COP3 // UK REFERENDUM // PRIMARY RESEARCH

As I was home for the Christmas period, it felt appropriate to gather feedback on the initial posters for the EU campaign I had created as the first piece for the concept (See posters below). The main advantages from gathering feedback back home (personally) is the people. At university, everyone is surrounded by people their age with little contact outside of that bubble. Back home gave me access to people from all ages and political opinions. These people from all walks of life were deeply affected, either positively or negatively about the referendum, so the feedback becomes more raw, deep and truthful.

The questions I asked were:

"How does the portrayal of Boris and Nigel make you feel?"
"Would you consider the portrayal successful?
"Do you find them any less trustworthy if you saw this poster pre-referendum?"

Result round up

The majority of results were positive. It seemed harder to persuade people who voted and supported the same political beliefs of the politicians. If you support the right or left, you're always going to support that party/campaign no matter. Therefore, the opinions of these people can't be persuaded by the rhetoric implemented within the posters. The rhetoric would need a lengthy amount of exposure to have any effect on people who support the campaign/politicians that I'm trying to smear.

This is the difference between this campaign and the Bernie Sanders campaign, The feedback is raw and very real. These are people of Britain and they care about their country and want to very best for it. On the other hand, people felt disconnected or not in tune when I attempted to gather feedback about the Bernie Sanders. I was only able to gather feedback on that campaign from British people and no Americans... you can imagine the amount of people who either didn't care or didn't know enough to give sufficient feedback.

Back to the results...The majority agreed that the posters were successful at portraying both politicians and the "Leave" campaign as liars. They all in fact really enjoyed the puns and the clever play on the phrases, which for them felt as if it was more engaging and sparked enough interest. In general, they felt the manipulation were very effective and again sparked enough interest to see what the campaign was about and for people who didn't know what fact checking was such as the youngest users; they started to ask questions about what fact checking was.

One interesting piece of feedback was the charity collaboration with 'Full Fact'. I was told that charities cannot in any way support or associate themselves with a political campaign or politics in general. Once they do they become bias and in return lose credibility, I'm not 100% sure about this fact but I will look into it! I will fact check it ;)

Overall, the feedback was a success to a certain extent. People who supported these figures weren't going to be persuaded, but people with more of a liberal way of thinking saw the poster series as a success.