Warning This Manual Cannot Be Directly Applied to Japanese Electoral Campaigns

For more details, please see notes.

Step Four: Developing the Campaign Message

What Is a Message?

Once you have decided who your target audience is, you need to decide what you will say to persuade them to vote for you. This is your campaign message. It tells the voters why you are running for this particular office and why they should choose you over your opponents for the same office. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, once again, it is deceptively complicated.

For example, let's start off by saying what a message is not. A campaign message is not the candidate's program of what they will do if elected; it is not a list of the issues the candidate will address; and it is not a simple catchy phrase or slogan. All of these things can be part of a campaign message, depending on whether or not they will persuade voters, but they should not be confused with the message - a simple statement that will be repeated over and over throughout the campaign to persuade your target voters.

What Voters Care About and How They Get Their Information

There are two important things you need to remember about voters. The first is what is important to them, and the second is their sources of information.

Take a minute to think: what are the most important issues in the average voters' minds? Their list of priorities is probably something like the following:

1. How are they getting along with their husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, or whatever?

2. How are their children or parents doing either in school or in life?

3. How are they doing in their jobs, or whether or not they will have enough money to get by?

4. How their football team is doing, why do they keep losing, and whether or not they will be able to see the next game?

5. Who should they vote for in the election tomorrow?

The point is that you and your election campaign are pretty low on the average voter's list of priorities and rightly so. All of the other things higher on the list will have a much more direct impact on their lives in the very short term, and with a little attention from them, they will have much more impact on those things.

The second thing to remember is that voters are being bombarded with information every day. They get news on television and the radio, they get reports at work, they get advertisements all the time, and they hear that juicy piece of gossip about the neighbor down the street. Candidates think that their competition is the other person running for the same office when, in reality, their competition for the voter's attention is all the other sources of information the voter receives every day. Your campaign message has to break through that thick wall of other information.

So, while candidates and campaign workers are spending hours and hours, days and days, months and months thinking about, worrying about, doing something about this campaign, voters will give you a minute or two of their precious time and attention. You must not waste it.

Advertising companies understand all this. That is why they come up with a clear, concise message and spend a lot of money making sure their target audience sees, hears, and tastes that message as many times as possible. You must do the same thing. You can spend hours and hours writing the most thoughtful position papers and newsletter articles, but if the voters throw them away in 15 seconds, if no one reads them, you are wasting your time.

This said, you should have the greatest respect for voters. They can see through an insincere message quicker than the politician can say it.

Characteristics of a Good Message

There are a number of criteria that make up a strong message.

A Message Must Be Short

Voters have very little patience for listening to long-winded politicians. If you cannot effectively deliver your message to a voter in less than one minute, then you will surely lose that voter's attention and probably their vote.

A Message Must Be Truthful and Credible

The message needs to come from the values, practices, policies, and history of the candidate. It cannot be inconsistent with the candidate's background. In addition, your message should be believable; candidates who make unrealistic promises simply add to voter apathy. Voters must believe what you say both about yourself and what you will do is true. It is therefore critically important to backup your statements with evidence of experience or knowledge from your personal past. Saying you understand a problem or issue without demonstrating why or how you understand it is a waste of your time and the voters' time.

A Message Must Be Persuasive and Important to Voters

You must talk about topics that are important to your target audience. These topics will often be problems that voters face every day in their lives, not issues that politicians think are important to public policy. Voters are more likely to support candidates that talk to them about their jobs, their children's education, or their pension, then a candidate that talks about the budget, even though the budget may deal with all of these things. Remember, you are trying to convince the voter that you are the best candidate to represent them and persuade them to do something, namely vote for you.

A Message Must Show Contrast

Voters must make a choice between you and other candidates. You need to make it clear to the voters how you are different from the other candidates in the race by contrasting yourself with them. If every candidate stands for economic development and social security, then voters will have no way of making a clear choice. If, on the other hand, you support tax cuts for this particular industry and your opponents do not, then the voters will have a very clear choice. Filling out the message box, which will be discussed in some detail later, will help with developing a clear contrast. Appendix E also provides some advice on how to draw a clear contrast with your opponent.

