Is anything else more inevitable? In a recent article from the Washington Post, it’s actually voting and spending…or at least, it’s those two behaviors that reveal personal preference and intention. The premise seems logical: if you believe in something, you’ll either vote for it or spend money on it. But I wonder if it’s that black and white.
The article discusses “microtargeting” and its recent use to win elections (apparently it won the 04 Election for Bush, and is now being used for Mitt Romney’s campaign). According to the story, microtargeting uses matches purchase behavior with voting behavior to “carve up the country into smaller and smaller clusters of like-minded consumers, and turn those trends into political strategy.”
The premise: voters in the same party are often driven by different, even contradictory, issues, so divying up the nation into like-minded groups will facilitate efficiently targeted messaging. Basically, if you can define a group, structuring the right message is easy.
While this seems fairly natural (to do research to find out what your public values), what intrigues me is how fine a point this political strategist adivises putting on segmenting “consumers”. This isn’t just ethnicity, gender, household income stuff…we’re talking about matching people’s voting and purchasing behavior to household level specific perspectives. It’s a level of detail that I think represents the increasing power of the consumer. It’s natural that political campaigners want to get as many votes as possible, but my question is: would seeking this level of detail have been a valid strategy before the Internet Age (Read: before the public was given unquestioned access to media)? I don’t think so. The trend (and the point I’m trying to make here) shows that with more voice in the media, distinguishing of consumer differences trumps the traditional strategy of finding commonalities and lumping as many people into one singular thinking, homogenous group as possible.
My question: how finite will politicos (and companies) go? Will we see classifications like ”single, white male” give way to “single white male who still lives at home, fears commitment, but uses his work as a scape goat for his failure in steady relationships”?
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