The political antagonists: buying and selling

(Carsten Willer)

In political will formation, buying stands for identification and selling for confrontation. So let's call it unity and struggle of opposites. Or axiom equals counter-axiom. Or buying versus selling. Seller versus buyer. Communicator versus consumer. Desire versus reality. Need versus satisfaction. Identification versus confrontation.

This dialectic drives the social evolution of humanity. Even if the words used for buying and selling i.e. identification and confrontation are and have been varying. People buy or decide to act one way or the other. These interactions are part of human action. Sellers and communicators, however, do not always have to be flesh and blood. Political content is also just virtual products that sell themselves. Selling ideas. Selling visions. Selling packaging. Selling images. Words sell. Haptics sell. Selling films. Posters sell. Letters sell. Websites sell. Mathematical algorithms sell. Stories sell best. Everything that communicates sells.

Selling is communication - so is buying

Everything is communication. But who or what communicates? Not just the salesperson, the human communicator. Not just the political brand. Not just the election advertising. Not just the political PoS. Political communication is a complex process that we occasionally like to break down into simple components and then say, this is how it works. However, breaking down the communication process with a person in detail and analyzing it in its entirety is practically impossible, because then we would have to be able to read out the entire biographical memory of the respective recipient. We can't do that today, and the likelihood of that becoming possible in our lifetime doesn't seem very great at the moment.

But just as we can classify types of sellers and buyers by abstraction, it is also possible to profile voters and political actors, as well as to decode the political sensory system and identify and match corresponding patterns of action and thought. To do this, we make use of our common sense, i.e. individual experience values, and many scientific findings from behavioral as well as brain research.

The focus of any sales process is, of course, always the product or service itself - which communicates through its physical and "mental" existence alone. Color, shape, material, consistency, functionality, utility, context, sense-making, all of this is information about the product that our brain perceives, processes, matches with experience, and stores in such a way that it can be remembered subconsciously or consciously.

We have neither influence nor conscious access to what our brain stores. Everything that affects us emotionally in general, that seems helpful to us in the respective situation and that seems to give our thoughts and actions a personal meaning, is transported into the long-term memory. Whereby the word long-term memory is probably an inadmissible simplification of how human memory works, because we don't really have a clue yet how it works exactly.

So when sales advisors and sales trainers want to trim us to apply this or that sales trick in the respective sales situation, this is of course much too short-sighted. Ultimately, it's not the salesperson's empathy, persuasiveness, or questioning technique that decides whether a sale is closed. The sale starts much earlier - already with the creation of the product, the service, the brand.

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