This Valentine’s Day brought a very special treat for middle-aged women feeling unloved and invisible. If you’re between 40 and 60, belong to the National Trust, watch Countryfile, own a dog, and care about “doing things the proper British way”, then you’re now an object of unalloyed lust for at least two of the three main political parties. After being wooed by Boris Johnson in 2022 (and surviving), so-called “Waitrose Woman” is currently the subject of a renewed tug-of-love between Liberal Democrats and Tories.
Also in Ed Davey’s amorous sights, according to the same Telegraph report, are “M&S Movers”: youngish couples who have upped sticks from London to the Home Counties after the pandemic in the hope of starting families there. They worry about climate change and mortgage hikes, and “care deeply” about “Gary Lineker and his causes”. Normally this fantasy pair would vote Labour, but the Lib Dem leader apparently thinks he can lure them into a socially responsible throuple.
Whenever I read about fictitious voting personas — see also Waterstones Dad, Deano, Millennial Milly, and Workington Man — it is striking how they seem more like characters in a terrible play than resembling real people. On a stage set for a dinner party, Waterstones Dad is boring on about Simon Schama’s latest tome as Waitrose Woman politely nods and pretends to listen. Workington Man is surreptitiously checking his betting app while, outside, Millennial Milly is flirtily cadging fags off Deano. Indeed, the people who came up with Waitrose Woman and M&S Movers can’t even seem to make the supermarkets in question believable. For surely Waitrose is more often a place full of recycling obsessives wearing wacky spectacles and stripey jumpers; while M&S tends to attract the more sedate dowager-types.
Even so, political strategists still love the device of a fictitious persona: partly, I assume, because they wrongly think of themselves as too individual to ever be described generically. See: “Daniel is a pale-faced 30-something dressed in white shirt and Portcullis House lanyard, stalking about Westminster coffee cup in hand, worrying about his rent and listening to The Rest is Politics on his AirPods.”
Originally, personas were conceived by marketers as a means of designing more desirable products — first identifying a specific type of person, and then working out what sort of thing, exactly, that type of person might want. Soon the practice migrated to politics and characters such as “Dougie” were born: “a stereotypically hard-working, blue-collar white guy who loved hockey, beer, Tim Hortons coffee, and hanging out at the hardware store”.
Dougie was aimed at attracting like-minded souls to vote Conservative in the 2006 Canadian federal election. Single and in his 20s, he worked for Canadian Tire, and later went on to get a girlfriend called Denise. And as his creator put it: “He agreed with us on issues such as crime and welfare abuse, but he was more interested in hunting and fishing than politics and often didn’t bother to vote.”
These days, presumably Dougie is languishing in a Canadian jail for his role in the trucker convoy protests; but back in 2006 he was the Conservative’s main man. Over the course of that campaign, he appeared on PowerPoints and briefing sheets, posters and hockey cards. Policymakers were encouraged to look at an image of Dougie and ask themselves how he would feel about a particular idea; those in charge of communications would anticipate which messages he would most like to hear. When the Conservatives eventually got into minority government, they put “Team Dougie” on a T-shirt.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Tom McTague"]https://staging.unherd.com/2023/04/the-political-power-of-deano/[/su_unherd_related]
Yet despite its apparent success in this case, the practice of persona-construction still seems distinctly odd. On the face of it, even the use of them in product design seems counterintuitive: for why would you deliberately make the things that you want to sell appeal only to a very specific type of consumer? The standard answer here is that the use of the technique works best for what are assumed to be relatively niche markets in the first place; and, after all, most markets are like this. It’s theoretically true that catering for the whims of a very particular sort of person might dissuade lots of others from buying your wares, who don’t share those precise whims; but since in most cases your product was unlikely to appeal to the masses anyway, it doesn’t really matter.
With the political use of fictitious personas, however, the initial puzzlement becomes more insistent. For you would think that, by definition, there should be no particularly niche markets for the biggest political parties. Their aim should always be to give as many people as possible what they want, whether that’s because they want to attract the largest number of voters to their cause or because, more nobly but perhaps less plausibly, they think that this is how democracy ought to work. For the biggest parties, then, there seems to be a risk that, in putting time and energy into producing policies that specifically appeal to some particular caricature of a swing voter, they might accidentally ignore or even alienate lots of other potentials.
