Page 133 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

increasing the marginal propensity to buy among the voters’ (ibid.,
p. 169) and won the election. One advertisement used the visual and
narrative style associated with ITV’s popular and authoritative
News at Ten programme. Another played with the conventions of
commercial advertising, depicting a housewife ‘fed up’ with the old
brand – Labour– and willing to try the new, Conservative, product.
Despite its successful use of political advertising in 1970 the
Conservative government led by Edward Heath became publicly
associated with severe economic and industrial problems, such as
the miners’ strike and the three-day week, leading to its defeat in the
general election of 1974. In 1976 Heath was replaced as leader by
Margaret Thatcher, who continued the Tories’ pioneering approach
to political advertising with the appointment of Saatchi and Saatchi
to run the 1979 election campaign.
By 1983 the Conservatives had employed a full-time Director of
Marketing, Chris Lawson, who worked with Saatchi and Saatchi
to design a campaign which relied to a greater extent than ever
before on US-style value research and ‘psychographics’ of the kind
described above in connection with Ronald Reagan’s campaigns.
Johnson and Elebash note that ‘during the pre-election months,
the Conservatives were conducting focus groups on political words
and phraseology’ (1986, p. 301). Cockerell writes that throughout
the previous year ‘Saatchi and Saatchi had been engaged in “quali-
tative” research about voters’ attitudes. Their surveys revealed a
powerful nostalgia for imperialism, thrift, duty and hard work
which chimed in with the Prime Minister’s own beliefs’ (1988,
p. 278). On her return from a post-Falklands War public relations
tour Margaret Thatcher ‘endorsed “Victorian values”’, the need for
a return to which underpinned much of the Tories’ advertising. As
Ivan Fallon has described it in his biography of the Saatchis, their
1983 campaign was to be based on what account executive Tim Bell
called

‘the emotional attitudes which emerge when ordinary
people discuss politics’. There were hours of discussion
about finding the right tone, which had to be ‘warm,
confident, non-divisive, and exciting’, and analysis of what
all these objectives actually meant. There was quantitative
and qualitative research, much talk about ‘directional
research’, ‘target areas’, how to attract women voters,
skilled workers, and much else.
(1988, p. 157)

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