A Message Must Be Clear and Speak to the Heart

Your message must be delivered in language the voters use and understand easily. Too often politicians want to impress the voters with how smart they are using technical words that either the voters do not understand or have no real meaning for them. You do not want to make the voting public have to work to understand what you are talking about.

Creating a visual image in the minds of voters is much better. Talk about people, things, and real-life situations to describe abstract ideas such as "economic policy".

Politics is an emotional business, and politicians who appeal to the hearts of voters generally defeat those who appeal to their heads. This does not mean that you should abandon the intellectual basis of your party or candidacy, or that you should underestimate the intelligence of the voter. This means that you must find a way to tie your campaign message to the core values of your voters and make it clear that you understand the problems they face every day.

A Message Must Be Targeted

As discussed in "Step Three: Targeting the Voters", if your campaign message speaks to everyone, then in reality, it speaks to no one. The people who will vote for you are different from those who will not vote for you, and both groups have different concerns. Your campaign must determine what these differences are and address your message to your likely supporters. In many cases, voters just need clear information about who really represents their interests. If they have that information, they will vote for that person. Politicians often fail to provide that clear information. They seem to expect voters to either somehow know it without being told or wade through everything the politician says to figure it out.

A Message Must Be Repeated Again and Again

Once your campaign determines what message will persuade your target voters to vote for your candidate, then you must repeat that same message at every opportunity. Voters are not paying attention to your campaign. Just because you say something does not mean they are listening or will remember what you said. For your message to register with the voters, they have to hear the same message many times in many different ways. So, if you change your message, you are only confusing the voters.

Worksheet 6: Why Are You Running for This Office?

1. Make a list of all the reasons why voters should vote for your candidate or your party.

2. Now, choosing the most compelling reasons from above, write a brief statement about your candidate. This should be the answer to the question "why are you running for this office?" or "why should I support you?"

3. Now read the statement aloud and time yourself. You must be able to complete the statement in less than one minute. If you go over a minute, you must trim your message. Take out any long phrases or explanations. Remember that voters will not be paying attention to all of your ten-minute speech.

4. Grade your message against the above criteria. Is it credible and truthful? Do you back up your statements with personal experience from your past? Are you talking about things that will be important to your target voters? If you are running over one minute, then there are probably a lot of useless words and phrases that you can delete. Do you offer a clear choice between your candidate and your major opponents?

5. Now rewrite your statement taking into account those things you missed the first time. You still must keep your message under one minute. As you write and rewrite this statement as you begin using it as you talk to voters, it will continue to improve.

Worksheet 7: The Message Box

The American political strategist Paul Tully designed the following exercise to help candidates design their messages and think through their election strategies methodically and thoroughly. He called this exercise the "message box". The message box requires candidates not only to determine what they will be saying during the campaign but also how they will respond to their opponents' attacks.

On a large piece of paper or a chalkboard, draw the following graph:

What We Say About Us	What We Say About Them
What They Say About Us	What They Say About Them

Now fill in each box with as much information as possible.

What We Say About Us

How do the candidate and the campaign define themselves? This quadrant is filled with all the positive things the campaign wants the voters to know about your candidate. This is mostly the information you put down in Worksheet 6.

What We Say About Them

How does your campaign define your various opponents? This quadrant is filled with all the negative things the campaign would want the voters to think about your opponents, the reasons why voters should not vote for them. You may not say these things directly but you should at least know what they are.

What They Say About Us

In this quadrant, the campaign must begin to view your candidate and campaign from the point of view of your major opponents. What would the opponents want the voters to think about your candidate and why, in their opinion, should the voters not vote for your candidate?

What They Say About Them

As you continue to view your campaign through the eyes of your major opponents, now look at how they would define themselves. Why, in your opponents' opinion, should voters vote for them?

If done correctly, the complete message box should outline everything that could possibly be said during the election campaign by both your candidate and all of your major opponents. This includes things that may go unsaid or charges made by implication. For example, if you say that you are the more experienced candidate, by implication you are saying your opponents lack experience. By saying you are honest, you can imply that your opponents are corrupt. Your opponents can do this to your candidate as well. If, for example, they say that they care about education, they are implying that you do not care about education. How will you respond to their charges, both stated and implied?

