At Sauder, this week is election week for first-year rep. It’s nice to see so many candidates vying for the position and ultimately bearing ultimate responsibility for leadership in enhancing our first-year experience – but politics, as always, (and this is purely that) remains contentious.

I like to think about how the campaigns at our school would be run differently if the candidates had first learned about making business plans, and about marketing strategy; you know, making sense of marketing data, and preparing a general plan as to how they will approach this daunting challenge of selling themselves. I like to think of these elections as business interaction stripped of all its numerical aspects, leaving nothing but human interaction; I like to think that what’s left is marketing, as a naked, unifying concept of business.

In political trade, the product is what a person chooses to represent, and the consumer offers to “buy” into said product by agreeing to vote for the candidate. An intangible product is being sold for intangible values, and the only chemistry left between the parties is purely association by marketing.

For example, some of the problems faced by campaigns, like candidates being equidistant from constituents, are universal plagues, regardless of it being a national or in-school campaign.

Qualitatively speaking, this is also the most interesting, relevant case-analysis I can imagine to demonstrate the ropes of critical thinking to first-years – a concept so rarely approached in Sauder, and so close to the heart of and intertwined with business (in the same way marketing is, of course).