Or to put it another way: in going for Waitrose Woman, you are in danger of deterring Morrisons Man or Asda Aunty. Dougie seems to have worked well for a Canadian Conservative party that had arguably lost touch with a relatively large natural voter base at the time; but in the case of more marginal voting types, the value of using such devices is not so clear.
[su_pullquote]"In going for Waitrose Woman, you are in danger of deterring Morrisons Man or Asda Aunty..."[/su_pullquote]
This scepticism would not seem to apply to parties like the Reform Party or George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, though. Each of these is currently touting for voters in Rochdale with renewed urgency, now that the Labour by-election candidate has lost the future whip thanks to his endorsement of an antisemitic October 7 conspiracy theory. For these smaller outfits, mostly unheard-of on the doorstep, their aim is presumably to become much better known and liked among a relatively narrow band of rather similar voters, rather than to widen their appeal more broadly. Here, it would seem strategically reasonable — if not particularly palatable in terms of optics — to specifically target policies at, say, John the 70-year-old Northern homeowner furious about immigration; or careworker Malika, who has three kids and likes going to pro-Palestinian marches in her spare time.
The counterargument to scepticism about the use of personas for the larger parties is that nowadays each of us has increasingly less in common with others, so that there are relatively few general voter characteristics for a would-be unifying political party to draw upon. Multiple social cleavages — financial, educational, cultural, moral — are separating us into smaller and smaller voting blocs. In other words, though relatively many of us will end up voting for the same party, it will be for very different background reasons. As a result, Conservatives now include those advocating for state interference in family life and those allergic to it; those who support gender ideology in schools and those who want it banned; those who would rejoin the EU and those who would prefer to see it destroyed. Labour voters are no less stratified; and arguably Lib Dem supporters have always been a basket case — as also seems evident from some current members’ wildly illiberal approaches to free speech.
Still, noticing the existence of increased voter stratification is one thing; deliberately drawing the electorate’s attention to it, quite another. As well as potentially alienating others and intensifying social divisions, singling out one or two groups for special attention by coarsely personifying them into a clichéd caricature inevitably comes across to some as deeply patronising. And then there’s just the sheer desperate transactionality of the practice. Politicians being explicit about fashioning niche policies and messages simply in order to bribe small numbers of voters over to their side, with increased or maintained power as their ultimate object, is hardly the noble democratic ideal. In fact — given they sound like highly principled sorts — it’s exactly the sort of thing Waitrose Woman and M&S Movers might rightly despise.
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SubscribeHey! What happened to White Van Man? Is he past his sell-by date?
Don’t worry, “White Van Man” will be in the limelight as soon as WW3 starts and they need conscripts to man the trenches, while the Waitrose women do their Titanic act.
And sorry, should be “person the trenches”.
Tommy Atkins
*peroffspring the trenches.
He’s too white. That’s problematic.
Kahn’s ULEZ put paid to him.
Can’t wait for the merch for all these characters. An obvious market opening. They need their own cinematic universe, and boxed figurines. I’d want Nigella, an alcoholic and aging, sophisticated domestic goddess — she’ll always have a place in my heart. How d’you reckon she’d vote though?
Someone should start a Dinner Party, her natural home.
Nigella – Labour. Because she can afford to.
A luxury voter you think? Too rich to worry about self- interest more interested in demonstrating altruism and noble thoughts regarding the plebs.
Am I foolish in thinking a political party should have some principles and then try to persuade us that these are good ideas and that they should vote for them?
You know like the Tories say that they believe in a small state, free markets and individuals. Or the Labour say explicitly that they need to redistribute incomes and intervene in markets. Liberals could be something else.
Of course, the great flaw is that we might not like their policies and not vote for them. We’ll then see the party we vote for make a dog’s breakfast of governing and the next time an election comes along try the first lot.
They’re not businesses. Businesses often try to figure out what we want and give it to us. Yet even businesses often invent stuff and hope we like it.
A lot of it is candidate selection I think. Far too many Westminster careerists and barely anyone with experience outside the public sector, banking and the law. Constituency parties need to re-assert their independence and make better and more representative choices.
