Inventing the candidate
According to Peruvian regulations, the incumbent president cannot run for re-election, thus I cannot use my strategies to promote Ollanta Humala. However, given that Humala himself, as well as Fujimori before him were outsiders and were not known in politics until about a year before each of them ran for president (in 2006 and 1990, respectively), it wouldn’t be too surprising if the new candidate were an outsider as well. Big part of Humala’s image is his military career and active participation in the wars against Shining Path and against Ecuador, and the rebellion against Fujimori regime in 2000, while not being a political figure until 2005. This past allowed him to appeal to nationalistic ideas and opposition of Fujimori regime.
I want to create a candidate who is also famous for his public campaigns but remained largely out of politics until close to the presidential race.
To come up with the name, I looked up the most popular first and last men names and picked Luis Quispe. First name Luis has European origins, last name Quispe comes from Quechua and means “free”. To appeal to identifications with different groups of voters, I want to craft the candidate’s life path intertwined between the two groups who are the target audience: impoverished rural families and urban students and young professionals.
I want Luis Quispe to spend his younger years working for his country in non-political and non-military ways. Luis Quispe was born and raised in a small town on the periphery of Peru in a mestizo family. The town was largely disconnected from the public life of the country because of technical problems with the roads and communication lines, as well as unwillingness of the local corrupt government to fix that situation. Luis’s father, a non-political local craftsman, on multiple occasions appealed to the local government to request improvements of infrastructure, but never got heard.
The desire to fix the infrastructural problems, connect other smaller cities to the big networks of the country and bring systematization and standardization of infrastructure brought Luis to Lima as a student in Civil Engineering of one of the universities. Throughout his studies in early 1990s Luis faced the economic and political crisis in the capital and witnessed Fujimori’s 1992 autogolpe. That further convinced him to stay away from the political sphere and physically stay away from Lima after he finished his degree. He spent the next dozen years working on infrastructural problems in distant regions of the country, designing the structures of roads, electricity, phone, TV and later Internet coverage. As he progressed through his career, he increasingly found himself dealing with the inefficient local governments, corruption and ignorance of what was claimed to be state-wide laws. New circumstances of work required him to spend less and less time solving engineering problems and more time doing policy. He returned to Lima for a few years in mid-2000s to get a Master’s in Political Science or Administration and then continued coordination of larger infrastructural projects, including not just roads and communication lines, but also schools, hospitals and other public institutions. He may have worked as a consultant for the deployment of the electronic voting system contracted by ONPE, thus using his technical and organizational insight to strengthen the democratic process in the country without being affiliated with the existing powers. His success and the number of followers allowed him to form a new political party and run for president in 2016. His intention is to become more efficient at the uniting of the country and the cleaning up of the legislation. He wants to use the high government position to have a direct effect on government policies and law projects.
Targeting the population
Now as we have an image of the candidate, we need to tie his personality into the campaign message and strategy. If the campaign focuses on cleaning up, it can as well provide a specific reference on who would do that work. I propose to do that by adding an extra line to the slogan, playing off candidate’s name: “Perú limpio, Perú claro, Luis lo limpiará”. The verb “limpiará” is used in future tense as a definite statement. In case Luis doesn’t get elected this time, he would still continue on his job of cleaning a country, now as an established politician. However, he would clearly have much more power to do so as a president.
His image is supposed to create identification in the two target groups. The rural impoverished population can see him as a man out of country, who embraced his educational opportunity but returned to work back into the rural areas for the sake of making a bigger impact on the infrastructure rather than a bigger career. Luis is mestizo, so he is partially identified with by the indigenous people. What is more important, is that he returned to the place of his childhood, showing commitment to the region and the people who live there rather than to the abstract nationalistic ideas and skin color. According to the LAPOP report, in public opinion in Peru darker skin color of a person correlates with higher distrust into the capacity of that person’s capacity to take public positions. Luis by showing off his work defies that association.
At the same time he appeals to the students and young professionals as a self-made man. He didn’t use help of influential friends and family to make his living in Lima as a student and survived through that time during the raging economic crisis of early 1990s. While the economic situation is a lot more stable now, students are still affected by the corruption scandals in the big universities and would support initiatives to clean up the organization of education and student benefits.
The big group of people who would not identify with Luis is the middle-age, middle and upper income level urban dwellers. The big infrastructure projects, especially those endorsed by the government, would rely on funding from taxes, and this group is the biggest taxpayers in the country. As well, living in the city they experience better everyday infrastructure of electricity, water, phones, Internet and mass media that is driven by higher capitalistic competition in the city. So these people are not interested in the efforts directed at rural areas. As well, a certain number of them would belong to the social class that actually benefits from corruption – if somebody from lower class is forced to give bribes, somebody form the upper class gets to receive them.
The way Luis can soften his perception by these people is by explaining and proclaiming the benefits of clean and efficient infrastructure for the urban population. Better roads expedite transportation and are beneficial for trade between the regions. As well, Luis himself represents a talent from the country who found his way into the city and became a good specialist despite the infrastructural difficulties on his way. He can appeal to the urban population by saying that they will benefit from influx of talented students and workers from the country that is facilitated by the improved infrastructure.
