The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

What's amusing is that most people aren't aware of what's influencing their decision making processes, political or otherwise. For example, the word choices and order above demonstrate that I prefer place more than time and that I like to push myself through difficult situations if I know there's safety, solace and surety on the other side (ie, I'll tolerate storms if I know smooth sailing follows). Want to know how you think? Add a comment and I'll let you know.

But enough of that. What's this post really about?

I've been thinking it's time to put up some posts about the 2008 Presidential campaign sites. We correctly predicted political outcomes months in advance in 2004 and during the 2008 primaries (see links below). One of NextStage's developers, Stonewall, sent me an article that turned into Stonewall's Findings: The Genetics of Politics and today I read Voting: In Your Genes? in the 25 July 08 issue of Science so I guess it might be time.

What follows is a brief, high level analysis of the John McCain and Barack Obama campaign sites for 13 Aug 08. More analyses may follow. Depends on the response I get to this one. And how the mood strikes me.

We used our TargetTrack on three webpages. One was Senator McCain's homepage shown on the right.

There was a big of discussion when it came to Senator Obama's homepage. Was the actual homepage a "splash" page or an "index" page?

This was something that came up during the last Presidential campaign cycle. I don't remember which candidate(s) had a page before the official site homepage, only that we had some very intense internal discussions on what constitutes a "homepage".

For NextStage's purposes -- we deal with human perception and how people interact with information in their environment, remember? -- we decided (okay, I decided) that the first page a visitor comes to is de facto the homepage of the site.

Thus, the first page a visitor to Senator Obama's site will encounter as of this writing is shown on the right. A probable second page is shown below. Careful readers might think I got things a little mixed up on a quick read. The largest visual element in the first image above -- a screenshot of Senator McCain's homepage -- is Senator Obama.

This caused confusion in more than one of us and before we performed any analytics. I actually called Senator McCain's headquarters to ask them a) was that intentional and if not b) someone had hacked into their site. Not only is the largest visual element Senator Obama, the framing text in the visual field is "FAN CLUB" and "The Obama FAN CLUB". That text is so large in contrast with the rest of the text that it's doubtful the rest of the text will be seen.

And I'm not here to tell the candidates' web design team how to improve their sites. What I am here to do is document some high level aspects of what our TargetTrack tool determined about each of these pages.

I've documented elsewhere the ten messages we look for in Presidential material (see links). How each page breaks out is given below:

Understanding the Chart

The numbers above are an indication of how strongly a given message comes through on a given page. These messages are delivered mostly non-consciously via colors, images, font size, so on and so forth. What's most important is that people's responses to these messages are the basis for the conscious decisions they'll make. Do the candidates or their site designers know they're placing these non-conscious messages into their sites?

It's not likely and that's where the real danger comes in. For example, I doubt that either Senator Obama or his site designer wants "I'm Presidential Material" to be one of the weaker messages on that site's "homepage" especially when the McCain site broadcasts that message almost twice as strong.

Similarly, all three pages devote a about a quarter of their energy to conveying the message "I Have a Vision for this Country". Good thing, yes, and no page conveys that the candidates care very much about you, the voters', opinion (the "I'm Listening" and "I'm Listening to You") messages.

Clearly, Senator Obama's index page conveys "I Can Lead Us to a Better Place" more than any other.

What else is of interest? Senator Obama's index page coveys a lower value for "I'm Presidential Material" than it does for "I'm Electable" by better than a 2:1 margin. A possible interpretation is that whoever had input to the site design thinks Senator Obama is electable, yes, but doesn't believe he's Presidential material. At least at this point in time.

The McCain effort re Obama doesn't come off as such until cognitive processes kick in (the 2 for "They're not good people". This is an indication that the negative message isn't working at a non-conscious, "priming the mind to agree" level.

What are the real issues for the people having a say in these pages? That's demonstrated where the numbers vary greatly; "I'm Presidential Material", "I Have a Vision for this Country" and "I Can Lead Us to a Better Place".

Aside from that, the McCain homepage is going to cause a lot of initial confusion. Consider the following exchange I had with NextStage's token Republican.

The fall push thing probably as to do with what's called "working memory".

Remember when Nader and Perot gained a push by announcing candidacy late in the summer/early fall? Maybe McCain has decided not to put himself out there until the fall instead of letting the public stew on him over the course of the summer. When you have a wealth of options for marketing and a fully functioning duopoly, so that the worst you can finish is second, nothing seems like a bad idea.

What a quote! "NextStage's Token Republican Calls McCain a Raging Duopolist!"

Crap, that'll get me arrested

Oh, you know that's going to be the post header! Crap, I'm laughing just thinking about it.

I think it is a moral imperative to make that the post header.

Links for this post:

• BizMediaScience Political Posts
• Politics Aren't Horseraces Any More
• Predicting Election Outcomes via NextStage's TargetTrack^TM
• Using NextStage's TargetTrack in Political Campaigns: A NextStage Evolution Research Case Study