Originally excited to see my friends on the cover and amused at the quips that introduced the topic, I rapidly became intrigued by the assumptions of Riley Chow’s article, “Everybody Loses” in The Cavalier. In essence, a political campaign is identical to a marketing campaign. Consumers are replaced by voters, and the products are the candidates and their platforms. The products are all in essence identical – as Chow clearly states, the candidates were “uniformly qualified by virtue of being in Sauder and the position fairly entry-level”. Thus everything in the election came down to how each student marketed themselves to their peers. What I found in the article was an extremely one-sided analysis of the way each candidate was campaigning, resulting in an inaccurate analysis.

Chow states that “anyone who attended the forum knew that [Jimmy Chang and Reef Chiu] had clearly earned their votes” and condemns the election results without looking at the other aspects of the candidate’s campaigns. This is akin to watching 5 minutes of commercials on TV and deciding which product is best solely based on those 5 minutes. Just as most marketers know that one single TV commercial is not enough, each candidate recognized this as well. Some candidates focused on having a particular brand or image associated with their names – Emmett Lee emphasized his blonde hair and courage, and Dilraj Rahal emphasized the idea of change and “bringing us forward”. Others chose to make flashy videos such as Rachael Yang’s “Friday” parody. In the end, however, the most effective marketing technique for these elections was cultivating personal relationships with the “consumers”. What was distinctive about the 2 winners was their dedication to spending time talking to their fellow classmates and trying to listen to and understand what mattered to us. In the end, a company is not successful because it has one good press conference, as Chow seemed to assume. A company maintains a strong client base through cultivating relationships and showing that they genuinely care – just as the election winners did.

Congratulations to all the candidates, and the best of luck Emmett and Armin.

http://cavalier.cusonline.ca/?p=708