Forming the visual ad
Throughout his career Luis has been working for non-political organizations and occasionally for government projects. He does not have an affiliation with specific professional organizations and is not targeting them. Using neo-populist techniques, he wants to target large unorganized masses of people and position himself as a good potential head of government. I think that the reasonable choice of colors to use in his campaign would be the two colors of the Peruvian national flag – red and white. The shape of the flag can be used as well.
PERÚ
LIMPIO PERÚ
CLARO LUIS
LO LIMPIARÁ
Replaceable
word
Replaceable
symbol
Figure 1. The core ad of the campaign.
The core ad of the campaign is presented in Figure 1. One of the additional features on it that provides even more emotional response is the strong bottom-left to top-right diagonal. From what I know about the design of logos and visual messages, people from a wide variety of backgrounds associate such a diagonal with fast and easy motion forward, eye wants to go along this diagonal. This diagonal brings to the top-right corner of the flag and leads to the textual message, uniting these two elements of the advertisement. As well, this image can be interpreted as creation of a white stripe along the flag, which is similar to the motion of cleaning. The visual features of the ad can be improved by somebody who has more expertise in visual design. I intended to communicate in this paper the general idea, structure and interpretation.
TRÁNSITO
LIMPIO TRÁNSITO
CLARO LUIS
LO LIMPIARÁ
MINERÍA
LIMPIA MINERÍA
CLARA LUIS
LA LIMPIARÁ
JUSTICIA
LIMPIA JUSTICIA
CLARA LUIS
LA LIMPIARÁ
ollowing
the idea of replaceable symbols and words Figure 2 shows examples of
the other ads of the family.
Figure 2. Other advertisements of the family.
Media usage for the campaign
I want to focus the campaign on usage of three strategies. The research of Chapter 3 shows that the Peruvians are highly susceptible to TV as a source of news and information, so TV spots should be one of the main strategies of the campaign. The second important way of advertising is the billboards. The third strategy is big personal meeting and parades.
Designing the TV spots
The TV spots serve the promoting of Luis personality as a professional. Ollanta Humala in his spots uses very informal style of dress – relaxed shirts without a tie and jeans. As a former military leader, he is used to wearing uniform and only recently switched to civilian clothing. He uses informal clothes to create identification with other people who dress similarly – the lower classes of society, the simple people.
I want to position Luis as a professional. He got his high education degree as an engineer and has been working in this capacity ever since. For the spots and public appearances he should wear a dress shirt, tie, formal pants, and maybe glasses.
The spots should have references to the past successes of Luis infrastructure efforts – videos of the built structures and interviews with the people who directly benefited from it. As well, it should have the frames of Luis talking in the camera and explaining his strategy. Several different spots can be running concurrently that appeal to different areas of focus – mining, justice, education.
It is better to focus on the hope emotion in the advertisements. They can combine the images of the past infrastructure successes with the images of cleaned up and prospering regions that are currently known for being corrupt and inefficient.
The unification of transit laws and improvement of transport infrastructure is one of Luis’s focuses. That is a job to which he has dedicated many years. On one side, he is the designer and organizer of the road structure. On the other side, he is a big user of the system, as his work in remote regions required a lot of travel and was thus itself reliant on the infrastructure.
One of the images that can be used to appeal to the target groups is Luis driving on a modern asphalted road into his hometown to visit family. He can accent that some 20 years ago when he was leaving to become a student in Lima this road did not exist and visiting his family was a very complicated and long journey. This image allows appealing simultaneously to family values, to the not forgotten rural population, to the rural youth who would get a logistically easy opportunity to study and work in big cities, and to the improvement of the infrastructure itself.
Each ad should conclude with the appropriate image from the family of ads, so that the same visual and textual message is repeated over and over.
Using the billboard ads
Billboard ads are a more permanent reminder of the candidate than the TV spots. They are more subtle than TV, but that is compensated by their constant presence. I want to use the family of advertisements placed on the billboards according to their placement. Thus, the message about clean mining is placed next to the mines, the message of clean education around the university campuses, the message of clean justice around courts and so forth. The message about clean transit can be placed along the main roads as well as near the entrances to the small towns where Luis facilitated the improvement of road connection.
Using the mass meetings
Almost each of the previous Peruvian presidential candidates used the big personal meetings to gain support for his campaigning. They need to include speeches by Luis that at the same time appeal to the key emotional factors and explain his plans. By picking the places to campaign Luis can further create identification with his voters. He can target the rural towns that already benefited from his efforts and those that still require help. Luis is used to traveling around the country and needs to show off that by extensively touring the periphery and the center. In Lima and other big cities Luis should focus on universities or main public spaces of districts popular with the younger people.
Of course, all those events should be accompanied by design and merchandise with colors and symbols of the candidate.
References
“ENCUESTA NACIONAL URBANO RURAL IMASEN ABRIL 2011: OLLANTA ARRIBA CON CASI 5% DE DISTANCIA”, VOTO PERUANO 2011, 1 de mayo de 2011, http://votoperuano2011.blogspot.com/2011/05/encuesta-nacional-urbano-rural-imasen.html
“ENCUESTA NACIONAL URBANO RURAL IMASEN MAYO: HUMALA 41,6%, FUJIMORI 39,7%”, VOTO PERUANO 2011, 15 de mayo de 2011, http://votoperuano2011.blogspot.com/2011/05/encuesta-nacional-urbano-rural-imasen_15.html