(We’re just giving you a different truth)
Richard Cable, Head of Digital Publishing, BBH London
Why do the pollsters keep getting it wrong? It’s not a blip. It’s beyond a trend. We’re in the midst of a landslide of misinformation and misdirection.
There has, to date, been a serious discrepancy between prediction and result in the US midterms, the British general election, the Israeli election, the Scottish independence referendum and, most recently, the Greek Euro vote.
At the time of writing, Jeremy Corbyn is the runaway favourite to be the next Labour leader. Is it too late to bung a tenner on Andy Burnham?
It’s a confusing time for brands, especially political ones. As if it wasn’t hard enough already to tell if people are actually in love with you or just think they’re in love with you, we can now add a sizeable new group who may be saying they’re in love with you while fully intending to go and sleep with the person you despise most in all the world.
So what’s going on?
The prosaic answer would be something to do with flawed methodology or ‘shy Tories’, but that doesn’t answer the question of why the polls have been so consistently and internationally wrong. Something has changed.
A much more interesting possibility is that we — human beings — are undergoing a revolution that is fundamentally reshaping the nature of identity, and social media is to blame.
No really. Let me explain.
It’s well understood that our identity is defined by our social interactions. Carefully curating ourselves for different contexts is simply part of who we are.
What social media appears to be doing is radically amplifying this behaviour in three important ways.
First, it has vastly diversified the number and type of interactions. We are all multichannel people these days, communicating through a patois of speech, text, image, emoticon, approval and gesture, across a burgeoning array of platforms.
Second, it has allowed us be much more ‘elective’ about the identity we share. Put simply, we can now have lots of identities that are relatively discrete and separate from each other; that behave differently and believe in different things. A mate on Facebook; a wit on Twitter; an auteur on Instagram; a Flaming Lamborghini on LinkedIn; a carnivore on Tinder.
Third, it has given us an acute sense of audience. In ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’, Goffman describes identity as ‘performance’. And how. Like never before, we are aggressively projecting ourselves outwards to our “often imagined and constructed” audiences, self-consciously and diligently shaping our identity to the immediate social context of whichever channel we’re on.
The upshot of all this is that when an earnest and unsuspecting pollster asks us about voting intention, we may not answer like we used to. We’ve been too well coached by social for that.
We don’t just share information anymore. We’re selecting an identity, mulling our audience, considering our personal brand and then we’re sharing. The pollster is asking us what we believe in, and we’re telling them what we want other people to believe we believe in.
By contrast, a voting slip is just a shopping list; a market comparison app. In the absolute privacy of the polling booth, it’s just you and what you really think. No audience.
It’s not even that what we’re saying to the pollster isn’t truthful. It’s arguably true, for that part of us, for that identity, at that moment. Cognitive, but without the dissonance.
And if this is the case, it’s a trend that seems only likely to intensify as our use of social media becomes an ever-more fundamental part of who we are.
Leading thinker on the psychology of social Kenneth Gergen has already classified new pathologies in human identity in which we progressively abandon all sense of a ‘true’, essential self in favour of playing roles defined by our social context.
At its most extreme, he sees our sense of self being entirely defined by our social interactions. In other words, without an audience, there is no me. Literally, I tweet, therefore I am.
This is, at best, an emerging trend — an inkling of what the future may hold — but the implications for brands are both complex and challenging.
While political brands should expect more uncertainty and yet more shock results, consumer brands, for the same reasons, might need to start asking questions of their own research, and by extension the strategies they build out of it.
In short, brands may need to figure out how to plan for a future in which the same person can be several different consumers at the same time, believing in many different versions of the truth.
