model which still has some relevance. These days, getting awareness and interest is tough when targeting people via traditional and social media. Sometimes you have to be a bit shocking to stop people in their tracks. The UK’s Gourmet Burger Kitchen did just that. They ran a series of ads targeting vegetarians. The ads had images of cows and burgers with the lines “You’ll always remember when you gave up being a vegetarian”, “They eat grass, so you don’t have to” and “Resistance is futile.”
Even leaving aside the myth that vegetarians can be pretty humourless, the ads caused uproar and were soon withdrawn. The whole idea must have seemed hilarious in the planning stages and the carnivorous consumer groups must have resembled the old Cadbury Smash aliens in terms of hysteria. But there is a big difference between being brave and foolhardy.
Brave is about taking a calculated risk and achieving your objective. Foolhardy means taking a risk without checking out the lay of the land. #gourmetmurderkitchen set Twitter alight. In the face of such outrage, GBK came out from behind their riot shields to apologise -“we’re quite taken aback, the last thing we ever intended to do was offend or alienate vegetarians”.
From a strategic planning point of view, the whole thing was a disaster if they really did not expect what they got. If they deliberately set out to gain attention using negative disruption consumers might have proved more forgiving. In the US, Nationwide Insurance committed a similar faux pas with a Superbowl ad featuring a young boy talking about all the things he will never do because he died in “a preventable accident.” Nationwide had to explain that their intention was to start a conversation with consumers, not sell them insurance policies.
And as we all know, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.
ZEN & ART OF EMAIL
Some useful advice by way of The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk. If you are someone who occasionally drowns under email traffic, you might find Jess Kelly’s 4D approach to dealing with of help. Rather than procrastinating every time an email lands we should quickly decide whether to delete it, defer it, do it, or delegate it to someone who is qualified to deal with it. That way the inbox shrinks to manageable proportions and life becomes more holistic.
Comments on this article are welcome at colm@theresearchcentre.ie