I think this is the key to the problem, we have professional politicians who have done nothing else. If the potential candidates had experience of something other than public sector, law and banking they would have a better understanding of more of the population and as comments above mention, principles rather than stereotypes could perhaps restore some faith in politics.
We tried that here in America with Donald Trump, and no living person has been more vilified, demonized, persecuted, and detested.
The professional politicians have made it clear they will not allow their corruption and perversion to be exposed for our silly little principles.
i think, unfortunately, that both USA and UK have got to go through a period of politics becoming worse before they get better, I just hope it won’t take too long to get there.
Or that we don’t totally destroy our country in the process.
Professional politicians are anathema to politics…..absolutely clueless about what people outside of Westminster want. Get out onto the street and talk to a few ordinary punters.
That would be refreshing, political parties with principles…. Or have I become cynical?
No, just realistic.
I feel as though they were like that once, in some long ago golden age, but perhaps I’m misremembering.
No, I think you’re right. In those days you knew what you were voting for and a party, once in office, generally did what it said on the tin. Unlike the sort of focus-grouped, amorphous policy soup in which all three major parties (four in Scotland) currently swim (and then sink once they’ve been elected).
Political parties’ election megagurus need to re-discover the “Man on the Clapham Omnibus“. Instead, they focus on marginal seats (UK), swing states (USA) and “target ridings” (Canada), where they are trying to win over a small proportion of voters by focusing on a fictitious persona who might be biddable, given the right messaging.
Unfortunately, we are going to suffer a lot more from the fictitious persona when we use our computers and phones. Software interface designers have used this technique for some time. But it is really taking off now with so-called prompt engineers customising chatbots to deal with customers categorised into groups depicted in much the same way as politicos’ Waitrose Woman.
ULEZ Man? Although that might easily be taken as an anti-authoritarian persona.
So, to summarise – British voters have the choice between a knackered party in need of total pulverisation and one which can’t get its anti-semitism problem under control – neither of which can present a uniform philosophy underpinning their existence and policies and neither of which really understand the people whose votes they desperately want.
That pretty much sums it up Katharine.
Well at least we Scots have got an extra choice for a totally dysfunctional political party/
That made me chuckle, yes, in Scotland you have an extra party patronising you.
Spoiled for choice, one might say.
The problem with the Conservative Party is that it has failed to target natural conservatives and in trying to appeal to too broad a swathe of opinion including people that are its natural ideological opponents it has pushed natural conservatives into the arms of Reform, just sitting the vote out or the anarchistic solution of voting for Labour in the hope of destroying the currently unconservative Conservative Party in the hope that a proper Conservative Party will rise from the ashes.
Dougie: “a stereotypically hard-working, blue-collar white guy who loved hockey, beer, Tim Hortons coffee, and hanging out at the hardware store”.
Describes me to a tee, wouldn’t you agree, Katharine?
They are all pretty much out of ideas, except for, not them.
The Monster Raving Looney Party had a candidate in Rochdale but Screaming Lord Sutch has retired!
Here’s the one they should really be thinking about: machete man, the 30-something who is going to turn up on their doorsteps if they don’t reform the housing market.
Most of us won’t be voting at all at the next GE.
Yes. I’ve long been disenfranchised and this time I won’t be able to carry out a vote in blind faith. With apologies to the Suffragetts.
“and I’m not voting in the next election, until they find the person… who is on my party line” The Kinks – Ray Davis probably, 1970
There’s a SPAR man, waiting in the sky.
Not to worry, I’ll continue voting for the least-worst option. It gets harder each time.
Political parties ignore the Lidl people at their peril.
The Aldi you get, the less you matter to them.
That Asda be the worst supermarket pun so far.
You missed out TO, otherwise perfect!
Steve and Rocky are the new Marks and Spencer.
Better than No Marks in suspenders.
The worse, the better!
I’ve got to the point where I am minded to vote for the least competent, most self-serving candidate on the basis that technically competent politicians who are persuaded of the moral rectitude of their causes and their policies are the ones most likely to do the largest amount of damage.
