I think we’ll see a National win in part because John has been so careful to not say anything different from the status quo. And because people just want a change in leadership but no so much policy settings.

He hasn’t really volunteered any policy insights and has tried not to highlight the lack of talent in his team.

I’d guess that a fair number of them are much further to the right than he is and all these mentions of Trojan horses are no coincidence.

The Greens aren’t playing with a full deck. Ultimately they want all other parties to adopt more green ideals and this is already happening.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that the Greens & Maori Party can make the policies of who ever leads the next coalition just a bit more people friendly.

Thanks for the cultural creatives link – there is a green cultural creative category I note.

The segment ideas are quite endless – LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) is one we hear plenty about for example.

8 Tribes is a New Zealand context and tries to be a bit wider which is why I still like it.

There’s no doubt John has played it safe and Helen made a strategic error focusing on trust. What about a vision for NZ? At a time when the country is under huge financial pressure from an enormous current account deficit and overseas borrowing with the wazoo.

I think John has at least made an effort in the visioning department.

And the Greens…lovely advertising…..but look beneath the surface and something is missing for me there.

On the 8 Tribes aspect have you considered the Cultural Creatives? I believe this a much bigger group and cuts across all of these pseudo-demographic portraits.

A cultural creative could be at ease with Rodney Hide or Jeanette Fitzsimmons…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Creative

Yes I’m one of them

There is a huge sense of vision coming from the Obama team. I hope we can get a bit of that here in NZ.

As any marketer worth their salt knows, the only effective way to communicate is to identify their audience and find a message that clearly resonates with them. Seemingly this campaign has witnessed parties preaching to the converted, and their audience knowledge being limited to “males 35-45, high incomes, don’t like political correctness.”

Where is the insight into the electorate? (i won’t even try to discuss FORESIGHT) Where are the stories and appeals to those people who sit in the political centre and feel dis-enfranchised wherever they look? Where is there evidence of intelligent audience segmentation and targeted messaging?

All i see is broad, sweeping, generalised, convoluted statements to a perplexed electorate. the scary thing is that the majority of people hate politics. Clinical as it is, if i was a planner in the agency that handled these parties accounts, i would be following the Greens example. Don’t deal with policy. Appeal to emotion. Give them something they can grasp. As base as it is, it works. Scary as it is, they haven’t even managed to grasp that.

This is a fascinating election. I was in Wellington yesterday and got a strong feeling that people are more savvy about MMP this time. *

Re: Seth Godin’s book on Tribes – Understanding tribes /affiliations is what advertising and marketing communications is all about. It really is part of the marketing segmentation process. Which voice works best with which group…

Seth on Tribes and the actual tribes book was published 16th Oct ‘08 One reviews says “Short on pages but long on repetition..” Best read the reviews carefully and find the slides.

What makes Rapailles anthropology and 8 Tribes sociology more interesting is that the shading and analogies are less driven by a client or a campaign and perhaps more useful to those of us who aren’t advertising clients.

The Greens have the best election campaign as it is more about vision and universal ideas. Certainly their posters are the best.

Piero also thinks so. “the only party who is actually trying to communicate an idea with their billboards”..

* Taxi drivers are fascinating observers of all tribes. They are often keen observers of subtle changes in the mood. Have always thought that if someone wanted to get a really cleaver poll they could do it using a selection of tax drivers. Anyway for what its worth one driver in Wellington thought that Labour is closing the gap and will likely win on the day. Part of the thinking was that Labour just has more in common with Maori & Green parties and most likely to get a winning coalition.

You may want to take a look at Seth Godin’s new book, called “Tribes”. It has a different take on all of this.

Living in Grey Lynn I am noticing a lot of Green posters that people have voluntarily added to their fence. People are proud to identify for the Greens. The posters are not being defaced and continue to look great. The few Labour ones have been wheeled in on trailers.

I am so disappointed that Labour hasn’t managed to do better at speaking to my tribe. At my bookgroup last night (all Labour voters) we all agreed the campaign for Labour is uninspiring and dull.

I’d make two comments – first that you’re right – the tribes are universal.

Watching the US elections, as I’ve been doing quite avidly, I can see that Barack Obama actually has this great mix of mid western [Balclutha] values plus liberal Grey Lynn values which has taken him to the middle ground of US politics. Helen Clark has that too. If she is re-elected I’m sure they’ll get on famously.

With the tribes it’s not just about the way you speak to different social tribes, it’s also about your own core values and how they resonate with other tribes.

In a crisis, steady Balclutha and thoughtful Grey Lynn is a pretty good mix. Not quite what you’d want for a bold step into the unknown but great for fixing things up. Can the National party’s mix of North Shore and Balclutha values [Key and English personnified] chart a different course?

The second point I’d like to make is about how the tribes are expressed through different ethnic groups.

The Otara tribe certainly wasn’t there to contain all the brown people of New Zealand, as some Grey Lynners seemed to imagine.

It was just for the people who’d recently arrived from the third world. New Zealand’s ethnic minorities – Maori, Pacific and Asian people are distributed across all the 8 tribes, just as its Caucasian majority is. As I thought to myself the other day when I saw Oscar Kightley coming out of the Wholefoods store in Grey Lynn. Well actually it was the shop next door.

In a fabulous process of cultural metamorphosis, as different cultures become more prominent in a social tribe, the tribe’s values change to accommodate them.

Watching English archaeologists in a couple of programmes over the last few days treating human remains with little reverence and not much more than academic interest, I was once again aware of the way Maori spirituality has become part of the Grey Lynn tribe’s core beliefs.

We just wouldn’t do that here.

So yes we’re just waiting for the Ponsonby tribe to complete its gestation so we can write about it properly. I go there to do fieldwork sometimes.

Cheers

Jill C

It’s especially critical when you consider that almost everyone in this day and age has at least a little trace of the Grey Lynn liberal intellectual in them – even the right wing ideologs of ACT.

The secret for National to win this lot would be to create a distinctive brand of eco-politics that incorporates environmentalism and economic pragmatism, and then sell it as beautifully as the greens are selling themselves…