Often the difficulty is putting yourself in the role of your opponents and view your opponents positively and yourself negatively. Remember, just because your opponents say it does not mean that it has to be true. The real question is what will voters believe? If you do not respond to what they say, the voters may take their information as the truth.

The other important part of this exercise is to have answers for the possible charges your opponents will say about you. If they attack you or blame you for something in one of their boxes, how do you respond in your boxes?

Credibility - Raising Your Credibility with Voters and Lowering Your Opponents' Credibility with Voters

As you consider your message and develop the contrast with your opponents, you should keep in mind that what you want to accomplish in the end is to have more credibility with your target voters than your opponents have. In other words, you want more of your target voters to view you as the better candidate and vote for you. There are two ways to accomplish this.

First, you can do and say things to raise your credibility in the eyes of the voters. You may do this by concentrating on your positive characteristics and popular stands on issues.

Second, you can try to lower your opponents' credibility in the eyes of the voters. You may do this by pointing out what voters will view as the negative characteristics of your opponents or unpopular positions on issues.

Which of these methods you choose and in what combination most often depends on what position you find yourself in over the course of the campaign. Often, if you are ahead in the polls and can expect to win easily, then you can concentrate on raising your credibility. You will not want to mention your opponents and bring attention to them. You also do not want to risk alienating voters by running what may be viewed as a negative campaign or unnecessarily attacking your opponents.

On the other hand, if you find yourself behind in the polls, raising your credibility may not be enough to win. In this case you may be want to raise your credibility and, at the same time, work to lower your opponents' credibility. In a sense, you have nothing to lose (you are already losing) by attacking your opponents and everything to gain (you may win).

Issues and the Campaign Message

As stated above, your campaign message is not your program or the list of issues you will address. Still, your campaign should address the issues that are important to your target voters.

You may think of your campaign's message as the trunk of a large oak tree - strong, stable, and well-rooted in your candidate's values and personal experience. Following this analogy, the campaign issues that you will discuss are the tree branches, covering a wide area but all firmly connected to your message tree trunk. Similarly, your campaign must cover a broad range of issues that concern your target audience. However, in order to address these issues effectively, in order to avoid confusing your target voters with a jumble of incoherent program ideas, you must tie all of your issues to your campaign message.

Governor Bill Clinton's 1992 challenge campaign against President George Bush provides an excellent example of how to do this. Clinton's message was a simple one:

After twelve years of Republican leadership resulting in social stagnation and economic recession, the American people are ready for change. The choice in 1992 is clear: change or more of the same.

The Clinton campaign did an excellent job of tying each campaign issue to this message. If, for example, Bill Clinton talked about health care reform, the question was change or more of the same? If Clinton talked about education, the economy, social welfare or anything else, the question was always the same, change or more of the same?

It should be noted that the Clinton message strategy met all of the criteria for a good message and followed the recommendations outlined in this Campaign Planning Manual. For example:

The campaign message was based on solid research. Political polls and focus groups showed that the American people were, in fact, hungry for change.

The message was short, truthful and credible, important to a majority of voters, showed contrast with Bush and the Republicans, and spoke clearly to the heart of the American people.

The message was designed for a discrete target audience, workers and the middle class who felt that Republican policies were not helping them to get ahead.

Bill Clinton stayed on message continuously. He repeated the same message, "change or more of the same", at every opportunity.

Issue Selection

It is important not to confuse a problem with an issue. A problem is a condition that needs addressing, such as economic problems. An issue is a solution or partial solution to a problem, such as increased investment in education and small business to address problems with the economy.

As you consider what issues your campaign will address through its message, there are two important things to remember. First, how important is this particular issue to your target voters? Second, which candidate has the better position on this issue in the eyes of the voters? Too often, candidates either focus on issues that are not important to voters, ignoring more important issues, or they focus on issues where their opponents can claim, with a certain amount of credibility, a better position on the issue.

The following exercise illustrates this point.

Worksheet 8: Determining Issue Importance and Position

Suppose that your candidate is considering ten issues that may become factors in the upcoming election campaign. In order to preserve the focus of your campaign, you want to concentrate on only two or three, but which ones? Using this type of graph may help you choose.