As CS Lewis memorably put it, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
“their aim is presumably to become much better known and liked among a relatively narrow band of rather similar voters” The Reform Party and their so-called “right wing populist” counterparts in Europe are simply trying to address the people’s legitimate concerns that major parties haven’t the courage to face.
This is actually the other way round.
The demographer Richard Webber, who I had a series of professional meetings with about 10 years ago and is very interesting on these subjects, first developed geodemographic classifications in Liverpool for local government administration purposes. Essentially to map communities and their likely needs for better targeting of services.
The idea was then picked up by Experian in the 1980s, with whom Webber developed MOSAIC, which is still their geodemographic marketing database. Webber also worked with CACI to develop their rival database Acorn. Its these databases which underpin the models used by the political parties to segment the electorate into target groups like Waitrose Woman.
There is a risk but certainly within the context of UK elections, it is far outweighed by the realities of the electoral system.
In first-past-the-post elections a relatively small number of people in a relatively small number of constituencies often have a disproportionate impact on the result.
If, for example, the Conservatives can identify and target the narrow demographic group which will allow them to hang onto a marginal seat, then it really doesn’t matter that everyone hates them even more in a seat like, for example, Liverpool Walton. Both seats count the same and they were never going to win Liverpool Walton anyway.
That said, the Tories should probably save their money and not bother with demographic segmentation this time around. As the by-elections yesterday demonstrated, when absolutely everyone thinks you are a hopeless shower of shite, there are no segments left to target.
Congratulations for ‘quote of the day’ in your last sentence.
I presume Kathleen Stock doesn’t write for a target reader because it is a matter of surprise to me that I, as an elderly heterosexual man who has not been to University with a bucket-full of supposedly far-right views, regards this apparently trans-exclusionary radical feminist academic lesbian as one of the most entertaining and interesting authors not just on Unherd but generally. I am pretty sure she is not targeting me in her writing.
That indicates a certain broadness of mind on both her part and yours.
Well, you have certainly endorsed this article’s sub-heading ” … don’t rely on cliched caricatures.”
Jeremy, shush, don’t tell Kathleen, but I made up a category which I love to hate. The Grauniad reading ‘Awfully Nice Brigade’. Their MO being, if you’re very nice to people they will be very nice back. It’s just a matter of time before they realise that raping children, blombing people and hating women isn’t very nice at all. [Shudder]
That will be the Guardian reading, tofu eating wokerati, then? (Suella Braverman’s caricature of them)
Exactly. I can see Suella and I think a like.
Aren’t they called ‘luvvies’?
Jeremy, you silver-tongued smoothie, you! I bet you say that to every think-tanker you meet…
“recycling obsessives wearing wacky spectacles and stripey jumpers”
As a resident of Bristol, I can tell you this “fictitious persona” is anything but.
Waitrose Woman votes for permanent decline.
You can’t be all things to all people. But identifying groups of people and picking the one thing that really motivates each group is extremely effective. It may be intellectually incoherent, but it doesn’t really matter as people will put up with a lot of things they disagree with if they feel the one thing they really care about is being represented.
This is the approach the AfD have been using in Germany. Depending on where in the country you go, you’ll find AfD posters targetting native Germans or Turkish immigrants, people who care about the cost of heating, or people who worry about woke… it’s about focussed policies for specific people rather than a coherent vision for the country. I agree that naming your cliches and then talking about them on broadcasts is stupid. But it turns out that populism is quite popular.
These composite people are usually compartmentalised constructions of traumatised children who lack the consistent caregiving that would help them to form healthy attachments. When they are used by politicians, who would really just love to name everything “The Grate British…[whatever]” but can’t because it is deeply and profoundly…grating – and trite, it devalues the concept and we can all see it for the alienating, nihilistic and dehumanising marketing ploy it is. It’s the B-Side of “some bigoted woman”.
Well written Kathleen, a broadbrush of Brit political movement(s) in a clinical, comedic style. It just flows and informs and provokes. Thank you. Des (anguishing between Dougie the Canuck and John the Geordie).
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The aim of electoral politics is not universal appeal, it has become getting just enough votes to win without compromising your ability to screw your constituents on behalf of others and yourself, and still get reelected.
