It hadn’t intend to write a three-part series on independence strategy but someone’s off sick so…
Last time I argued that we need to persuade the ten per cent of Scots who take us from round-about 50 per cent support to round-about 60 per cent. While it is an imprecise judgement, 60 per cent is what I think is the minimum threshold that persuades even critics that independence is the settled will of the Scottish people – but I left open how we actually do this.
Mostly until now people have pushed for the referendum route (or some proxy for it) for a specific reason, and that reason is entirely legitimate. If you want someone to change their mind about an issue the first priority is getting them to think about it at all.
Most of us most of the time don’t expend energy thinking about things that are not directly relevant to us or which we do not find intrinsically interesting or entertaining or enjoyable. We make the decisions we have to then pursue the things we enjoy.
In technical terms this is known as ‘issue salience’ – how important is it that I make this decision now and so how important is it that I absorb enough information to make that decision? If I don’t need to make the decision, the issue has low salience so there is little point in me expending effort to gather information.
A referendum creates a decision-point granting the issue high salience, and so people respond differently. That is why we had that remarkably high turnout on referendum day; people thought it was important and so expended surprising amounts of energy engaging with the debate.
Post-referendum there has been no decision-point on independence, making it generally low salience, and we’ve struggled to break that barrier. For the most part we have failed to get our target audience to engage with the information we need them to see if they are to change their minds – so we want another referendum to create a high-salience dynamic.
That is absolutely legitimate and it would definitely work; given another referendum, people would definitely engage. There are just two problems; first, this is precisely the reason no-one is going to give us a referendum if they can possibly avoid it, and second, even if people do see an issue as high valiance it does not mean they will necessarily change their mind.
Referendums have been lost twice in a row; double failure is not impossible. No matter what we do we have to persuade more people and while increasing the issue salience will grab their attention, it does not necessarily mean they will change their position.
It is not enough to claim you’re solving problems, your target audience has to believe it
This is point number one; issue salience has a powerful effect but it is not sufficient in itself so other factors matter. But this also means that there must be other factors which effect attention and decision-making – and there are. That is the second point.
You can get people to pay attention through issue salience, but you can also get people to pay attention through information availability. Adverts on TV are not there to make you think laundry detergent is important but to put a particular brand of detergent in your mind for when you do buy.
Are we putting sharp, memorable messages about independence to an audience in their own environment regularly so it is absorbed and established as an idea? A referendum makes people think about an issue they might not otherwise, but so does message availability. They can’t un-see it.
Another crucial factor is issue relevance. This sounds facile but it is not – we engage with the information we think is most relevant to us. I absorbed zero information about drain augers until I got a blocked drain and suddenly this thing I’d never thought about before was solving a significant problem I had.
We may not be able to force a decision-point on independence, but there are lots of decision-points people will face anyway. These are the endless little problems of life, and when we reach those points we start paying attention to information related to that problem.
In other words, we need to make independence a meaningful solution to the problems people face every day. Every spike in support we’ve had in the last ten years was when the public thought independence was solving something – Brexit or Boris or Covid incompetence.
This does not mean spraying aspirational statements around. We have a tendency to make independence a ‘macro’ issue – ‘it will create ten thousand jobs’. We need to make it a targetted, micro issue.
It has to be about our audience, and they don’t want ten thousand jobs, they want one good job. They want a nicer home, more affordable bills, good public services, better customer service, more parking or better public transport.
How are we solving these problems? What does independence mean for the individual? That leads to another crucial factor – information credibility. It is not enough to claim you’re solving problems, your target audience has to believe it.
We’re bad on this; we make fairly bold statements that aren’t evidenced or explained. We say ‘your electricity will be cheaper’ but we don’t explain how we’ll set up an energy market, how a regulator will keep bills low, we don’t have a credible ‘grid budget’ that explains costs in a way people can examine.
We want too much to be taken on trust and that’s not good enough. And it raises another crucial factor – the messenger effect. This is a term for the differential way people receive information depending on who is giving them the information.
None of this is glamorous, but it works
Think ‘like, respect, know, believe’ – each of these makes us more likely to absorb information from a given source. We need to think in terms of two things here. First, the original source of the material must be from someone authoritative that the target audience believes.
But second, it works best if this is delivered by people the target audience knows or likes or thinks is ‘like them’. This last point is again crucial – we have an enormously powerful resource in the people who support us but aren’t activists.
Getting them involved in message-passing to their peers is (if done well), incredibly effective – particularly where the original source of the information is also trusted.
What I’m saying here is that you most certainly do not need a referendum to get people to engage with information, but that makes it a different game with different rules – and we’re not playing it.
There is something else that is at the heart of this – see every method that I suggest above? They work, but you need to know your audience. You need to know who they are, where they are, where they live, what their problems are (never assume), what their barriers are (why aren’t they supporting us?), what information they need to hear and who they trust to tell them it.
Again, no-one apart from us refuses to do market research. We’ve been so focussed on trying to come up with a scheme so the powerful can cut a deal between themselves to give us a referendum that we’ve lost sight of our audience altogether.
Let me ask you this; all the evidence I have seen suggests that there are undoubtedly ten per cent of the population who can change their minds – but how many of them voted in the Holyrood election? What social class are they? Is there a gender skew? Where are they located? And what is currently stopping them supporting us?
Do we know any of this stuff? I’ve been involved in the limited amount of work which has actually been done on this and I can only answer probably one of those questions with confidence (the last one). That isn’t good enough.
None of this is glamorous, but it works. That is why everything I’ve mentioned above is core practice in the multi-trillion dollar global influencing industries. When I say we need to stop thinking magically and instead think scientifically, this is what I mean.
Use the most effective tools based on the best possible data and use your creativity to make great, compelling messages that really speak to our target audience based on solid product development (independence is our ‘product’ and the current available specifications of our product are rubbish, filled with vague promises and requests to just take our word for it…).
Get that core work done, learn about your audience, create a strong messaging strategy with constant effective feedback, get support over a ‘settled will’ threshold and then press your advantage politically.
It took only a few hours for five per cent of the Scottish public to change their minds on independence when they saw it as a credible solution to Brexit. Why on earth do we think we can’t do twice as well as this within a couple of years with some professionalism, wit and hard work?