First, rank the ten issues (A through J) in order of importance to your target voters (the numbers along the side of the box). In this example, Issue C is most important to voters, followed by Issues G, F, J, E, A, D, H, B and I respectively.

Second, rank the issues in order of how well your candidate does on these issues in comparison to your major opponents (the numbers along the bottom of the box). In this example, the voters believe the candidate will best be able to address issue G, followed by Issues J, A, I, B, E, H, F, C and D respectively.

Issues	Importance	Position
A	5	8
B	2	6
C	10	2
D	4	1
E	6	5
F	8	3
G	9	10
H	3	4
I	1	7
J	7	9

Now, plot out these ten issues as shown on the graph, placing them in the various quadrants. The example should look something like the following graph:

Your campaign should focus on the issues that fall into the upper-right-hand quadrant. In this example, the candidate should focus on Issues G and J. The target audience believes that these issues are important and they believe that your candidate is best positioned to deal with them.

Focusing on issues in the lower-right-hand quadrant (Less Important/Good Position) will not help your candidate very much because the target audience does not consider them very important. Although focusing on these issues will not hurt the candidate, you should not waste scarce resources talking about things that the target audience does not care about.

Focusing on issues in the upper left-hand quadrant (Very Important/Poor Position) is actually quite dangerous. Although the target audience considers them important, they believe that other candidates are more likely to better deal with them. Thus, every time that your candidate talks about Issues C and F, your campaign is bringing the voters' attention to the strengths of your opponent. In other words, you are spending your own resources to help your opponent.

Candidates often wrongly believe that it is possible to change voter's minds about their positioning on issues. From a psychological standpoint, it is very difficult to change a voter's mind about any issue; it is much easier to turn the focus of the debate onto issues where your candidate is well positioned. In the example above, why should your candidate spend scarce resources trying to change people's minds about Issue C when he can immediately get favorable attention talking about Issue G?

Sociological Research and Message Development

Your campaign's message development, like its voter targeting and analysis, should be based on solid research. For example, when you fill out an issue chart like the one above, you should not sit and guess about the relative importance of each issue and your positioning on it. If at all possible, your rankings should come from polling information.

Also, you should use sociological research to test your campaign's message before the start of the election campaign. You would never spend thousands of dollars on a car without driving it to see whether or not it runs. Why would you spend the same thousands of dollars to publicize a message without testing it to see whether or not it will be effective? Focus groups may provide the best low-cost alternative to polling for testing your campaign's message.

Stay on Message

Once you have developed a clear, concise, persuadable message it is important that you use that message at every opportunity and not deviate from it throughout the campaign. This is called "staying on message".

In the next chapter we will discuss various methods of contacting voters. It is important that every method you use incorporates the same message. Often one type of voter contact will reinforce the message delivered using a different type of voter contact. For example, a brief thirty second television commercial can reinforce the message delivered in the literature and in the press. By using the same message in all your voter contact, you are less likely to confuse voters who may not be paying close attention and reinforce what they have heard. It is often said that voters have to hear the same message as many as seven times for it to sink in and register with them.

Often the opposition or the press will do something or say something that will drag you and the campaign "off message". If you respond, you will not be talking about the issues you want to talk about but will be talking about the issues your opponent wants to talk about. In most cases, you should respond to any charges but than quickly shift the conversation back to the issues and the message you want to address.

It is also important that you not bury the message under too much information. After talking to supporters, candidates and political activists often wrongly believe that voters want more information. One should not confuse ordinary voters who may still need to be persuaded with supporters who are probably already convinced to vote for your candidate or party and want more information. You can often supply this need for more information in the form of position papers or articles but you must summarize the main points in a one page press release that delivers the message in the first sentence. You should further summarize the message in a quality piece of literature that grabs the voters attention with pictures and headlines and doesn't let go until your message is delivered. This literature will be the bulk of your voter contact delivery method. If someone says that they want more information you can give them the press release or position paper. We will discuss in some length how to create quality literature, but the point is to deliver your message as effectively as possible to as many voters in your target audience as possible.