SNP Hit
By IAN DOMMETT, MD of Golley Slater Scotland
HERE'S a marketing challenge. It's June 2006. You're the SNP and you have to fight a Scottish parliamentary election in less than a year. You've never won one before. You suffered a setback last time and, almost without exception, newspapers are telling readers that success for your party would be the worst thing that could ever happen.
For an agency such as Golley Slater, more used to recruiting soldiers for the Army, selling cars for Mitsubishi and pies for Greggs, this was the big one.
Fast-forward to 5 May 2007. The same newspapers are unanimous in the view that the result is "historic". The political landscape of Scotland is felt to have changed forever.
So, was it the marketing wot won it, as the Sun wouldn't have said? Everyone's too exhausted to comment but what is definitely true is that staging a political campaign is no different to any other marketing campaign.
Get it right and you see the effects booming across the country.
Our campaign theme "It's time" perfectly summed up the mood of expectation. Not just designed to inspire the electorate, the agency also challenged the party itself to seize the opportunity.
We pushed to shoot all broadcasts on film, not on video. This was significant: the dramatically improved quality of the broadcasts would demonstrate how the party had raised its game. Top quality advertising in all but name.
We were never likely to please the tabloid press but the decision to undertake a positive campaign was crucial to the consistency of the campaign and was a lesson learnt from other campaigns, including Labour's 1997 election success.
The campaign team set targets and had these targets constantly on display. For more than 160 days a clock in SNP's Campaign HQ ticked down, bringing the message "It's time" to life on a second-by-second basis.
No other campaign in UK politics has been so advanced in its use of targeting techniques. Thousands of records of voter intentions, going back several years, were analysed, enabling the direct targeting of voter groups most likely to be supportive. A brilliant use of direct marketing.
The changes in the rules on party naming allowed "Alex Salmond for First Minister" to be added to the SNP entry on the regional list ballot paper. The best (only) use of Point of Sale marketing in the campaign, perhaps?
Thoroughly frazzled by the end, I have rarely encountered the same level of insight, commitment, creativity, consistency and clarity as I experienced while working with the SNP over the last 12 months. And not one person I worked with had a title that included the word "marketing" in it. Perhaps that's the best lesson of the lot.
HERE'S a marketing challenge. It's June 2006. You're the SNP and you have to fight a Scottish parliamentary election in less than a year. You've never won one before. You suffered a setback last time and, almost without exception, newspapers are telling readers that success for your party would be the worst thing that could ever happen.
For an agency such as Golley Slater, more used to recruiting soldiers for the Army, selling cars for Mitsubishi and pies for Greggs, this was the big one.
Fast-forward to 5 May 2007. The same newspapers are unanimous in the view that the result is "historic". The political landscape of Scotland is felt to have changed forever.
So, was it the marketing wot won it, as the Sun wouldn't have said? Everyone's too exhausted to comment but what is definitely true is that staging a political campaign is no different to any other marketing campaign.
Get it right and you see the effects booming across the country.
Our campaign theme "It's time" perfectly summed up the mood of expectation. Not just designed to inspire the electorate, the agency also challenged the party itself to seize the opportunity.
We pushed to shoot all broadcasts on film, not on video. This was significant: the dramatically improved quality of the broadcasts would demonstrate how the party had raised its game. Top quality advertising in all but name.
We were never likely to please the tabloid press but the decision to undertake a positive campaign was crucial to the consistency of the campaign and was a lesson learnt from other campaigns, including Labour's 1997 election success.
The campaign team set targets and had these targets constantly on display. For more than 160 days a clock in SNP's Campaign HQ ticked down, bringing the message "It's time" to life on a second-by-second basis.
No other campaign in UK politics has been so advanced in its use of targeting techniques. Thousands of records of voter intentions, going back several years, were analysed, enabling the direct targeting of voter groups most likely to be supportive. A brilliant use of direct marketing.
The changes in the rules on party naming allowed "Alex Salmond for First Minister" to be added to the SNP entry on the regional list ballot paper. The best (only) use of Point of Sale marketing in the campaign, perhaps?
Thoroughly frazzled by the end, I have rarely encountered the same level of insight, commitment, creativity, consistency and clarity as I experienced while working with the SNP over the last 12 months. And not one person I worked with had a title that included the word "marketing" in it. Perhaps that's the best lesson of the lot.