In May 2019 in Barzago, a municipality in the province of Lecco, elections were held for the choice of the mayor and the city council..
I was asked to actively participate as a candidate for the city council in the civic center-left list "Il Paese Barzago". I preferred a more interesting role: taking care of communication during the election campaign.
The challenge: a centre-left list in a right-wing country.
The municipal elections of 29 May 2019 were held in conjunction with those for the European Parliament. In Barzago in that vote the centre-right and right-wing parties together took more than 80% of the votes. Almost a plebiscite.
The ballot for the choice of the mayor would be held the day after the results of the European elections were announced. All the ingredients were there to fear the worst: the mass vote towards the Lega of Salvini (which supported the opponent's list), a candidate, Mirko Ceroli, with a past as councillor but without leadership experience, a list made up of many young people with the lowest average age in the whole province.
"Well done, everyone, at least we tried" we were about to say.
The result came unexpectedly, however, in the form of a call from my friend Isaco. "Gabri" he told me, "We won. Mirko is the new mayor."
I couldn't believe my ears: despite the Bulgarian percentages for the centre-right in Europe, 53.9% of Barzaga's voters had preferred him to lead the municipality.
Setting the campaign: starting with the values
The secret of the victory, I believe, has been an election campaign which was very consistent from the outset, based not so much on electoral promises but on key values that the list has carried.
In fact, I understood something important from a few conversations with some of the voters.
At a local level, people don't vote for a mayor to fix the street for them or fix the sewer under their homes. Instead they are looking for someone they can trust, someone who shares with them some - a few - key values.
So this had to be the watchword: VALUES.
The picture you see above is an exercise I had the list do: I asked them to divide a large sheet of paper in two and write on one side "our values" on the other "the values on the opponent's list". The next step: write on post-its some values that a mayor should have and place them on the sheet. Depending on the position they would be "exclusive values" of one or the other list, or shared values.
The result? In less than an hour of discussion I obtained what in marketing is called unique selling proposition (which in this case also corresponds to the key value proposition): that set of attributes and values that detach my product (my list) from the competition and make it unique and inimitable.
In particular, 3 were the values identified: Listening, Competence, Willingness.
Easy to say, difficult to apply, even more complex to communicate.
Listening, Competence, Willingness: how to communicate them?
Communicating the "competence" of a list is difficult. How to do it? This was the intuition: avoid quoting the group, but start from the individuals.
Put like that, everything became easier:
Listening = ability to get in tune with the average inhabitant of the country
Competence = one's own experience and knowledge, but also one's own passions
Willingness = the courage to put your face to it, to go out into the street and touch the reality of the municipality.
Thus was born a series of videos called "my place of the heart": each candidate was asked to choose a place in the country that was important to him and from there tell something about himself and what he could bring to the municipality.
Many of the candidates were awkward in front of the camera, but this - I think - gave an extra touch of sympathy and consonance with the average voter.
The videos were released every 2-3 days. Here is the video of Francesca Mantonico.
A convincing and professional pitch
Individuality is all well and good, but sooner or later the moment had to come when the whole list comes together and tells its programme.
The presentation in that case was taken care of in detail. The watchwords: 1. "be interesting and enjoyable" and 2. "values, not promises".
The great novelty compared to previous years has been the careful choice of the guests. In previous years the custom was to invite some high level local politicians who would give a small speech with a few generic words of support to the list trying to remember the names of the candidates. But how can such a person represent "competence" "listening" and "willingness"?
We have thus unhinged tradition and called:
- the long-time mayor of a neighboring municipality
- a manager of a large local company, member of federmanager.
Two "Mr. Nobody" of politics, but decisive for two issues that voters considered important: security (the invited mayor is a pioneer of the so-called "neighborhood control") and fear of unemployment (in the following months with federmanager we organized free courses for writing the CV and preparing a job interview).
Here are some pictures of the evening
Hey, I was there too!
The final rush. Emotional videos to strike the voter at the heart
Back to square one: the voter doesn't want promises or philosophies, he wants to be able to trust.
That's how, for the last communication before the vote, we put all our money on emotion.
On the one hand we asked the members of the list to take part in a video in which everyone recited a fragment of an inspiring message. Here is the result.
On the other hand, we asked some supporters to "put their faces on it".
Reliability in fact passes above all from the observation of the behaviour of other people considered to be "like us". "If they do it - says our head - why shouldn't I trust them".
So here is a second video, released close to the first one, just a few days before the vote. The participants are all people known in the village and more or less close to the list. They all said something unprepared, spontaneous and - I think - in many cases their sincerity and affection are clearly visible.
Winning trust. The most difficult thing
What have I learned?
- It's very difficult to gain a person's trust.
- to do this you need to use all the logic and subconscious circuits you can get to
- appealing to rationality alone is not necessary
- better to talk about values, not about attributes or functions (in the case of products) or promises and programs (in the case of political ideas)
A behind-the-scenes photo.
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