What US shopping baskets say about their voters
You may have already read about what data mining is and how companies use it to target their customers. But it’s not only businesses who are using it.
Across the Atlantic, data mining’s becoming a popular tool for American political campaigns, as a means of influencing undecided voters.
Effectively data mining in a political context works in exactly the same way as it would in the business world. It uses consumer preferences data to target products to would-be customers. But in this case, products are politicians and the customers are the electorate.
In recent years, data mining’s become an integral part of electioneering for some politicians, particularly in the US. Political groups buy details from consumer data banks and combine it with information from the census, voters lists and public records. They can also find out whether you’re a member of any political party.
All these details are collated into a master list for a specific region and thousands of people in that area are polled for market researchers to get an idea about how to categorise voters.
The practice of ‘microtargeting’ uses predictive market segmentation to track individual voters and identify potential supporters. This information can even be gleaned from categories including your drink, car and leisure preferences.
For example, according to the Washington Post pro-wrestling loving organic foodies, who drink Sprite, Budweiser or gin and who like Saab cars, apparently are more likely to ‘trend’ democrat. Meanwhile Audi-loving Wal-Mart shoppers, who are into monster trucks, Coors beer, Dr Pepper or bourbon, fit into the democrat profile.
When ABC News spoke to voters to examine how likely it was that people’s leisure preferences reflected their political preferences, they were surprised at how accurate findings were.
By tapping into your preferences, politicians can communicate a tailored message to a particular subgroup of the electorate. This information can also identify undecided voters; how that message is tailored and conveyed will depend on the kind of lifestyle indicators for that individual.
This data also identifies what’s known as ‘influentials’. It works on the premise that one in ten Americans − the so-called influentials − tell the other nine what to buy, where to eat and, critically, how to vote. It was a tactic used by George W Bush in 2004, when his campaign targetted two million influentials across the States, so the success of this tactic speaks for itself.
The use of these kind of marketing devices in politics raises an important question. As microtargeting becomes increasingly sophisticated and widely used outside the realms of business, could future political campaigns be less about a focus on policy and more about which candidate has the most innovative marketing approach and the financial backing to reach the electorate?
Katherine Lakeland, Sage (UK) Ltd