There’s only one person left for Tory MPs to impress now…and that’s ‘Can You Give Me a Job’ man.
Maybe politicians could stop treating potential constituents as props in a play and see them as individuals, as people with aspirations, ideas, values, etc. That’s probably asking too much of those in the ruling class or those wishing to join it, but the whole reason parts of Europe are bubbling is the disconnect between govt and the governed.
Here’s a clue for any office-holder or seeker: worry less about what you can do for me and more about what your ideas do to me. Every single issue in life does not require a govt solution. I do not need govt guidance over what type of car to drive, whether or not to use a gas stove, my social media comments being treated as criminal activity, or my children used to advance fringe agendas. Just provide the public services you are supposed to provide in something resembling an efficient manner.
I couldn’t agree more, I’d like to vote for a party that will protect the UK from all threats, both foreign and domestic, take as little of my hard earned money as possible to provide the necessary basic services and to support those genuinely in need and then leave me the f**k alone as much as possible. Not looking good is it?
I’m an old woman in the South West and shop at Waitrose. I’m a member of the SDP. For whom shall I vote?
Forget Waitrose Woman; which party is wooing Piltdown Man?
On both sides of the Atlantic the left/right, lib/conservative polarities no longer work. The political hacks of all sorts (pundits, activists, aparachiks and carreer politicians), who tend to be rather dense and tin-eared, haven’t even begun to notice.
Welcome to the revolution, comrades!
This article is very intriguing to me personally, as I worked at Waitrose as a side job for much of 2023- and in fact I worked at the very branch that Ed Davey is said to frequent (the likely reason for his obsession with “Waitrose Women”), and actually served him at least twice on the tills. I didn’t even recognise him until the final time I served him- and I only found out because I struck a convo with him about his fancy tuxedo! And I reacted with nigh-indifference and just kept treating him as a generic customer- and his reaction was that of silent confusion and perhaps even dismay- similar to the one you often see on TV. Side note: This was also around when Davey publicly avoided Andrew Bridgen (a man I deeply respect) in parliament, alleging the latter’s leprosy- a disease that is not only curable but also NOT very transmissible!
But to respond to the “Waitrose Women” caricature I’ve actually encountered among dozens of both former female co-workers (NONE of them in nightshift) & customers- my impression is that 3 quarters of them tend to be middle or even upper class women of various ethnicities who still take mainstream media’s word for it and still sucked in by party politics- an overrated notion that I’ve come to despise. A number of them also happen to have certain snobby and brattish tendencies particularly prevalent among their collective social status. And along with their male and androgenous counterparts this is THE crowd Ed Davey is particularly appealing to, the same way Keir Starmer panders to certain woke/politically-hypercorrect crowds (I despise the latter even more as a non-white). I wonder what supposedly ‘negligible’ demographics (mind the inverted commas) they and their Tory counterparts are ignoring?
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“nowadays each of us has increasingly less in common with others”
This couldn’t be further from the truth. The bigger the government footprint the more individuals will need to avoid being stomped on. And the more conforming people will become.
Great article. Any party should aim at doing what’s best for the country – keeping it solvent and keeping it safe. I shop in all sorts of supermarkets and there definitely isn’t a Waitrose woman nor even a Lidl one.
You’re lucky having all those different supermarkets in the UK. We only have two big chains in Australia, and they both suck.
I just watched a Tory minister on TV. He was about 12 years old . His head kept bobbing as he talked. He said the economy was improving.
The UK GDP per capita is falling. He is clearly an idiot or a liar . Choose.
No one shops at Waitrose anymore. Lidl Luvvies?
If you write a speech, develop a product or write an ad – and I’ve done all three for a living for a long time – you have to be writing with somebody in mind. Even Coca Cola has a specific person in mind – the person who only buys one Coke a year (amazingly those people represent about 50% of Coke sales). They’re the ‘swing voters’ of Coca Cola, and Coke spends billions of dollars a year making messaging specifically for personas based on them. Clearly it works. The alternative to creating for a persona is to create for yourself. If you’re somebody like Steve Jobs or Karl Lagerfeld, and you represent an extreme version of your customer, then that works. For everybody else toiling away in the communications business, we’ll carry on using personas, thanks.