Thursday, April 21, 2016

Is negative marketing a good idea?

When it seems difficult to find something positive to say about your product, is turning instead to making negative statements about your competitors offer going to get you more business?

As the UK Referendum campaign is now officially underway, it is the Government that has opened the offensive, last week with the £9 million leaflet and now with a Treasury report concluding that the UK is better off remaining a member of the EU or else we would all be a few thousand pound worse off. The thing is nobody actually knows. Those supporting the campaign to leave the EU claim the UK  would be £20 billion a year better off because instead of paying such sums into the EU, that money could be better spent on our people. Not so much of a forecast as saving the club fees.

The real issue for the stay in the EU group is that the product - the continued EU membership - is a bit  tired. It seems to be difficult to identify the product benefits. In fact the Prime Minister himself talked about the need for reform and claims rather disingenuously to have recently achieved major reforms. The proposition for the stay in campaign is we will all be better off, it is good for business and jobs and we can block immigrants now. But the backing to this vague message is that if we leave, we will lose jobs, our security would be undermined and everyone would have to shoulder the burden. The promoters are those with most to lose - politicians, big business, trade unions most of the political parties and some prominent people. Many were not born before the UK joined up so will have little direct comparison of life before and since.

The leave campaign's central proposition is more difficult to pin down and the case is barely being made other than to refute the frightening doomsday warnings of big time damage to the UK economy labelled as 'project fear'. Older voters will reflect that the post  Second World War generation were the first to voluntarily choose to travel to Europe on holiday, in serious numbers. Previous generations had certainly visited but in the colours of a British Expeditionary force. The great peace-time 'pay off' was not due to the then infant EU, but to the fact  German plans for controlling Europe had been defeated. For the Brits a European vacation pre- Euro was cheap and offered the opportunity for a decent amount of duty free fags and booze to be carted back home as a bonus and all for a British Visitors Passport you could buy for 7 shillings and sixpence at the Post Office! All pleasures now lost by being EU members. Along with the fun of messing around with foreign coinage. Along the way the old Imperial system of measurements has been sacrificed - well partially - we buy petrol by the litre but consume it by the mile, we still have 4 pints of milk in a bottle, but it is labelled as 2.73 litres!

So will the negative campaign pay dividends? Well the older generation have put up with worse, so they are more likely to respond to the nostalgia of the past if offered as a persuasive vision for the future. If the 'in' crowd can paint a more inspirational future of a rebranded EU than the 'out' crowd can re-ignite and evoke calls to a brighter future back in the world then they have got to drop the negative approach quickly.

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