Mesh Planning targets floating voters with election experience tool

The Election Experience Monitor is based on Mesh’s Touchpoints Return on Investment approach, where respondents send a text message after every encounter they have with an ad campaign.

Mesh has recruited 1,100 floating voters from Research Now’s online panel and asked them to complete a questionnaire about their voting intentions, perceptions of the parties, political leaders and views on key issues.

Respondents are then asked to send a text every time they come into contact with a political party, either in person or via the media, detailing the party, the occasion, how positive the experience was and how persuasive it was using a code. For example, during the televised leaders’ debate, CB45 stood for: C (Liberal Democrats), B (leaders’ debate), 4 (felt fairly positive) and 5 (much more likely to vote for this party). The respondents are also able to go into greater detail in an online diary.

Texting went live last Monday, and after each week respondents will be asked to take the original questionnaire again to see if there have been any changes in their opinions.

There will also be a final questionnaire after the election to find out which party the respondent voted for. Mesh said that by analysing this final result and a respondent’s activity in the build up to the election they would be able to see “which experiences have really influenced the final outcome”.

Fiona Blades (pictured), chief experience officer at Mesh, said: “There are lots of political opinion polls but they only tell us who people are intending to vote for and not which experiences help people make their decision. For the last four years we have been evaluating the impact of brand experiences for clients. We understand the power that experiences have on influencing behaviour and thought we should apply the approach to the election.”