 RESEARCH AT CRANFIELD SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
MEASURING COMMUNICATION CHANNEL EXPERIENCES AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON
VOTING IN THE 2010 BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION
Dr Paul Baines
Reader in Marketing
Political parties can track customer responses to customer experience
holistically and in real time.
The authors sought to find out how the
election campaign influenced voting intentions
and what role was played by different
communication channels. Few studies have
evaluated the effectiveness of different
marketing techniques in politics because they
mostly focus on voter intention. This means
that research so far has also been unable to
gauge the persuasiveness of messages
received. The evaluation of communication
channel effectiveness is equally sparse in
commercial settings.
This study takes a new approach by looking at
the influence of different marketing
communications, over time, during the 2010
British General Election. The results indicate,
for the first time, the relative importance to
floating voters of a wide range of “touchpoints”
that conveyed the brands of all three main
political parties. These “touchpoints” include
debates, word of mouth, party election
broadcasts and posters. The research was
conducted among a sample of 1100 floating
voters and combines an online and mobile
phone survey covering “touchpoints”
encountered over a four week period.
These two examples illustrate the type of
results obtained:

People who intended to vote Liberal
Democrat and reported a conversation
about Labour were three times less
likely to vote Conservative.

The viewing of a Labour party election
broadcast by people who had initially
intended to vote Conservative was
significantly associated with switching
to Labour.
The main contribution of this study is to
illustrate how political parties (and other
brands) can track customer responses to
customer experience holistically and in real
time. These responses can be used to
RESEARCH AT CRANFIELD SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
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evaluate the impact of multi-channel
communications. It opens the way for
experimentation with customer insight
techniques in order to gain competitive
advantage.
A further contribution is the illustration of how
floating voters experienced different
“touchpoints” during the 2010 general election.
The first election campaign debate offers a
particularly strong example of this in its impact
on the floating voter.
http://tinyurl.com/d36o8oc
For practitioners in political marketing the
study pilots an innovative approach to
measuring the effectiveness of varying
communication channels in influencing floating
voters.
Baines, P., Macdonald, E., Wilson, H. &
Blades, F. (2011) Measuring communication
channel experiences and their influence on
voting in the 2010 British General Election,
Journal of Marketing Management, vol. 27,
no. 7-8, pp. 691-717.
For further details on this research paper
please contact: paul.baines@cranfield.ac.uk
Management Theme: Marketing,
Sales and Client Relationships
MANAGEMENT THEMES AT CRANFIELD SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
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 Business Performance Management
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 Entrepreneurship and Business Growth
 General Management
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 Innovation and Operations Management
 Leadership
 Managing People and Global Careers
 Marketing, Sales and Client Relationships
 Programme and Project Management
 Strategy, Complexity and Change Management
 Supply Chain and Logistics Management