Greg Canty Fuzion Blog

Martin Coughlan - Start again?

As part of the election process I am going to do a Ronseal review of the political candidates literature that comes in through our letterbox and score them accordingly!!

Candidate Election: Martin Coughlan, Labour Party (Cork North West Central)

Design and Layout (5)
A5 flyer, which is quite clean and well designed with a professional look and feel to it – score 4.5

Photo (10)
On the flyer Martin shares the photo platform equally with Eamon Gilmore, which is obviously their policy for this election. This waters down Martin’s pitch I feel. Martin is smiling, looks like a nice guy, trusting but older and probably part of the political establishment! The suit is quite formal, dark suit, white shirt and red tie, the same as Eamon’s. At a time that we need new and fresh this doesn’t do it for me – score 5

Contact Details (5)
He includes both his email address and his personal phone number on her flyer, a nice “open” approach. However there is no sign of either Facebook or twitter, where people could really interact and get to know him – score 3.5

Background (10)
Other than being a Councillor on the Macroom Town Council and Cork County Council no other information is offered as to what qualifies Martin as being a valid candidate. This stuff tells me nothing, come on sell to me .. – score 3

Sales Pitch (10)
Other than offering his honesty, dedication and experience to the national stage and getting Fianna Fail out, nothing – the crew on X-Factor have to work harder than that to get votes – score 1

Big Picture (10)
Truthfully nothing is being offered here other than getting FF out, I know that seems like the obvious argument but for gods sake give me something more than this.. please! – score 1

Overall Score
This for me sums up why FF have been getting away with so much – nothing inspirational is being offered by the opposition. Out of a possible score of 50 Martin scored 18 losing so much by offering so little … come on guys, shake it up!

Martin, tear your stock of flyers up, start again, have a good think about your target audience and give us really good reasons for voting for you!

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion Communications

Tags: cork north west general, election 2011, labour, labour party, Martin Coughlan

This entry was posted on January 25, 2011 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Irish Economy, Irish Politics, Marketing, PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.