Political Micro Targeting - Case Study Example

1. Spotlight Analysis managed to identify Barn Raisers a tribe of 14 million voters who play a major role in elections due to their voting patterns. They are regarded as active participants in community organizations and are ambivalent about government. Even though they are from different races, religions, and ethnicities and 40% voted for Democrats and 27% voted for the Republicans. President Obama also managed to identify behavioral grouping as a means of political targeting. He noted that most of the time people have failed in studying individual behaviors and influencing their voting patterns. Through Spotlight Analysis he manages to do that by grouping individuals in terms of behavior, choice, names, and even color. Obama also went ahead and used a decision-making system that did quite a sophisticated analysis of voters' several school-going children, type of car, zip code, magazine subscriptions, and mortgage balance as a way of determining the voting pattern of the voter.

2. Transactional information involves all the information creates in a single business process while analytical information is the organizational information that is usually stored and is in use during the daily managerial analysis tasks. Transactional information is also used in daily business operations even though this is created in a single business process. Spotlight Analysis managed to use transactional information about the 10 tribes which included their general values. However, the company went ahead and involved analytical information that managed to isolate the Barn Raisers into even tiny groups by analyzing even smaller details about their voting patterns.

3. Spotlight Analysis identified neighborhood patterns, family sizes, and spending patterns of 175 million voters and categorized them into 10 values tribes. The company went ahead to identify the Barn Raisers into religions, races, and ethnicity. The company went ahead and even focused on individual voters and this helped them in predicting and determining the voting pattern of a certain voter in terms of color race and other characteristics such as income.

4. The business process reengineering included determining the influence that Barn Raisers had on the votes. This was done mainly through the use of new technology. Obama used a different approach that most candidates had not approached. He used Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites to woo voters. Spotlight Analysis correlated its data with commercially available data and matched their profiles. It was noted that Barn Raisers had a 75% match (Wooz, 2014). For this reason, the company was able to make a reliable decision on who would win the elections. Using this information the Obama team ensured that they used this opportunity to influence Barn Raisers to vote for them after realizing that they also landed in the still swing voters category.

5. President Obama used different metrics to measure the success of political micro-targeting. One of the metrics used involved the level of income. It was discovered that the level of income influenced voting patterns. Demography was also another metric used. Areas that suffered from Hurricane Katrina and Alaska State which suffered business scandals and cases of increased fraud made Republicans lose the elections. The color was also used as a metric for political micro-targeting. Due to Obama’s color, most of the voters opted to vote for him as a sign of identity. A factor like ethnic background also influenced the voting patterns and was included as a metric to measure the level of success in the elections.

6. Political micro-targeting signals dehumanization of politics is indeed a true statement. It is very evident that voting is no longer an individual decision but can also be measured through various ways such as level of income, race, ethnicity, income, and social status. This is evident after Obama’s campaign team managed to manipulate the dehumanizing factors to influence the voting process in their favor. With the increased trend of the internet and technology, it would be much easier to round up factor-thatch are non-humans but greatly play a major role in shifting the equilibrium of the voting patterns. Votingshortlye will not be based on the tyranny of numbers but largely on many smaller and specific factors which must be learned. Dehumanization of politics has no negative effect and is important that most countries around the world embrace this kind of study to influence the voting patterns of its citizens. Read More